Unity-ShaderCharDisplay

Convenient shader tool for displaying ascii characters as debug text in your shaders

What is this?

Everyone who is working with postprocess shaders always struggle to debug pixel data, or intermediate values. To do so, you have really few tools in hand - return a color as screen color, or debug the pixels in Renderdoc, where you may read DXBC and debug line by line with it. If we have a tool to display realtime data inside shader, this could be really convenient.

Unity-ShaderCharDisplay provides a shadercommon file where you can port to any project you like, and it will display anything you like once you included it! Also a great advantage is that you do not need to include a texture file just for your debug font!

How to use it?

Pretty simple, just add PRINT_CHAR or PRINT_NUMBER to anywhere you like inside your shader!

Function Arguments

• PRINT_NUMBER

  • num: The number you want to display, can be float, float2, float3 and float4 form.
  • uv: Current uv of the canvas.
  • uvMins: The bottomleft corner of the text.
  • size: The height of your text.
  • screenAspect: The texture aspect of your canvas, usually it should be xxx_TexelSize.w / xxx_TexelSize.z

• PRINT_CHAR

  • ch: The character ascii you want to display, should be in range [0, 127]
  • uv: Current uv of the canvas.
  • uvMins: The bottomleft corner of the text.
  • size: The height of your text.
  • screenAspect: The texture aspect of your canvas, usually it should be xxx_TexelSize.w / xxx_TexelSize.z

How it works?

It's not hard trick, I just encoded every character in numbers. Thanks to 8-bit font creaters.

Special thanks

https://chequered.ink/ for the Teeny Tiny Pixls font.

This font is lisenced only for personal use.