Unity 5.x Shaders and Effects Cookbook

Unity 5.x Shaders and Effects Cookbook

By : Alan Zucconi

Buy this Book

Unity 5.x Shaders and Effects Cookbook

By: Alan Zucconi

Buy this Book

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.

Unity 5.x Shaders and Effects Cookbook

Credits

About the Authors

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

Creating Your First Shader

Introduction

Creating a basic Standard Shader

Migrating Legacy Shaders from Unity 4 to Unity 5

Adding properties to a shader

Using properties in a Surface Shader

Surface Shaders and Texture Mapping

Introduction

Diffuse shading

Using packed arrays

Adding a texture to a shader

Scrolling textures by modifying UV values

Normal mapping

Creating a transparent material

Creating a Holographic Shader

Packing and blending textures

Creating a circle around your terrain

Understanding Lighting Models

Introduction

Creating a custom diffuse lighting model

Creating a Toon Shader

Creating a Phong Specular type

Creating a BlinnPhong Specular type

Creating an Anisotropic Specular type

Physically Based Rendering in Unity 5

Introduction

Understanding the metallic setup

Adding transparency to PBR

Creating mirrors and reflective surfaces

Baking lights in your scene

Vertex Functions

Introduction

Accessing a vertex color in a Surface Shader

Animating vertices in a Surface Shader

Extruding your models

Implementing a snow shader

Implementing a volumetric explosion

Fragment Shaders and Grab Passes

Introduction

Understanding Vertex and Fragment Shaders

Using grab pass

Implementing a Glass Shader

Implementing a Water Shader for 2D games

Mobile Shader Adjustment

Introduction

What is a cheap shader?

Profiling your shaders

Modifying our shaders for mobile

Screen Effects with Unity Render Textures

Introduction

Setting up the screen effects script system

Using brightness, saturation, and contrast with screen effects

Using basic Photoshop-like Blend modes with screen effects

Using the Overlay Blend mode with screen effects

Gameplay and Screen Effects

Introduction

Creating an old movie screen effect

Creating a night vision screen effect

Advanced Shading Techniques

Introduction

Using CgInclude files that are built into Unity

Making your shader world modular with CgInclude

Implementing a Fur Shader

Implementing heatmaps with arrays

Index

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Implementing heatmaps with arrays

One characteristic that makes shaders hard to master is the lack of a proper documentation. Most developers learn shaders by messing up with the code, without having a deep knowledge of what's going on. The problem is amplified by the fact that Cg/HLSL makes a lot of assumptions, some of which are not properly advertised. Unity3D allows C# scripts to communicate with shaders using methods such as SetFloat, SetInt, SetVector, and so on. Unfortunately, Unity3D doesn't have a SetArray method, which led many developers to believe that Cg/HLSL doesn't support arrays either. This is not true. This post will show you how it's possible to pass arrays to shaders. Just remember that GPUs are highly optimized for parallel computations, and using for loops in a shader will dramatically drop its performance.

For this recipe, we will implement a heatmap, as shown in the following image:

Getting ready

The effect in this recipe creates a heatmap from a set of points. This...

Unity 5.x Shaders and Effects Cookbook

By : Alan Zucconi

Unity 5.x Shaders and Effects Cookbook

By: Alan Zucconi

Overview of this book

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Unity 5.x Shaders and Effects Cookbook

Implementing heatmaps with arrays

Getting ready