Book Image

Unity 5.x Shaders and Effects Cookbook

By : Zucconi
Book Image

Unity 5.x Shaders and Effects Cookbook

By: 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 (12 chapters)
11
Index

Diffuse shading


Before starting our journey into texture mapping, it is important to understand how diffuse materials work. Certain objects might have a uniform color and smooth surface, but not smooth enough to shine on reflected light. These matte materials are best represented with a Diffuse shader. While in the real world, pure diffuse materials do not exist; Diffuse shaders are relatively cheap to implement and find a large application in games with low-poly aesthetics.

Getting ready

There are several ways in which you can create your own Diffuse shader. A quick way is to start with the Standard Shader in Unity 5 and edit it to remove any texture, similarly to what was previously done in Chapter 1, Creating Your First Shader.

How to do it...

Let's start with our Standard Shader, and apply the following changes:

  1. Remove all the properties except _Color:

    _Color ("Color", Color) = (1,1,1,1)
  2. From the SubShader{} section, remove the _MainTex, _Glossiness, and _Metallic variables. You should not...