Why does the downloaded Standard shader behave differently than the built-in?

Questions & Answers
1

I’ve recently had to download the built-in shaders and remap all of our models and materials to use them to fix the duplicate shader issue with asset bundles and reduce our ShaderLab memory usage. However, I’ve found that the downloaded Standard (Specular setup) and Standard shaders are behaving differently than the built-in shaders.
The downloaded shaders are rendering opaque when they should be transparent, they are causing other artifacts with overlapping objects (this is mainly when used as a water surface), or they are sorting incorrectly and/or simply disappearing at certain angles. I have not figured out the exact situation that causes the issues, but it appears to be related to transparency and specular highlights. When I changed the shader in the materials from built-in to downloaded in script, Unity also removed the Transparency setting and queue order from the material. When I reset those settings and make sure that the only difference in the material file is the shader reference, they still behave differently.
The fun thing is that everything renders properly in the editor, so I have to build our bundles to test this.
Anyway, I’ve reverted the handful of materials that we’ve found through testing, and I’m about to run a script to crawl the project and alert us to other potential problems so that we can test those as well.
Are the downloadable shaders for 2018.2.15f1 correct? If so, why are they behaving differently than the built-in shaders when the materials don’t have any other differences? And why do they render correctly in the editor?

2

Unity’s Standard Shader is essentially an all-in-one shader. Because of that, they enable and disable features for the shader on demand in order to accommodate some of those variations using a custom shader editor.

For direct references on how it does that in full, take a look at StandardShaderGUI.cs.

The part that most directly (and most likely) affects the Transparency factors you’re looking for should be under the SetupMaterialWithBlendMode(Material, BlendMode) function). To borrow an excerpt from it:

case BlendMode.Transparent: 
	material.SetOverrideTag("RenderType", "Transparent"); 
	material.SetInt("_SrcBlend", (int)UnityEngine.Rendering.BlendMode.One); 
	material.SetInt("_DstBlend", (int)UnityEngine.Rendering.BlendMode.OneMinusSrcAlpha); 
	material.SetInt("_ZWrite", 0); 
	material.DisableKeyword("_ALPHATEST_ON"); 
	material.DisableKeyword("_ALPHABLEND_ON"); 
	material.EnableKeyword("_ALPHAPREMULTIPLY_ON"); 
	material.renderQueue = (int)UnityEngine.Rendering.RenderQueue.Transparent; 
	break;

When you change between modes in the selection box, it immediately makes 8 changes to the instance of the shader used by that material to switch from an opaque- to a transparent-intended variation of the same shader.

3

I opened my test scene in the editor and created a ShaderVariantCollection from the Graphics settings. I added that ShaderVariantCollection to the shader bundle, and it works now. So, apparently when building to bundles, you can’t count on the correct variants being included without a ShaderVariantCollection. Does that sound right?