Shader Forge + Spine

JulioD

Hello,

We're using Shader Forge and Spine for our project and we're interested in knowing how to get both working properly.

I already read about the name MainTex to the Diffuse texture from Shader Forge, and if I MANUALLY swap material via editor in runtime, the shader seems to work as it should, however if I set it beforehand and swap it out on the Atlas asset, the spine object won't render and a "Page missing material" error will appear in the Atlas asset.

Is there anything I should consider to make it work?

EDIT:

Okay, somehow I just did the very same I've been trying for two hours and it seems to work now, I don't know why, and I don't know if there something else to take into consideration, so I'd love some clarification in case I find this again in the near future 😃

Pharan

This has nothing to do with Shader Forge.

Did you mean swapping the texture? If you swapped the material, it wouldn't care. When you export atlases from Spine, it stores the name of the image file where parts can be found, in case not all the parts fit in one texture. Likewise, the AtlasAsset looks for the texture name of the mainTexture of each Material to know where parts/images come from. If it doesn't find a texture name it needs, it will warn you that it's missing.

The Unity console would have logged something like Material with texture name "yourOriginalTextureName" not found for atlas asset: yourSkeletonName_Atlas.
Did you check?

This matching is done at load time (when the Skeleton data is loaded and instantiated). It does no checking of texture names after that. Each runtime renderable attachment object just stores which Material needs to be used to render it, so the SkeletonRenderer knows to use/insert that Material in the MeshRenderer's materials array.

JulioD

No, I meant swapping materials.

Since it's a single-atlas object, I went straight to making different materials and swapping them instead of textures and such.
Somehow, I believe it worked when I reassigned the texture the shader uses to the material created with Shader Forge. I'm inclined to believe there was a bug in the editor showing I had a texture assigned (the preview showed and everything) when in reality it wasn't.

It's really weird, because as I say, if I set the material via editor at runtime, the shader would work just fine.