Adding properties to a shader

Properties of a shader are very important for the shader pipeline as they are the method that you use to let the artist or user of the shader assign textures and tweak your shader values. Properties allow you to expose GUI elements in a material's Inspector tab without you having to use a separate editor, which provides visual ways to tweak a shader. With your shader opened in your IDE of choice, look at the block of lines two through seven. This is called the Properties block of the script. Currently, it will have one texture property in it called _MainTex.

If you look at your material that has this shader applied to it, you will notice that there is one texture GUI element in the Inspector tab. These lines of code in our shader are creating this GUI element for us. Again, Unity has made this process very efficient in terms of coding and the amount of time it takes to iterate through changing your properties.