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

Chapter 3. Understanding Lighting Models

In the previous chapters, we introduced Surface Shaders and explained how we can change physical properties (such as Albedo and Specular) to simulate different materials. How does this really work? At the heart of every Surface Shader, there is its lighting model. It's the function that takes these properties and calculates the final shade of each pixel. Unity usually hides this from the developers because in order to write a lighting model, you have to understand how light reflects and refracts onto surfaces. This chapter will finally show you how lighting models work and give you the basics to create your own.

In this chapter, you will learn the following recipes:

  • 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