Mesh Renderers become invisible when animating material properties

[dean-cgs]

If you attach any sprite-based shader material to a Mesh Renderer, e.g. A material that uses the “Sprite-Lit-Default” shader, and then try to animate any material property on it, the whole Mesh Renderer suddenly goes invisible.

The shader will work as expected when there is no animator on the Mesh Renderer Game Object and be visible, but just suddenly go invisible as soon as an animation clip that touches any shader properties is used.

I created a project here to show the problem: unity-6-mesh-renderer-anim-issue/README.md at main · DeanIsseyegh/unity-6-mesh-renderer-anim-issue · GitHub

I made a Bug Report to Unity yesterday (IN-92544) so still waiting on updates with that.

Note: This didn’t happen in Unity 2021, which is the version I’m upgrading from.

[apparition]

I wonder if this is related to this issue I posted the other day:

Using MeshRenderer with the 2D Renderer and sprite shaders

I’m in the process of converting my game from the Built-In Renderer to the 2D Renderer/URP. My game includes some generated (flat/2D) meshes rendered with the MeshRenderer component. The 2D Renderer fails to render these meshes (when using sprite shaders) seemingly because the special internal shader properties unity_SpriteColor and unity_SpriteProps are unset. I assume these are normally set by the renderer component, and MeshRenderer doesn’t set them because it wasn’t designed to render sprit…

Maybe animating the material removes it from batching, and then the MeshRenderer fails to render due to the unset unity_SpriteColor / unity_SpriteProps properties.

[dean-cgs]

A fix for this bug should be coming out today.

The issue I reported got merged with this one:

Unity IssueTracker - Sprite Renderer with Animation does not reflect Sprite...

[apparition]

Oh cool! Hopefully it’s fixed!