gamedev-shaders
Installation
SKILL.md
Shaders & VFX (game engines)
Author shaders, materials, and full-screen effects across Godot, Unity, and Unreal. One mental model — the GPU pipeline — mapped onto each engine's authoring surface, plus recipes for the effects people actually ask for.
Version contract — read first
Target the current stable line of each engine and never emit its retired APIs. If unsure a symbol is current, say so rather than guess.
| Engine | Target | Never emit → use instead |
|---|---|---|
| Godot | 4.x (4.4/4.5 stable) | SCREEN_TEXTURE/DEPTH_TEXTURE/NORMAL_TEXTURE built-ins → declare a uniform sampler2D … : hint_screen_texture / hint_depth_texture / hint_normal_roughness_texture. hint_color/hint_albedo → source_color. hint_white/hint_black → hint_default_white/hint_default_black. GLES2-era guides. |
| Unity | 6 (6000.x LTS), URP/HDRP | Surface shaders (#pragma surface) — Built-in-RP only, they do not compile under URP/HDRP. CGPROGRAM+UnityCG.cginc, UnityObjectToClipPos, mul(UNITY_MATRIX_MVP, v) → HLSLPROGRAM + URP Core.hlsl and TransformObjectToHClip(posOS). OnRenderImage/Graphics.Blit post FX → URP Renderer Feature / Fullscreen Shader Graph. |
| Unreal | 5.x (5.4+) | SceneTexture:PostProcessInput0 outside a Post Process material; Opacity without a translucent blend mode; Opacity Mask without a Masked blend mode. Prefer graph nodes; drop to a Custom HLSL node only for logic nodes can't express. |
shader_type tokens in Godot 4 are exact: spatial, canvas_item (underscore), particles
(plural), sky, fog.