Abyssal Void (Minimal Unlit Unity Shader)

About:

The Abyssal Void Shader was originally designed for my purchased copy of Sillurgy's "Abyssal Rapace V3" (awesome model, by the way). In general, this shader works quite well on any matte black avatars. As a result, I have chosen to release this for free!

The shader is intended to be dark and difficult to see. You can partly customize this, such as by changing the glow color or the sharpness of that glow. It's a bit like rim lighting, but it uses the normals of the model instead of per-pixel colors, so it won't be a cartoony line like you might have come to expect from other shaders.

How It Works:

The shader has three properties:

1. Body Texture - This can be used to mix the blackness of this effect with a texture. The lighter a color is on the texture, the less it is affected by the shader. Thus, black parts of the texture show the effect.
2. Underglow Color - This is the color of the outline, defaulting to a violet shade.
3. Underglow Sharpness - This is an exponent for how quickly the color fades, higher values create sharper outlines.

References (Screenshots):

The models used in the pictures can be found here:

• Sillurgy's "Abyssal Rapace V3"
• Tosca's "VRChat Cat"

Performance Implications and Features:

• This shader is computationally cheap; you can generally use it extensively at no cost.
• [VRChat] The shader properly tells VRC to fall back to an unlit texture, so if your texture is mostly black, it will still look decent.
• Shader properly ignores projectors and lights, and does not cast a shadow.

Limits:

This shader works great when:

• The avatar has no large areas of bright color that may cause the focus of the viewer to change
• The avatar is as dark as possible
• The avatar has sharp angles over a short distance; less large, flat surfaces.

This shader struggles when:

• The avatar has a lot of bright colors
• The world ambient color is not a color that provides contrast to the dark violet tones
• The shader is applied to a texture with colors brighter than pitch black (#000000) - the violet applies additively, and so it will be drowned out by other colors.

Abyssal Void (Unlit VRChat Avatar Shader) © 2022 by Xan // Eti is licensed under CC BY 4.0