Arrays & Shaders in Unity 5.4+

This post shows how to use arrays and shaders in Unity 5.4. Back in January I already covered this topic in an article called Arrays & shaders: Heatmaps in Unity. My original approach exposed an undocumented feature that allowed to pass arrays to shaders. Since then, Unity 5.4 has introduced proper support in its API. This tutorial replaces the previous article. If you have read the previous tutorial, you do not need any changes to your shader code and you can skip to Step 2.

Step 1. The Shader
Step 2. The Script
Step 3. Limitations

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Arrays & shaders: heatmaps in Unity

This tutorial explains how to pass arrays to shaders in Unity. This feature has been present for a long time, but is mostly undocumented. Unity 5.4.0 Beta 1 will introduce a proper API to pass arrays to shaders; this technique however will work with any previous version.

Introduction
Step 1: The arrays
Step 2: The shader
Step 3: The C# code
Step 4: A more general approach
Conclusion & download

If you are using Unity 5.4+, please refer to the Arrays & Shaders in Unity 5.4+ tutorial.

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