I’m sure this is a dumb question but I can’t find an answer, there is a bumped specular but no regular specular shader in the mobile shaders package.
Where can I find a simple specular shader that will work nicely on iOS? Nothing fancy, just a few pool balls.
There isn’t a mobile specular only. But the normal unity spec shader works on mobile - bit slow if you’re not careful.
For pool balls, a spec shader (gloss map shader) isn’t the right thing to use. Instead you’d get a much, much nicer effect from a clever cubemap blended in.
Ah ok, well I know pretty much nothing at all about shader development, but I figure today is a good day to start.
Can you explain what exactly you mean by "a clever cubemap blended in. " And would this tutorial series be a good place to start?
Bump, can anyone be a bit more specific about what Hippocoder was getting at? I’ve been following that tutorial series and have yet to come across cubemaps.
Cube mapping, from my limited understanding of the concept, is a cube texture (6 sides) where each side captures different information about the environment. (Bottom side holds information about the floor, Right side about right side of room, Top is the ceiling, and so on.) Which can be mapped onto an object and act as reflections of the room.
I’m glad someone else wants to find this out too!!
I don’t understand why there’s so little information on this subject? Hippocoder mentions there’s no mobile specular shader but no one answers the obvious question, WHY??
Are we to think that current gen ios devices can’t handle specular? Perhaps even, that ios users simply don’t like specular and prefer worlds made up of flat diffuse materials!?
Nobody made one. I’d make it and sell it on the Asset Store, but Unity doesn’t provide the information to do so. Writing your own specular shader is easy; integrating it with the undocumented lighting code is painful.
Thanks for the reply Jessy, at least that’s cleared things up slightly.
I guess it does end up asking more questions though. Why don’t Unity provide this information? Why haven’t they just released a standard one themselves?
I’m frustrated because specular is so basic from an art sense. Not having a solution for it is just rubbish.
Yeah it frustrated me too as there is a bump map specular in the mobile shaders pack, but no regular specular, I’m no shader writer but I can image it would be a quick and easy edit to convert the bumped spec to a regular spec, couldn’t find the source for the bumped spec shader tho.
They provide what they want to provide. But they say it doesn’t run fast enough to be used. :-\
There is no sense. They lack direction. They provide the dog food but tell us not to eat it. I can only assume it’s politics; some group of people with UT is trying to sabotage its usability in order to get something it wants. 
Haha, not fast enough!? What is this 1998?
Well it sucks and I can’t believe more people don’t kick up a fuss about it.
I believe it’s because they’re too busy to do it, or don’t think it’s high enough priority. If they had any sense they’d just hire jessy 
Hmm… I wonder if the mobile bump-specular shader with no normal map texture applied runs the speed of what a mobile specular shader would? It still seems to render fine but I don’t know if the shader is ignoring the bumpmapping part of the code or still expensively running through it.
Look, if Unity were to just give me the information I want, about light probes and lightmapping, I’d write this shader, put it on the Asset Store for free, and document it. It just hasn’t been worth my time to dig through the nigh-unreadable compiled surface shaders for that. They don’t want to concede that GLSL is the way to go on mobile platforms, but they have Shadowgun on their front page. It’s discordant.
This is exactly the problem we’re encountering. We’re going to have to run a test soon to try and get to the bottom of it. One with all our assets using diffuse, one with them all using bumped spec.
What makes this so important is that Specular is a necessity not a bonus for the current gen of titles. It’s quite frankly ridiculous that it’s not properly implemented currently. Hasn’t it been brought up at Unity conferences? What have they said about it? Or don’t artists go to these things?
Jessy, have you thought about contacting Unity directly and ask for the information you want? Making it for free would be brilliant but if not I’d still be prepared to pay a reasonable amount for it, say $20. At that price you’d get a lot of takers.
I don’t know what “contacting Unity directly” is; what are you thinking? I watch for help; once in a blue moon, we get some really helpful posts from UT developers, the likes of which are unfortunately no longer the norm.
Well, I mean any contact addresses you can find?
support@unity3d.com
or how about PM’ing that Robert guy (in thethread you linked to) and asking for the info you need? Or his advice on how you could make a Specular shader given the current restrictions?
There must be so many devs out there crying out for this shader, it can’t be just us? The current iphone/ipads are capable of some eye watering graphics. But without simple shaders like this artists like me can’t create them. It is so frustrating!!
The ramp LUT controls the specular with one directional light.
You can turn your directional light on or off to create specular light, if you don’t want bumpmap, and for faster execution, you can always sorta get rid off the novertexlight, and then have that sort of fake specular light. As far as I can see, this is fastest thing it will go with lightprobe, I wish I can get CG or GLSL shaders to work with probes, but that itself is a trivial at this point with almost no examples on how to take in the probe data.
Shader "Mobile/Bumped Specular (with lookup texture and 1 Directional Light)" {
Properties {
_SpecularTex ("Specular Lookup Texture", 2D) = "white" {}
_MainTex ("Base (RGB) Gloss (A)", 2D) = "white" {}
_BumpMap ("Normalmap", 2D) = "bump" {}
}
SubShader {
Tags { "RenderType"="Opaque" }
LOD 300
CGPROGRAM
#pragma surface surf MobileBlinnPhong exclude_pathrepass noforwardadd halfasview novertexlights
sampler2D _SpecularTex;
inline fixed4 LightingMobileBlinnPhong (SurfaceOutput s, fixed3 lightDir, fixed3 halfDir, fixed atten)
{
fixed diff = clamp(dot (s.Normal, lightDir), 0.0, 1.0);
fixed nh = clamp(dot (s.Normal, halfDir), 0.0, 1.0);
fixed spec = tex2D(_SpecularTex, fixed2(nh, 0.0)).x * s.Gloss;
fixed4 c;
c.rgb = (s.Albedo * _LightColor0.rgb * diff + _LightColor0.rgb * spec) * (atten*2);
c.a = 0.0;
return c;
}
sampler2D _MainTex;
sampler2D _BumpMap;
struct Input {
float2 uv_MainTex;
};
void surf (Input IN, inout SurfaceOutput o) {
fixed4 tex = tex2D(_MainTex, IN.uv_MainTex);
o.Albedo = tex.rgb;
o.Gloss = tex.a;
o.Alpha = tex.a;
o.Normal = UnpackNormal (tex2D(_BumpMap, IN.uv_MainTex));
float3 worldNormal = WorldNormalVector(IN,o.Normal);
o.Emission += o.Albedo*ShadeSH9(float4(worldNormal,1));
}
ENDCG
}
FallBack "Mobile/VertexLit"
}
We are always glad to provide you guys with the information you need. First we need to know what’s needed though. Could you please point me to the thread where you asked for more info?
Please feel free to poke us with direct messages if you feel that we have missed an important thread.
Depending on the type of information the right place for it might be documentation, but some details about inner workings of some systems do not need to be documented, since no one will ever read about them.
So yeah, once you ask for help in a certain area and we feel that more people can benefit from the answer and it also fits with the type of information that should be in the docs – we’ll put it there.
Going off-topic a bit to follow up what hippocoder says. Remember that Phong-style “specular highlights” were just a hack; an approximation of what is really happening - lightsources being reflected. We now have the ability to quickly render reflections with cubemaps, which will typically look better, especially if you have some nice Fresnel-type falloff depending on viewing angle.