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

Learning the art of optimizing your shaders will come up in just about any game project that you work on. There will always come a point in any production where a shader needs to be optimized, or maybe it needs to use less textures but produce the same effect. As a technical artist or shader programmer, you have to understand these core fundamentals to optimize your shaders so that you can increase the performance of your game while still achieving the same visual fidelity. Having this knowledge can also help in setting the way in which you write your shader from the start. For instance, by knowing that the game built using your shader will be played on a mobile device, we can automatically set all our lighting functions to use a half vector as the view direction or set all of our float variable types to fixed or half. These, and many other techniques, all contribute to your shaders running efficiently on your target hardware. Let's begin our journey and start learning...