Legacy 2 PBR – a batch Material updater for Unity 5

Hey everybody! I just want to take a quick minute to share a cool Unity extension I made that you may find useful for your projects. It’s called Legacy 2 PBR, and its primary function is to automate your Material update process when moving from Unity 4 to Unity 5.

Legacy 2 PBR – https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/39625

If you decided to update to Unity 5 in the middle of a project, you’ve no doubt found that manually modifying your Materials to use the new PBR shader set can be an extremely tedious process, especially if you have a large number of them to update. With Legacy 2 PBR I’ve done my best to remove as much of that tedium as possible by developing a system for batched Material updates. Instead of changing your shaders one by one, the Leg2PBR editor window makes it so that all you have to do is:

1. Choose a new target shader (Standard if you want PBR)
2. Map texture properties from the old shader to the new one
3. Drop all of your Materials to update into the editor
4. Press go!

Here’s a short video of the tool in use:

Something else that’s really neat about Legacy 2 PBR is that you don’t necessarily have to use it to update your Materials to use PBR shaders. You can set your target shader to any of Unity’s shaders or even your own custom shaders, and the tool will update your Materials just the same. Pretty cool.

Of course, not every tool is perfect so I wanted to go ahead and list the minor issues I’m aware of (both of which are mentioned in the video).

• Unreliable UNDO – I haven’t quite gotten the hang of Unity’s UNDO system yet, so if you undo after a Material update you might lose links to some of the mapped textures on those materials.
• Non-Texture values don’t cross over – Parameters like Specularity or Color don’t move from shader to shader at this time, only Textures.

These minor issues don’t ever get in the way of your mass Material updates since everything else is fully functional, but I’d like to see if I can fix them in future updates. I just thought it would be nice to make everyone aware of them.

I think this is a pretty great little tool, and I’m hoping that you’ll find some use in it. I’d love to hear what you all think about Legacy 2 PBR, and maybe you’ll even have some ideas to help me make it better down the road.

And please! Share my tool with your friends if you like it! The more you share, the more you help support my work, and I’d like to be able to keep making stuff like this for everyone. 🙂

Unity Forum Post – http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/legacy-2-pbr-a-batch-updater-for-your-materials.337470/

Asset Store – https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/39625

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