Hi, everyone. I’m here to tell you about my new tool in the Asset Store that I think you might like. It’s called Legacy 2 PBR, and its primary function is to automate your Material update process when moving from Unity 4 to Unity 5. If you want to take advantage of the new PBR shader system in your project, then Legacy 2 PBR is the way to go.
Legacy 2 PBR - Unity Asset Store - The Best Assets for Game Making
If you decided to update to Unity 5 in the middle of a project, you’ve no doubt found that manually modifying your Materials to use the new PBR shader set can be an extremely tedious process, especially if you have a large number of them to update. With Legacy 2 PBR I’ve done my best to remove as much of that tedium as possible by developing a system for batched Material updates. Instead of changing your shaders one by one, the Leg2PBR editor window makes it so that all you have to do is:
- Choose a new target shader (Standard if you want PBR)
- Map texture properties from the old shader to the new one
- Drop all of your Materials to update into the editor
- Press go!
This tool is extremely simple to use, and it can save you a ton of time. Here’s a short video I made if you’d like to see it in use.
Something I’ve actually found super useful about Legacy 2 PBR is that you don’t necessarily have to use it to update your Materials to use PBR shaders. You can set your target shader to any of Unity’s shaders or even your own custom shaders, and the tool will update your Materials just the same. Pretty cool.
Of course, not every tool is perfect so I wanted to go ahead and list the minor issues I’m aware of (both of which are mentioned in the video).
- Unreliable UNDO - I haven’t quite gotten the hang of Unity’s UNDO system yet, so if you undo after a Material update you might lose links to some of the mapped textures on those materials.
- Non-Texture values don’t cross over - Parameters like Specularity or Color don’t move from shader to shader at this time, only Textures.
These minor issues don’t ever get in the way of your mass Material updates since everything else is fully functional, but I’d like to see if I can fix them in future updates. I just thought you should know about them.
I think this is a pretty great little tool, and I hope it helps you with your projects. I’d love to hear what you all think about Legacy 2 PBR, and maybe you’ll even have some ideas to help me make it better down the road.
Legacy 2 PBR - Unity Asset Store - The Best Assets for Game Making
Have fun!
Adam