Anyway, deferred lighting accomplishes much of what you are trying to accomplish here: breaking the lighting terms up into discrete elements. In a deferred lighting setup, albedo and normals (and spec and materials, up to you) are rendered into the G-buffer.

A more interesting topic is how can one sample a shadowmap in a custom Unity shader? There is stunningly no information on that topic.

Would make shaders way more accessible to beginners, and help ease the workload tremendously for graphics programmers. As it is now, figuring out the huge amount of boilerplate required to set something up when you’re starting with shaders is overwhelming, and then you have to write the same crap all over and over again, just to make a stupid typo and waste even more time hunting it down (yesterday I was stumped for an hour why my lighting was so wierd – turns out I used light direction instead of view direction in a calculation – but it just got lost in all that mess around it). So HUGE KUDOS, and keep at it!

If something like this would make it’s way into Unity, it would put it ahead the competition for sure (not that it at the top already :) ). Also you would probably see an increase in quality in indie projects made with Unity.

And a more concrete remark: It would be great if you could also get things like view direction in different spaces easily. Not that it’s hard to call a function to transform them, but it’s something that’s done predominantly in the vertex shader, and you said you want to omit those (and I wholeheartedly agree!).

Keep up the good work!
Andor