Technical reference

Use this reference when replacing textures, assembling a new renderer composition or integrating the materials with a larger URP scene. For everyday appearance changes, start with the Shader Reference.

Texture channels and mapping

Shader or layer	Input	Important role
Terrestrial	Land Mask red / green	Water-versus-land selection / shore shaping
Terrestrial	Height Map RGB	Terrain color-layer masks and detail
Terrestrial cities	City Light Map red, CityLight Mask Map red	City pattern and restriction mask
Terrestrial cities	CityLight UV Map RG	Coordinates used to sample the city pattern
Terrestrial/Oceanic/Sand clouds	Clouds Top, Clouds Middle, Gradient	Pole and middle maps joined through a gradient-based blend
Moon	Detail Map red / SpecularMap red	Specular strength / Smoothness mask
Ice	Height Map red and Detail Map red/green	Depth-shaped ice ramp and fine detail
Gas	UV Distortion Map red	Band distortion and pole detail
Ring Transparent	Detail Map RGB / red	Ring color / opacity multiplied by Ring Tint alpha
Ring Shadow	Detail Map alpha	Alpha-test pattern with Clip
Sun	Surfrace Map red/green	Stellar color and flakes detail
Sun Corona	Corona Map red/green	Noise and discharge patterns

Retain the supplied textures’ importer intent when copying them. A color image, packed mask, coordinate texture and normal map are not interchangeable. Changing import color-space treatment can change mask values as well as color. Inspect replacements in the final material rather than treating a white or black diagnostic texture as an artistic preset.

Many surfaces project textures from several directions. Their Tiling controls change texture repetition; they do not increase mesh resolution. Cloud poles and middles use distinct UV channels, so replacing the supplied mesh can break the blend. Rings derive their texture position from object-space radius and depend on the mesh origin. Preserve the authored origin and mapping while first customizing the effect.

Sensitive combinations

Setting	Keep in mind
CityLight Population	Keep positive and nonzero; it appears in a reciprocal exponent
Ice Factor C	Keep nonzero
Ice remap span	Keep (Ice Detail + Ice Factor B) - (Ice Factor A - Ice Detail) nonzero
Ring radial mapping	Keep Ring Size != Ring Offset + 1
Depth Fade	Keep nonzero and tune at the intended world scale
Gas Lo/Hi vectors	Keep low/high thresholds ordered and distinct
Triplanar falloffs	Start with finite positive values from the supplied preset

These are practical setup boundaries, not a claim that every other value is safe or artistically useful. Keep a known-good material copy before changing interdependent remaps.

Rendering behavior

Atmosphere and Corona use additive color. Their visible transparency comes from the amount of color added, rather than ordinary alpha opacity. Transparent Ring uses a transparent queue but keeps depth writing enabled. This can affect overlap with other transparent effects; inspect the actual camera view.

The lit planet shaders use UniversalForwardOnly for their custom surface shading. In a Deferred renderer they still use that forward-only route. The presence of other generated passes does not by itself establish equivalent behavior for decals, SSAO or every renderer feature.

Surface scatter, atmospheric arcs, cloud-shadow shaping and night effects include main-light-dependent terms. A scene with several lights is not a physical multi-light atmosphere simulation. Corona reads scene depth, and its Depth Fade denominator is in world units; enable depth as described in Installation.

Amplify Shader Editor and scripting

The product uses Amplify Shader Editor. You do not need ASE to use the supplied compiled shaders and materials in the configuration described by this guide. Graph editing requires a suitable ASE authoring setup and lies beyond the normal material workflow. Retain original generated shaders and shared function assets when managing the product in source control.

Unity helper includes with ShaderGraph in their path are dependencies of the generated shader code; they are not an instruction to convert the product to another shader-authoring system. Use Runtime materials for scripting against the existing properties.