Example of a Surface Shader that supports GPU Instancing in the Built-In Render Pipeline

Important: The Built-In Render Pipeline is deprecated and will be made obsolete in a future release.

It remains supported, including bug fixes and maintenance, through the full Unity 6.7 LTS lifecycle.

The Universal Render Pipeline (URP) doesn’t support surface shaders. For more information on how to replace surface shaders in URP, refer to Convert custom shaders for URP compatibility.

The following example demonstrates how to create an instanced Surface Shader with different color values for each instance.

Shader "Custom/InstancedColorSurfaceShader"
{
    Properties
    {
        _Color ("Color", Color) = (1,1,1,1)
        _MainTex ("Albedo (RGB)", 2D) = "white" {}
        _Glossiness ("Smoothness", Range(0,1)) = 0.5
        _Metallic ("Metallic", Range(0,1)) = 0.0
    }

    SubShader
    {
        Tags { "RenderType"="Opaque" }
        LOD 200
        
        CGPROGRAM
        // Uses the physically based standard lighting model with shadows enabled for all light types.
        #pragma surface surf Standard fullforwardshadows
        
        // Use Shader model 3.0 target
        #pragma target 3.0
        sampler2D _MainTex;
        
        struct Input
        {
            float2 uv_MainTex;
        };
        
        half _Glossiness;
        half _Metallic;
        
        UNITY_INSTANCING_BUFFER_START(Props)
        UNITY_DEFINE_INSTANCED_PROP(fixed4, _Color)
        UNITY_INSTANCING_BUFFER_END(Props)
        
        void surf (Input IN, inout SurfaceOutputStandard o) 
        {
            fixed4 c = tex2D (_MainTex, IN.uv_MainTex) * UNITY_ACCESS_INSTANCED_PROP(Props, _Color);
            o.Albedo = c.rgb;
            o.Metallic = _Metallic;
            o.Smoothness = _Glossiness;
            o.Alpha = c.a;
        }
        ENDCG
    }
    FallBack "Diffuse"
}

Examples of GPU instancing shaders in the Built-In Render Pipeline

Example of a shader that supports GPU Instancing in the Built-In Render Pipeline

Unity Manual

Example of a Surface Shader that supports GPU Instancing in the Built-In Render Pipeline