How to avoid Unity Complie all Standard shader variants

Question

When add Standard Shader to Graphics——Always Include Shaders, Unity always stucks in sharedassets0.asset. I know it's unity complies shader variants in the background. it's about 60000 variants which make the .apk size is triple bigger than normal size. And it takes a long time(a couple of hours) to build, even if an empty project.If I remove the shader from the list, when I load a model from asset bundle, it will be a pink.Only add Standard to the list, then everything is ok!Is there any way to solve this problem? Please help me!I googled all I can google!

Answer 1

Edit: Unity 2018.2 added IPreprocessShaders which is described at: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/05/14/stripping-scriptable-shader-variants/ You can review each individual shader keyword combination in IList<ShaderCompilerData> and remove ones you are certain you don't need. The this API is not complicated, but standard shader keywords are not well documented. Some of the keyword correspond to enum BuiltinShaderDefine while others are not. I ended up using this preprocessor to remove any ShaderCompilerData with BuiltinShaderDefine.UNITY_HARDWARE_TIER1, BuiltinShaderDefine.UNITY_HARDWARE_TIER2 and INSTANCING_ON(This is not in the BuiltinShaderDefine enum) turned on since I am certain we didn't use quality settings toggle and instancing.

The Unity Shader Variant Collections works kind of wonky. I ended up using a plugin called "Shader Control" to clean up the mess. But the process is still far from enjoyable since when you remove a keyword there is a chance you break something.

The best solution I could think of is remove all the "Built-in Shader" (Maybe not "Deferred" is you are using Deferred Rendering) and "Always Include Shaders" at the beginning of the project and if someone needs a built-in shader, download "Builit in Shaders" from the Unity Download Archive and import only the one needed back to the project. So that you can:

• Have 100% control over built-in shader
• Only compile shaders you used
• Avoid shader duplication in AssetBundles (If you pack something referencing default imported shaders, the shader will be duplicated for each AssetBundle)

But this "best solution" is certainly more of a hindsight and does not help your current situation though. Give Shader Control a try.