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

Accessing a vertex color in a Surface Shader


Let's begin this chapter by taking a look at how we can access the information of a model's vertex using the vertex function in a Surface Shader. This will arm us with the knowledge to start utilizing the elements contained within a model's vertex to create really useful and visually appealing effects.

A vertex in a vertex function can return information about itself that we need to be aware of. You can actually retrieve the vertices' normal directions as a float3 value, the position of the vertex as float3, and you can even store color values in each vertex and return that color as float4. This is what we will take a look at in this recipe. We need to see how to store color information and retrieve this stored color information inside each vertex of a Surface Shader.

Getting ready

In order to write this shader, we need to prepare a few assets. The following steps will set us up to create this Vertex Shader:

  1. In order to view the colors of a vertex...