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

Introduction

All the lighting models encountered in Chapter 3, Understanding Lighting Models, were very primitive descriptions of how light behaves. The most important aspect during their making was efficiency. Real-time shading is expensive, and techniques such as Lambertian or BlinnPhong are a compromise between computational cost and realism. Having a more powerful graphics processing unit (GPU) has allowed us to write progressively more sophisticated lighting models and rendering engines, with the aim of simulating how light actually behaves. This is, in a nutshell, the philosophy behind PBR. As the name suggests, it tries to get as close as possible to the physics behind the processes that give a unique look to each material. Despite this, the term PBR has been widely used in marketing campaigns and is more of a synonym for state-of-the-art rendering rather than a well-defined technique. Unity 5 implements PBR by introducing two important changes. The first is a completely new lighting...