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Why is it so complicated to make a simple unlit additive material? Way too many, very unintuative, settings for this commonly used shader type.

How do you make an unlit additive material? (This is for God Rays on static planes in no particles.) My issue is while it does become additive, it also it stops rendering any background geometry behind the object.

Hello, thank you for getting in touch and for your support!

We understand that it can be quite overwhelming to get started on a visual editor tool such as ASE, especially due to the fact that it provides a huge amount of flexibility and power to users, allowing the creation of shaders without having to write a single line of code. For this to be possible, we have to expose many parameters and, as a result, it can be slightly confusing at first to deal with so many settings, however, we believe that after most users are done with the initial learning curve, they'll be able to quickly create and experiment with all sorts of effects, even if they are beginners in shader development.

That being said, it's also our focus to provide the best user experience that we can, so all feedback is very much welcome, as we've implemented many user suggestions from the very beginning and hope to continue doing so.
We're always open to suggestions on how to improve ASE, all we ask is that users provide detailed information on what they'd like to see changed or added, and we'll definitely take it into consideration for future updates.

Also, we suggest looking through our Wiki Manual and Tutorials if you haven't had the opportunity to do so yet, as they'll definitely help bring you up to speed with ASE!

Regarding the creation of an unlit additive material, when you set your Shader Type to Unlit, you're in fact using one of our Shader Templates, which has its own intricacies and is somewhat different to handle than the Surface Shader Type.

After creating your shader and setting its type to Unlit, you'll need to access the Output Node's Parameters and set both the RenderType and Queue parameters to Transparent, in the SubShader Tags section, and then set the Blend RGB and Blend Alpha parameters to Additive.

Please refer to the image below for an example of the setup mentioned above:



This should be a good starting point, and you can find further information regarding Blending modes in this Unity Manual page.

On a final note, we have plans to improve the workflow of our Shader Templates further down the road, including the way you set their Blend Modes.

If you're still having any sort of issues feel free to let us know, we're here to help!

Well it makes me feel better knowing you get the same bug I have. Additive means add on top of the pixels "rendered" behind it. This is adding on top w/o rendering geometry pixels behind it. I only get the skysphere.

You can test this by taking a noise texture on this additive unit material, apply it to a plane, place that plane in front of a scene with geometry in it. Here's mine. What you see is only the bg sky sphere not the geometry.

In the screenshot I've shared, the geometry behind the plane is behaving as expected, which is not the case for your setup.

Also, your shot doesn't include the Render Type and Queue, are they both set to Transparent?

If so, in order for us to best help you figure out what be causing the issue, could you share a sample with the issue present? Feel free to do so through [email protected] if you'd rather share it privately.