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

Profiling your shaders


Now that we know how we can reduce the overhead that our shaders might take, let's take a look at how to find problematic shaders in a scene where you might have a lot of shaders or a ton of objects, shaders, and scripts, all running at the same time. To find a single object or shader among a whole game can be quite daunting, but Unity provides us with its built-in Profiler. This allows us to actually see, on a frame-by-frame basis, what is happening in the game and each item being used by the GPU and CPU.

Using the Profiler, we can isolate items such as shaders, geometry, and general rendering items using its interface to create blocks of profiling jobs. We can filter out items till we are looking at the performance of just a single object. This then lets us see the effects on the CPU and GPU that the object has while it is performing its functions at runtime.

Let's take a look through the different sections of the Profiler and learn how to debug our scenes and, most...