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Reading from Depth Texture in Unity 2021.1.7f1
I began making this project that has many similarities to Sebastian Lague's "Atmosphere" coding adventure, so I decided to take inspiration from one of his shaders. The link is here (specifically minute 2:01). This video was published last year, so as I expected I ran into difficulties when sampling from the depth texture. After hours of reading documentation, I decided to simply check if I could display the plain depth texture without any post processing effects like so:
struct appdata
{
float4 vertex : POSITION;
float2 uv : TEXCOORD0;
};
struct v2f
{
float2 uv : TEXCOORD0;
float4 vertex : SV_POSITION;
float3 viewVector : TEXCOORD1;
float2 depth : TEXCOORD2;
};
v2f vert (appdata v)
{
v2f o;
o.vertex = UnityObjectToClipPos(v.vertex);
o.uv = v.uv;
float3 viewVector = mul(unity_CameraInvProjection, float4(v.uv.xy * 2 - 1,0,-1));
o.viewVector = mul(unity_CameraToWorld, float4(viewVector,0));
UNITY_TRANSFER_DEPTH(o.depth);
return o;
}
sampler2D _MainTex;
float3 planetCenter;
float atmosphereRadius;
float planetRadius;
fixed4 frag (v2f i) : SV_Target
{
//fixed4 col = tex2D(_MainTex, i.uv);
return float4(Linear01Depth(i.depth),0,0,1);
}
ENDCG
With this I got a black screen as a result and an error that said Metal: Error creating pipeline state (Custom/AtmosphereShader): Link failed: fragment input user(TEXCOORD2) was not found in vertex shader outputs (null). I got these commands from the unity documentation here. So then I tried going even simpler and taking the code from the documentation that supposedly renders the depth from objects in the scene:
Shader "Render Depth" {
SubShader {
Tags { "RenderType"="Opaque" }
Pass {
CGPROGRAM
#pragma vertex vert
#pragma fragment frag
#include "UnityCG.cginc"
struct v2f {
float4 pos : SV_POSITION;
float2 depth : TEXCOORD0;
};
v2f vert (appdata_base v) {
v2f o;
o.pos = UnityObjectToClipPos(v.vertex);
UNITY_TRANSFER_DEPTH(o.depth);
return o;
}
half4 frag(v2f i) : SV_Target {
UNITY_OUTPUT_DEPTH(i.depth);
}
ENDCG
}
}
}
Though there wasn't an error, the black screen prevailed. the program on my camera that blits the shader is really simple it's just:
using UnityEngine;
[ExecuteInEditMode]
public class PPCamera : MonoBehaviour
{
public Material postProcessingMat;
void OnRenderImage(RenderTexture source, RenderTexture dest){
Graphics.Blit(source,dest,postProcessingMat);
}
}
I'm new to shaders so I may be missing something very obvious but does anyone know any workarounds?