Source metadata
- Type: Official Unity package documentation
- Maintainer: Unity Technologies
- Accessed: 2026-04-24
- Primary URL: Lit Shader
Key takeaways
- Unity describes the URP Lit shader as a shader for real-world surfaces such as stone, wood, glass, plastic and metals.
- The material inspector exposes Surface Options, Surface Inputs and Advanced settings.
- Surface Options include workflow mode, surface type, blending mode, render face, alpha clipping and shadow reception.
- Surface Inputs include Base Map, Metallic or Specular Map, Smoothness, Normal Map, Height Map and Occlusion Map.
- Smoothness controls highlight spread. Low smoothness gives wider rough highlights, while high smoothness gives sharper highlights.
- Normal maps add apparent surface detail such as bumps, scratches and grooves without changing the mesh silhouette.
Notable claims
- Unity notes that URP Lit is the most computationally heavy shading model in URP, so it should be used deliberately.
- Opaque materials render before transparent materials, which matters for sorting and performance.
- Metallic values range from non-metallic surfaces to fully metallic surfaces, with intermediate values useful for dirty or corroded metals.
Relevance
This source informs:
- 3d-materials-and-uvs
- unity-lighting-for-3d-scenes
- unity-urp-overview
- unity-urp-lighting-and-render-features
Open questions raised
- At what point should students move from URP Lit materials to Shader Graph?
- Which material-map packing workflow should GDnD teach for intermediate optimisation?