iOS, Assentbundles and Custom Shaders

Question

There's something special about shaders in assent bundles in iOS? When I do the process below and use Windows as target, everything run smoothly. When it do it in iOS, the materials contained in the asset bundle are all OK except that ones that uses custom shaders. Am I doing something wrong?

PS: The asset bundle do contains the custom shaders (Im using BuildAssetBundleOptions.CollectDependencies) and this process do works in windows bundles.

 PushAssetDependencies

     BuildAssetBundle // Materials and Shaders
 
     PushAssetDependencies
         BuildPlayer
     PopAssetDependencies
 
 PopAssetDependencies

Answer 1

My team recently experienced this as well.

We found that simply re-assigning the material's shader at run-time with Shader.Find actually resolved the issue.

 [RequireComponent(typeof(Renderer))]
 public class ShaderFix : MonoBehaviour 
 {
     //This should be attached to any Game Object with a Renderer that has a Material with a custom shader.
     #if UNITY_IPHONE
     void Awake()
     {
 
         Material[] newMats = new Material[renderer.materials.Length];
         
         for(int i = 0; i < newMats.Length; i++)
         {
             Material ogMat = renderer.materials[i];
             Material mat = new Material(ogMat);
             //Note: the material maintains a link to its shader's name, so pass that across dynamically.
             mat.shader = Shader.Find(ogMat.shader.name); 
             newMats[i] = mat;
         }
         
         renderer.materials = newMats;
     }
     #endif    
 }

Another thing that may also provide some help is to have empty materials somewhere in a built scene that use the shaders.

The problem seems to be that since the shaders get bundled, they don't come across in the build because they weren't used anywhere that the build process could see. Creating a simple empty MonoBehaviour with a Material[] will suffice here, and they will not add any significant memory as they don't need textures, but just a way to ground the custom shader in your project so that it is collected by the build processor.

Hope this helps.

==

iOS, Assentbundles and Custom Shaders

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