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

Understanding the metallic setup


Unity 5 provides two different types of PBR shaders; they are referred to in the drop-down menu of the material's Inspector tab as Standard and Standard (Specular setup). The main difference is that the former exposes the Metallic property, while the latter replaces it with Specular. Both these metallic and specular setups represent different ways in which one can initialize PBR materials. One of the concepts that has driven PBR is the ability to provide meaningful, physically-related properties that artists and developers can tweak and play with. The properties of some materials are easier to represent indicating how metallic they are, while for some, the other is more important in order to define how they reflect lights directly. If you have used Unity 4 in the past, Standard (Specular setup) might look more familiar to you. This recipe will show you how to use the metallic setup effectively. It's important to remember that the metallic workflow is not...