Book Image

Unity 5.x Shaders and Effects Cookbook

By : Alan Zucconi
Book Image

Unity 5.x Shaders and Effects Cookbook

By: Alan Zucconi

Overview of this book

Since their introduction to Unity, Shaders have been notoriously difficult to understand and implement in games: complex mathematics have always stood in the way of creating your own Shaders and attaining that level of realism you crave. With Shaders, you can transform your game into a highly polished, refined product with Unity’s post-processing effects. Unity Shaders and Effects Cookbook is the first of its kind to bring you the secrets of creating Shaders for Unity3D—guiding you through the process of understanding vectors, how lighting is constructed with them, and also how textures are used to create complex effects without the heavy math. We’ll start with essential lighting and finishing up by creating stunning screen Effects just like those in high quality 3D and mobile games. You’ll discover techniques including normal mapping, image-based lighting, and how to animate your models inside a Shader. We’ll explore the secrets behind some of the most powerful techniques, such as physically based rendering! With Unity Shaders and Effects Cookbook, what seems like a dark art today will be second nature by tomorrow.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Unity 5.x Shaders and Effects Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using CgInclude files that are built into Unity


Our first step in writing our own CgInclude files is to understand what Unity is already providing us with for shaders. By writing Surface Shaders, there is a lot happening under the hood, which makes the process of writing Surface Shaders so efficient. We can see this code in the included CgInclude files found in your Unity install folder at Editor | Data | CGIncludes. All the files contained within this folder do their part to render our objects with our shaders to the screen. Some of these files take care of shadows and lighting, some take care of helper functions, and some manage platform dependencies. Without them, our shader writing experience would be much more laborious.

You can find a list of information that Unity has provided us with at the following link: http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Components/SL-BuiltinIncludes.html

Let's begin the process of understanding these built-in CgInclude files, using some of the built-in helper...