Common Issues
The problems you are most likely to hit, in roughly the order you will hit them. Each entry is phrased as a question — search this page for the symptom you see, then follow the fix.
Why does my material render magenta?
Magenta means the shader could not compile or could not be found. Check the Console for a Universal Render Pipeline/Lit not-found error — that indicates URP is missing. If URP is installed, look for HLSL compile errors specific to the Genesis includes.
Magenta after a Unity version upgrade usually means the shader cache is
stale. Delete Library/ShaderCache and let Unity recompile.
Why is my outline invisible?
Three causes, in order of likelihood:
- Cull Mode is Back — set Effects → Outline → Cull Mode to Front.
- Mesh has hard edges with smooth normals — the inverted hull splits at smoothing-group boundaries. Paint vertex color G to compensate or split smoothing groups.
- Camera is using deferred rendering — inverted hull requires forward. Switch the renderer.
Why do my cel bands look washed out?
Your project is in Gamma color space. Switch to Linear (Project Settings > Player > Other Settings > Color Space). Unity will reimport textures. In Gamma the bands read soft and oversaturated and the shadow tint shifts toward pink; Linear restores crisp bands matching the inspector swatch.
Why does my normal map have a yellow tint?
Your normal texture is imported as Default instead of Normal. Select the texture, set Texture Type → Normal map, click Apply. The tint will turn correct blue.
Why is my draw call count exploding?
You called renderer.material.SetX(...) somewhere. That instantiates the material per renderer. Switch to MaterialPropertyBlock — see Scripting Materials.
Even one renderer.material call somewhere in your codebase can wreck
batching across thousands of renderers. Audit with a grep before shipping.
Why does my ramp show visible bands?
Your ramp texture has mipmaps on. Select the texture, Advanced → Generate Mip Maps OFF, Filter Mode Bilinear, Wrap Mode Clamp.
Why does triplanar tile obviously?
Standard triplanar repeats. Switch to Stochastic Triplanar (desktop only) or break tiling with a low-frequency detail map at a different scale.
Why is my hologram invisible in bright scenes?
The additive blend mode blows the hologram into the background. Drop tint intensity from 4 to 2, and raise Edge Power to 3 — the rim does the heavy lifting in bright environments.
Why did build time explode after enabling features?
Variant explosion. Open Tools > Genesis > Shader Tools Window > Variant Audit and strip unused combinations. Set a platform profile in the Feature Configurator.
Why is my outline visible through walls?
You are using inverted-hull on a transparent material with ZTest Always. Set the outline pass ZTest to LEqual in the material override.