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

Using packed arrays


Loosely speaking, the code inside a shader has to be executed for at least every pixel in your screen. This is the reason why GPUs are highly optimized for parallel computing. This philosophy is also evident in the standard type of variables and operators available in Cg. Understanding them is essential not just to use shaders correctly, but also to write highly optimized ones.

How to do it...

There are two types of variables in Cg: single values and packed arrays. The latter can be identified because their type ends with a number such as float3 or int4. As their names suggest, these types of variables are similar to structs, which means that they each contain several single values. Cg calls them packed arrays, though they are not exactly arrays in the traditional sense.

The elements of a packed array can be accessed as a normal struct. They are typically called x, y, z, and w. However, Cg also provides you with another alias for them, that is, r, g, b, and a. Despite there...