Discovering Unity PBR-related tooling

Nowadays, many video games aim for renders that are as realistic as possible, and the PBR, or PBS, has become a new standard. It is, therefore, an important technique to master for modern technical artists, so let’s see how to apply it in Unity when using the URP pipeline.

In the following sections, we will have a quick glance at the shader keywords and variants that are required to make our shader lit. Then, we will have a quick look at the important tooling the URP provides us with for PBR, set up our shader keywords, and finally, introduce the four data structures our shader will use.

A quick overview of shader keywords and variants

So, before we actually dive into adding lighting to a URP shader and turning it into a lit PBS shader, we need to have a quick look at the notion of shader keywords and shader variants. We will not go into a fully detailed explanation here because we will have another in-depth run at those concepts...