Color Array to unlit Shader in Editor

Hello all.
I'm very new to sharers in general so I'm wondering if I could get a bit of help in writing a shader that'll turn a color array into a view able texture for me to use with Graphics.DrawTexture in the Editor.
I've done a bit of searching but haven't come up with anything yet. I'm assuming this method will be quicker than creating a new texture every time I update the array.

The method I'm using currently to get an x/y position in the array is "y * width + x" if that helps.

I'm guessing you'd also need to pass the texture width into the shader.

Best of luck, I'm hoping that this is an easy one to anybody with a knowledge of shaders.

 

Hey there,

I'm not quite sure if using shaders is the right usecase for that. If you want to create textures, I guess using a script will be a more viable solution. I made a simple example on how such a script could look like (Using scriptable objects to keep the settings for different textures nicely coupled):

Code (CSharp):

1. // --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2. // <copyright file="TextureCreator.cs" company="Supyrb">
3. //   Copyright (c) 2017 Supyrb. All rights reserved.
4. // </copyright>
5. // <author>
6. //   Johannes Deml
7. //   send@johannesdeml.com
8. // </author>
9. // --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
10.  
11. using System.IO;
12. using UnityEngine;
13. using UnityEditor;
14.  
15. namespace Supyrb
16. {
17.    
18.     public class TextureCreator : ScriptableObject
19.     {
20.         public string FilePath = "GeneratedTexture.png";
21.         public int Width = 8;
22.         public int Height = 1;
23.  
24.         public Color[] Colors = new Color[8];
25.        
26.  
27.         [ContextMenu("Create Texture")]
28.         public void CreateTexture()
29.         {
30.             var texture = new Texture2D(Width, Height, TextureFormat.ARGB32, false);
31.  
32.             for (int y = 0; y < texture.height; y++)
33.             {
34.                 for (int x = 0; x < texture.width; x++)
35.                 {
36.                     texture.SetPixel(x, y, GetColorValue(x, y));
37.                 }
38.             }
39.             texture.Apply();
40.  
41.  
42.             // Encode texture into PNG
43.             byte[] bytes = texture.EncodeToPNG();
44.  
45.             File.WriteAllBytes(FilePath, bytes);
46.  
47.             AssetDatabase.Refresh();
48.         }
49.  
50.         public Color GetColorValue(int x, int y)
51.         {
52.             var index = Width*y + x;
53.             if (index >= Colors.Length)
54.             {
55.                 return Color.black;
56.             }
57.             return Colors[index];
58.         }
59.  
60.         void Reset()
61.         {
62.             FilePath = Application.dataPath + "/GeneratedTexture.png";
63.         }
64.     }
65. }
66.  

This is the resulting scriptable object. When you click create texture a png will be saved to the defined file path.



This is rather simple, but I guess it gives you an idea on where to go with creating textures.

 

Nice script, but I actually do need a shader so that I can render the colors on screen without any of the overhead of creating textures. Thanks for the help though.