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

Adding transparency to PBR


Transparency is such an important aspect in games that the Standard Shader supports three different ways of doing it. This recipe is useful if you need to have realistic materials with transparent or semi-transparent properties. Glasses, bottles, windows, and crystals are good candidates for PBR transparent shaders. This is because you can still have all the realism introduced by PBR with the addition of a transparent or translucent effect. If you need transparency for something different such as UI elements or pixel art, there are more efficient alternatives that are explored in the Creating a transparent material recipe in Chapter 2, Surface Shaders and Texture Mapping.

Note

In order to have a transparent Standard material, changing the alpha channel of its Albedo color property is not enough. Unless you properly set its Rendering Mode, your material will not appear transparent.

Getting ready

This recipe will use the Standard Shader, so there is no need to create...