VAT Render Quality Tiers¶

How to pick the right VAT shader tier for your target hardware and agent count.

When to read this¶

You have already baked at least one VAT prefab and want to understand the quality vs. cost trade.
You are targeting mobile and need to know which tier to use for the crowd.
You are building a hero shot or marketing screenshot and want the most detailed look.

Concept¶

Every VAT bake produces a material assigned to one of three render tier shaders. The tier controls lighting quality, which surface maps are supported, and how much the shader costs per agent. You choose the tier by selecting a Bake Preset in the VAT Baker — the preset sets the sample rate, normal-bake flag, and the tier shader together.

Switching tiers later means rebaking with a different preset (or re-running the baker in update mode). When you switch to a lower tier, the baker clears surface map keywords the new shader no longer exposes, so none linger on the regenerated material.

Tier comparison¶

Tier	Shader	Lighting	Surface maps	Relative cost	Best for
Mobile	`Massive Swarm System/Swarm VAT/Mobile`	Half-Lambert + SH ambient	Base map only (no normal, metallic, occlusion, emission)	Lowest	1000+ agents on-device
Standard	`Massive Swarm System/Swarm VAT/Standard`	Main directional + soft shadows + SH ambient + reflection probes / skybox	Normal, metallic/smoothness, occlusion, emission	Medium	Hundreds of agents on desktop
High	`Massive Swarm System/Swarm VAT/High`	Standard plus dynamic point/spot lights and additional-light shadows	Same as Standard	Highest	Small counts, hero shots, screenshots

Standard is the default. Mobile has the fewest shader variants and compiles to the shortest forward-lit path — no additional lights, no shadow receives, no PBR surface maps.

How to choose¶

Use Mobile when the agent is part of the main crowd on a mobile build, or when you are hitting a GPU bottleneck at high agent counts on any platform. The shading is flatter — agents baked without normals are lit against an upward-facing default normal via half-Lambert, giving a uniformly top-lit look — but at crowd distance the difference is invisible.

Use Standard for most desktop projects. It gives full PBR shading (normal map, metallic/smoothness, occlusion, emission) lit by the main directional light with soft shadows, and reflects the skybox and reflection probes so metallic surfaces read as metal. It holds up to a few hundred agents on desktop.

Use High for close-range characters, cinematic hero shots, or screenshots where you want dynamic point and spot lights with their own shadows. High compiles many more shader variants than Standard. It is not meant for the crowd.

High tier on mobile build targets

The baker warns when the active build target is Android or iOS and the selected preset is High. High compiles per-pixel additional lights and many shader variants — heavy for an on-device crowd. Use Mobile or Standard for on-device agents and keep High for desktop or marketing captures.

Bake presets¶

The built-in presets are listed in the Bake Preset dropdown inside the VAT Baker, ordered from lowest to highest quality:

Preset	Description
Mobile	Cheapest tier for the big crowd. Skips the normal texture, so shading is flatter at distance — the right trade for 1000+ swarms and on-device builds.
Standard	Balanced default. Full surface detail (normal, metallic, occlusion) lit by the main light with soft shadows. Good for hundreds of agents on desktop.
High	Showcase tier. Adds dynamic point and spot lights plus their shadows on top of Standard — for hero shots and small counts.

Each preset selects the matching tier shader and sets the sample rate and normal-bake flag to values appropriate for that tier. You can override sample rate and normal-bake in Advanced mode after selecting a preset.

Generated materials have GPU instancing enabled automatically, so the SRP Batcher can batch the identical draws.

Distance LOD and normals¶

When Enable VAT Quality LOD is on in SwarmSettings, the simulation writes a per-instance quality tier (Full / Reduced / Cheap) into each agent's shader state each frame. What the shader does with that tier depends on which render tier you are using:

Frame interpolation is disabled at Reduced and Cheap tier on all three shaders. Animation smoothness is invisible at those distances.
Per-vertex baked normal (from the normal texture): Standard and High keep it at Reduced and Cheap distance so agents remain shaded instead of collapsing to flat geometry. Mobile drops it at those tiers to save the normal texture tap — the crowd pays only one position tap per vertex.
Per-pixel normal-map detail (the surface Normal Map texture) is static — it does not change with distance. It is always on when the _NORMALMAP keyword is enabled and always off when it is not; the quality LOD does not gate it.
At Cheap tier, all shaders snap to the dominant walk/run clip instead of blending two clips.

The visual result: Standard and High agents stay shaded at any distance; Mobile agents go slightly flatter when distant.

Shader name reference¶

Tier	Full shader name
Mobile	`Massive Swarm System/Swarm VAT/Mobile`
Standard	`Massive Swarm System/Swarm VAT/Standard`
High	`Massive Swarm System/Swarm VAT/High`

Animation — full VAT bake workflow and baker field reference
Performance — mobile optimization priorities and Importance LOD tuning
Swarm Settings — Enable VAT Quality LOD and distance thresholds