Modifying HDRP Materials in C#

When you change a Material’s properties in the Inspector, HDRP automatically validates a material when you change its properties in the inspector. This means that HDRP automatically sets up material properties, keywords, and passes.

However, if you use a script to change the properties of a material made from an HDRP Shader, or a ShaderGraph that has an HDRP target, HDRP doesn’t validate the material automatically.

When a material in your scene isn't valid, it might make a property change have no effect or cause the material to fail to render.

To do this, when you modify an HDRP material in C#:

You can find more information about Material properties in Unity in the Material section of the Unity Manual . For more information about shader variants, shader keywords, and access in standalone builds, see Branching, variants, and keywords .

Modify a Material with the HDMaterial API

To modify a Material property, use the methods in the HDMaterial class. When you use a method in HDMaterial to change a property, it automatically validates the Material.

The HDMaterial class contains methods that correspond to certain material properties. For a full list of HDMaterial methods, see the HDMaterial API documentation .

The following example script:

using UnityEngine.Rendering.HighDefinition;
public class CreateCutoutMaterial : MonoBehaviour
   void Start()
     var material = new Material(Shader.Find("HDRP/Lit"));
     HDMaterial.SetAlphaClipping(material, true);
     HDMaterial.SetAlphaCutoff(material, 0.2f);
Modify and validate a Material with ValidateMaterial
To validate a Material property which isn’t included in HDMaterial, use the ValidateMaterial method to force HDRP to validate the material.
The following example script:
Creates a Material with the HDRP/Lit shader.
Uses _AlphaCutoffEnable to enable alpha clipping.
Uses  "_AlphaCutoff" to set the cutoff value to 0.2.
Uses the ValidateMaterial function to validate this Material.
using UnityEngine.Rendering.HighDefinition;
public class CreateCutoutMaterial : MonoBehaviour
   void Start()
       var material = new Material(Shader.Find("HDRP/Lit"));
       material.SetFloat("_AlphaCutoffEnable", 1.0f);
       material.SetFloat("_AlphaCutoff", 0.2f);
      HDMaterial.ValidateMaterial(material);