Add material properties

To assign material properties to a ShaderA program that runs on the GPU. More info
See in Glossary object in ShaderLabUnity’s language for defining the structure of Shader objects. More info
See in Glossary, you place a Properties block inside a Shader block.

If you want to access some of those properties in a shader program, you need to declare a Cg/HLSL variable with the same name and a matching type.

For example these shader properties:

_MyColor ("Some Color", Color) = (1,1,1,1) 
_MyVector ("Some Vector", Vector) = (0,0,0,0) 
_MyFloat ("My float", Float) = 0.5 
_MyTexture ("Texture", 2D) = "white" {} 
_MyCubemap ("Cubemap", CUBE) = "" {} 

would be declared for access in Cg/HLSL code as:

fixed4 _MyColor; // low precision type is usually enough for colors
float4 _MyVector;
float _MyFloat; 
sampler2D _MyTexture;
samplerCUBE _MyCubemap;

Cg/HLSL can also accept uniform keyword, but it is not necessary:

uniform float4 _MyColor;

Property types in ShaderLab map to Cg/HLSL variable types this way:

• Color and Vector properties map to float4, half4 or fixed4 variables.
• Range and Float properties map to float, half or fixed variables.
• Texture properties map to sampler2D variables for regular (2D) textures; CubemapsA collection of six square textures that can represent the reflections in an environment or the skybox drawn behind your geometry. The six squares form the faces of an imaginary cube that surrounds an object; each face represents the view along the directions of the world axes (up, down, left, right, forward and back). More info
  See in Glossary map to samplerCUBE; and 3D textures map to sampler3D.

Color spaces and color/vector shader data

When using Linear color space, all material color properties are supplied as sRGB colors, but are converted into linear values when passed into shaders.

For example, if your Properties shader block contains a Color property called “MyColor“, then the corresponding ”MyColor” HLSL variable will get the linear color value.

For properties that are marked as Float or Vector type, no color space conversions are done by default; it is assumed that they contain non-color data. It is possible to add [Gamma] attribute for float/vector properties to indicate that they are specified in sRGB space, just like colors (see Properties).

Additional resources

• Properties block reference in ShaderLab
• Writing Shader Programs