Shader Bridge — Convert Blender Materials to Unity Shader Graph & Unreal

Real material conversion: procedurals are baked, channel-packed, and emitted as Unity Shader Graph, Unity ShaderLab, or Unreal T3D — no manual rebuilding.

---

Why Shader Bridge

Manual shader rebuilding burns hours per asset. Existing converters either dump every Blender node verbatim (which the engine can't compile) or summarise the material into a single Principled BSDF and lose all the detail.

Shader Bridge takes a middle path: it converts what the engine has a real equivalent for, bakes what it doesn't, and emits the result in the engine's native format with the right channel packing already applied.

---

Features

Three Unity targets + Unreal T3D

• Unity URP — .shadergraph (PBR Master Node)
• Unity HDRP — .shadergraph (HDLit Master Node)
• Unity Built-in — .shader (ShaderLab surface shader)
• Unreal Engine 4 / 5 — .t3d material file

Six supported root shaders (v1.1)

• Principled BSDF — direct conversion
• Emission — Color/Strength land on emission_color / emission_strength, base_color = 0
• Diffuse BSDF — metallic = 0, specular = 0
• Glossy BSDF — metallic = 1
• Glass BSDF — transmission = 1, IOR copied
• Transparent BSDF — alpha = 0, transmission = 1

Smart traversal

• Mix Shader / Add Shader passthrough — picks the dominant branch by Fac value, the other branch contributes its upstream nodes
• NodeGroup auto-traversal — enters custom node groups via GROUP_OUTPUT, no need to ungroup first
• Reroute transparency — hops through reroute nodes cleanly, ignores dangling links

Procedural baker

• Noise / Voronoi / Wave / Musgrave become real textures
• Proper context restore — your material's nodes are not left rewired after a failed bake
• ShaderToRGB-driven graphs detected and routed through the baker

Channel packing per engine

• Unity URP / Built-in — Metallic (RGB) + Smoothness (A)
• Unity HDRP — Mask Map: Metallic / AO / Detail / Smoothness
• Unreal Engine — ORM: AO (R) + Roughness (G) + Metallic (B)

Diagnostic Conversion Report

• Accurate supported / unsupported counts
• root_kind field — tells you whether the master ended up as PRINCIPLED / EMISSION / DIFFUSE / GLOSSY / GLASS / TRANSPARENT / ADD_SHADER
• Plain-English error messages for Use Nodes disabled, missing Material Output, unconnected Surface — no more Supported: 0 / Unsupported: 0 mystery

Real IR-driven emitters

• Values come from actual node defaults
• Links from the real graph
• No placeholder zeros

Viewport approximation

• One-click EEVEE preview tuned to the engine's look (Unity Filmic, Unreal ACES-style)
• Auto-detects EEVEE Next on Blender 4.2+

Toon detector

• Flags ShaderToRGB-driven materials so you can route them through the procedural baker

---

Compatibility

• Blender: 4.0 + (4.2 LTS recommended)
• Unity: 2022.3 LTS + (URP, HDRP, Built-in)
• Unreal Engine: 4.27 + and 5.x

---

What you get

• Shader Bridge add-on (Python only, no DLL)
• README with full quick-start guide
• Free updates for v1.x
• Support through marketplace messaging

---

Install

Edit → Preferences → Add-ons → Install... → pick shader_bridge_v1_1_0.zip → enable. The ShaderBridge sidebar tab appears in the 3D Viewport (press N).

No external Python packages or DLLs required.

---

License

GPL-3.0. Standard for Blender add-ons. The license applies to the add-on code only — the shaders you generate with it are yours to ship in any commercial project.

---

What's new in v1.1.0

• Stylised root shaders supported: Emission, Diffuse, Glossy, Glass, Transparent now accepted as Material Output sources
• Mix Shader / Add Shader passthrough with dominant-branch selection
• NodeGroup auto-traversal via GROUP_OUTPUT — works with materials from BlenderKit / Poliigon / Quixel that wrap their guts in a custom group
• Diagnostic Conversion Report — accurate counts plus a root_kind indicator
• Plain-English error messages with concrete fixes for Use Nodes disabled, missing Material Output, unconnected Surface