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

Creating a Holographic Shader


More and more space-themed games are being released every year. An important part of a good sci-fi game is the way futuristic technology is presented and integrated in the gameplay. There's nothing that screams futuristic more than holograms. Despite being present in many flavors, holograms are often represented as semi-transparent, thin projections of an object. This recipe shows you how to create a shader that simulates such effects. Take this as a starting point: you can add noise, animated scanlines, and vibrations to create a truly outstanding holographic effect. The following image shows an example of a holographic effect:

Getting ready

As the holographic effects shows only the outlines of an object, we'll call this shader Silhouette. Attach it to a material and assign it to your 3D model.

How to do it…

The following changes will modify our existing shader into a holographic one:

  1. Add the following property to the shader:

    _DotProduct("Rim effect", Range(-1,1...