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

Modifying our shaders for mobile


Now that we have seen quite a broad set of techniques to make really optimized shaders, let's take a look at writing a nice, high-quality shader targeted for a mobile device. It is actually quite easy to make a few adjustments to the shaders we have written so that they run faster on a mobile device. This includes elements such as using the approxview or halfasview lighting function variables. We can also reduce the amount of textures we need and even apply better compression for the textures we are using. By the end of this recipe, we will have a nicely optimized normal-mapped, Specular shader for use in our mobile games.

Getting ready

Before we begin, let's get a fresh new scene and fill it with some objects to apply our Mobile shader:

  1. Create a new scene and fill it with a default sphere and single directional light.

  2. Create a new material and shader, and assign the shader to the material.

  3. Finally, assign the material to our sphere object in our scene.

When completed...