Hue Shift

Hue Shift rotates the surface’s hue in HSV space, keeping luminance and saturation intact while changing the color. It is the right tool for faction palettes, power-up cycles, and per-instance prop variation without authoring separate materials.

When to use it

Faction tinting — one material, any number of team colors, zero rebuilds.
Power-up effects — animate the hue while charging.
Procedural variation — randomize per instance via MaterialPropertyBlock.
Day/night atmosphere — sweep the hue with time of day.

Difference from Color Adjustments

Color Adjustments grades brightness, contrast, and saturation. Hue Shift rotates only the hue and preserves luminance, so red metal stays the same brightness when shifted to blue. The two stack cleanly.

How it works

Genesis converts the albedo to HSV via a fast YIQ approximation, adds _HueShift / 360.0 to the hue, and converts back. With _HueAnimateSpeed above zero, time is added to the shift, giving the moving-rainbow effect.

Properties

Inspector label	Shader property	Type	Default	Description
Hue Shift	_HueShift	Float (0–360)	0.0	Rotation in degrees.
Animate Speed	_HueAnimateSpeed	Float (0–10)	0.0	0 = static; higher rotates faster.
Hue Mask	_HueMask	Texture2D	white	Mask restricting the shift to UV regions.
Affect Emission	_HueAffectsEmission	Toggle	Off	Off = albedo only, On = also shift emission.
Strength	_HueStrength	Float (0–1)	1.0	Blend amount against the original hue.

Usage

Enable Hue Shift and set the Shift value in degrees.
For faction colors, pass per-instance values via MaterialPropertyBlock to keep batching alive.
For animated hues, set Animate Speed above 0; the shader handles time internally.
Mask the shift to keep skin and eyes neutral while team-tinting armor.


var mpb = new MaterialPropertyBlock();
mpb.SetFloat("_HueShift", teamHueDegrees); // 0 red, 120 green, 240 blue
renderer.SetPropertyBlock(mpb);

Tips & gotchas

Use a MaterialPropertyBlock for variation; material.SetFloat breaks SRP batching.
A hue shift on near-grey colors is invisible — saturation must be above zero, so pull from saturated source textures.
Pairs with Iridescence: iridescence handles view-angle color, hue handles time and per-instance variation.
Cost is roughly six ALU per pixel, cheap enough to ship.

Color Adjustments — saturation and contrast.
Iridescence — view-angle hue cycling.
Emission — the hue can affect emission too.
Greyscale & Posterize — full quantization pass.