My posts have been about hardware up to this point, so I'm going to discuss some in-game stuff instead! Which of course means SHADERS!

I've been messing around a lot with Unity's Shader Graph system for a while now, and it really makes creating shaders a much more pleasing and reactionary experience. I've been following a lot of Minions Art's tutorials on both standard shaders and graphs, both of which are very thorough but simple in their explanation. The specific tutorial I utilized is the shader graph conversion of their "Appear/Dissappear/Texture Swap Shader".  I'll save posting any screenshots of my version as it is essentially the same, but utilized in a different way.

For my use-case, it is used for transitioning between Unity Scenes, filling the shot with black then fading back in. My challenge was ensuring the texture would work and be consistent no matter where the camera is. My first inclination was to just toss the object into the Canvas of the UI, but I encountered a problem. By default, the canvas Render Mode is set to "Screen Space - Overlay" which cannot render 3d objects within the canvas. The shader is designed for 3D, and doesn't translate easily to UI shaders. One option was to change the Render Mode to "Screen Space - Camera", but this resulted in several UI elements breaking. 

My solution was to create a second camera far off in the distance that only visualizes the transition shader object, placing a render texture inside the first canvas, and targeting the second camera's output to that render texture. And voila! It works! 

Secondary Camera with its own Screen Space - Camera canvas.

Primary Camera in Screen Space - Overlay and a Raw Image Render Texture.