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

Introduction


Surface Shaders have been introduced in Chapter 1, Creating Your First Shader, as the main type of shader used in Unity. This chapter will show in detail what these actually are and how they work. Generally speaking, there are two essential steps in every Surface Shader. First, you have to specify certain physical properties of the material that you want to describe, such as its diffuse color, smoothness, and transparency. These properties are initialized in a function called surface function and stored in a structure called surface output. Secondly, the surface output is passed to a lighting model. This is a special function that will also take information about the nearby lights in the scene. Both these parameters are then used to calculate the final color for each pixel of your model. The lighting function is where the real calculations of a shader take place as it's the piece of code that determines how light should behave when it touches a material.

The following diagram...