The InspectorA Unity window that displays information about the currently selected GameObject, asset or project settings, allowing you to inspect and edit the values. More info
See in Glossary window for this ShaderA program that runs on the GPU. More info
See in Glossary contains these elements:
The Surface Options control how URP renders the Material on a screen.
| Property | Description |
|---|---|
| Surface Type | Use this drop-down to apply an Opaque or Transparent surface type to the Material. This determines which render pass URP renders the material in. Opaque surface types are always fully visible, regardless of what’s behind them. URP renders opaque Materials first. Transparent surface types are affected by their background, and they can vary according to which type of transparent surface type you choose. URP renders transparent Materials in a separate pass after opaque objects. If you select Transparent, the Blending Mode drop-down appears. |
| Blending Mode | Select how Unity calculates the color of each pixel of a transparent Material when it blends the Material with the background. The options are the following:
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| Render Face | Use this drop-down to determine which sides of your geometry to render. Front Face renders the front face of your geometry and culls the back face. This is the default setting. Back Face renders the front face of your geometry and culls the front face. Both makes URP render both faces of the geometry. This is good for small, flat objects, like leaves, where you might want both sides visible. |
| Alpha Clipping | Makes your Material act like a Cutout Shader. Use this to create a transparent effect with hard edges between the opaque and transparent areas. For example, to create blades of grass. To achieve this effect, URP does not render alpha values below the specified Threshold, which appears when you enable Alpha Clipping. You can set the Threshold by moving the slider, which accepts values from 0 to 1. All values above your threshold are fully opaque, and all values below your threshold are invisible. For example, a threshold of 0.1 means that URP doesn’t render alpha values below 0.1. The default value is 0.5. |
| Color Mode | Use this drop-down to determine how the particle color and the Material color blend together. Multiply produces a darker final color by multiplying the two colors. Additive produces a brighter final colour by adding the two colours together. Subtractive subtracts the particle color from the base color of the Material. This creates an overall dark effect in the pixel itself, with less brightness. Overlay blends the particle color over the base color of the Material. This creates a brighter color at values over 0.5 and darker colors at values under 0.5. Color uses the particle color to colorize the Material color, while keeping the value and saturation of the base color of the Material. This is good for adding splashes of color to monochrome scenes. Difference returns the difference between both color values. This is good for blending Particle and Material colors that are similar to each other. |
The Surface Inputs describe the surface itself. For example, you can use these properties to make your surface look wet, dry, rough, or smooth.
| Property | Description |
|---|---|
| Base Map | Adds color to the surface. To assign a Texture to the Base Map setting, click the object picker next to it. This opens the Asset Browser, where you can select from the Textures in your Project. Alternatively, you can use the color picker. The color next to the setting shows the tint on top of your assigned Texture. To assign another tint, you can click this color swatch. If you select Transparent or Alpha Clipping under Surface Options, your Material uses the Texture’s alpha channel or color. The Base Map is also known as a diffuse map. |
| Specular Map | Controls the color of your specular highlights from direct lighting, for example Directional, Point, and Spot lights. To assign a Texture to the Specular Map setting, click the object picker next to it. This opens the Asset Browser, where you can select from the Textures in your Project. Alternatively, you can use the color picker. In** Source, you can select a Texture in your Project to act as a source for the smoothness. By default, the source is the alpha channel for this Texture. You can use the Smoothness** slider to control the spread of highlights on the surface. 0 gives a wide, rough highlight. 1 gives a small, sharp highlight like glass. Values in between 0 and 1 produce semi-glossy looks. For example, 0.5 produces a plastic-like glossiness. Note: If this setting appears greyed out, check if Specular Highlights are enabled under the Advanced settings. |
| Normal Map | Adds a normal map to the surface. With a normal mapA type of Bump Map texture that allows you to add surface detail such as bumps, grooves, and scratches to a model which catch the light as if they are represented by real geometry. See in Glossary, you can add surface details like bumps, scratches and grooves. To add the map, click the object picker next to it. The normal map picks up ambient lighting in the environment. |
| Emission | Makes the surface look like it emits lights. When enabled, the Emission Map and Emission Color settings appear. To assign an Emission Map, click the object picture next to it. This opens the Asset Browser, where you can select from the textures in your Project. For Emission Color, you can use the color picker to assign a tint on top of the color. This can be more than 100% white, which is useful for effects like lava, that shines brighter than white while still being another color. If you have not assigned an Emission Map, the Emission setting only uses the tint you’ve assigned in Emission Color. If you do not enable Emission, URP sets the emission to black and does not calculate emission. |
The Advanced settings affect behind-the-scenes rendering. They do not have a visible effect on your surface, but on underlying calculations that impact performance.
| Property | Description |
|---|---|
| Flip-Book Blending | Tick this box to blend flip-book frames together. This is useful in texture sheet animations with limited frames, because it makes animations smoother. If you have performance issues, try turning this off. |
| Specular Highlights | When enabled, your particles have specular highlights from direct lighting, for example Directional, Point, and Spot lights. This means that each particle reflects the shine from these light sources. When disabled, these highlight calculations are not part of the Shader, which can make the Shader render faster. By default, this feature is enabled. |
| Vertex Streams | This list shows the vertex streams that this Material requires in order to work properly. If the vertex streams aren’t correctly assigned, the Fix Now button appears. Click this button to apply the correct setup of vertex streams to the Particle SystemA component that simulates fluid entities such as liquids, clouds and flames by generating and animating large numbers of small 2D images in the scene. More info See in Glossary that this Material is assigned to. |
| Sorting Priority | Use this slider to determine the chronological rendering order for a Material. URP renders Materials with lower values first. You can use this to reduce overdraw on devices by making the pipeline render Materials in front of other Materials first, so it doesn’t have to render overlapping areas twice. This works similarly to the render queue in the built-in Unity render pipelineA series of operations that take the contents of a Scene, and displays them on a screen. Unity lets you choose from pre-built render pipelines, or write your own. More info See in Glossary. |
If you’ve chosen a Transparent surface type under Surface Options, the following options appear.
| Property | Description |
|---|---|
| Soft Particles | Tick this box to make particles fade out when they get close to intersecting with the surface of other geometry written into the depth bufferA memory store that holds the z-value depth of each pixel in an image, where the z-value is the depth for each rendered pixel from the projection plane. More info See in Glossary. When you enable this feature, the Surface Fade settings appear: Near sets the distance from the other surface where the particle is completely transparent. This is where the particle appears to fade out completely. Far sets the distance from the other surface where the particle is completely opaque. The particle appears solid here. Distances are measured in world units. Only usable for transparent surface types. Note: This setting uses the CameraDepthTexture that is created by URP. To use this setting, enable Depth Texture in the URP Asset or for the CameraA component which creates an image of a particular viewpoint in your scene. The output is either drawn to the screen or captured as a texture. More infoSee in Glossary that is rendering the particles. |
| Camera Fading | Tick this box to make particles fade out when they get close to the camera. When you enable this feature, the Distance settings appear: Near sets the distance from the camera where the particle is completely transparent. This is where the particle appears to fade out completely. Far sets the distance from the camera where the particle is completely opaque. The particle appears solid here. Distances are measured in world units. Note: This uses the CameraDepthTexture that is created by URP. To use this setting, enable Depth Texture in the URP Asset or for the Camera that is rendering the particles. |
| Distortion | Creates a distortion effect by making particles perform refraction with the objects drawn before them. This is useful for creating a heat wave effect or for warping objects behind the particles. When you enable this feature, these settings appear: Strength controls how much the Particle distorts the background. Negative values have the opposite effect of positive values. So if something was offset to the right with a positive value, the equal negative value offsets it to the left. Blend controls how visible the distortion is. At 0, there is no visible distortion. At 1, only the distortion effect is visible. Note: This uses the CameraOpaqueTexture that is created by URP. To use this setting, enable Opaque Texture in the URP Asset or for the Camera that is rendering the particles. |