Transparent Cutout Diffuse

Transparent Cutout Properties

This shader is an alternative method of displaying transparent objects. The fundamental differences between this shader and a regular Transparent shader are:

• This shader cannot have partially transparent areas. Everything will be either fully opaque or fully transparent.
• Objects using this shader can cast and receive shadows!
• The graphical sorting problems normally associated with transparent shaders do not occur when using this shader.

This shader uses an alpha channel contained in the Base Texture to determine the transparent areas. If the alpha contains a blend between transparent and opaque areas, you can manually determine the cutoff point for the which areas will be shown. You change this cutoff by adjusting the Alpha Cutoff slider in the Inspector.

Diffuse Properties

This shader is a Pixel-Lit shader, which is more expensive than Vertex-Lit. Pixel lighting is expensive mostly because each object has to be drawn multiple times for each pixel light that shines on it. Vertex lights don't affect the shader in this way. Pixel lights support cookies, bumpmapping, and shadows while vertex lights do not. Pixel lights are also much less sensitive to tesselation of the models - if you have a cube using this shader, you can put point light very close to its surface and it will have nice round highlight. This effect cannot be achieved with Vertex lighting.

Diffuse computes a simple (Lambertian) lighting model. The lighting on the surface decreases as the angle between it and the light decreases. The lighting depends only on the this angle, and does not change as the camera moves or rotates around.

Performance

Generally, this shader is cheap to render. For more details, please view the Shader Peformance page.