Question by Viza · Jun 28 at 09:48 PM · shader bug artifacts

Shader renders differently in editor and in exported app

Ok, this drives me crazy now.

I made (adopted) this shader - a simple wave propagation effect.

It looks fine when I run in the editor:

editor

But if I build a standalone app, the screen is full of artifacts:

bug

What can be the cause? Why it is different in editor and in the built app on the same computer? Is there any extra checks in the shaders when running in the editor or something?

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ttesla · Jun 29 at 12:40 AM 0

Probably won't help but I will suggest 2 things: 1- Double check the quality settings. Maybe your build use a different quality setting than you use in the editor.
2- Also sometimes unity discards shaders from the build if it can't find it in the scene. You should explicitly add that shader to Shader Variants. Or put a dummy object using that shader in the scene.

Viza ttesla · Jun 29 at 08:33 AM 0

Yeah, I already tried those. I didn't touch the quality settings so those should be ok, but for good measure I also set it from script to the highest one. And this don't seem to be a stripping issue, because the shader is there, and working, it just produces different results, than in the editor. But again, for good measure, I also added to the "Always included shaders" section in the preferences.

It seems that the artifacts happen at the parts of the image where there could be a negative value in the shader - at least it seems if I clamp the value, the artifacts disappear. But that not a real solution, because it changes the look of the effect, and also: it looks correctin the editor without clamping. That's why I though there could be some extra checks/measures in the shaders in the editor, and hope that I can enable or copy them to the runtime exported shader/app.