Chapter 1, Creating Your First Shader, introduces you to the world of shader coding in Unity 4 and 5.

Chapter 2, Surface Shaders and Texture Mapping, covers the most common and useful techniques that you can implement with Surface Shaders, including how to use textures and normal maps for your models.

Chapter 3, Understanding Lighting Models, gives you an in-depth explanation of how shaders model the behavior of light. The chapter teaches you how to create custom lighting models used to simulate special effects such as toon shading.

Chapter 4, Physically Based Rendering in Unity 5, shows you that physically-based rendering is the standard technology used by Unity 5 to bring realism to your games. This chapter explains how to make the most out of it, mastering transparencies, reflective surfaces, and global illumination.

Chapter 5, Vertex Functions, teaches you how shaders can be used to alter the geometry of an object; this chapter introduces vertex modifiers and uses them to bring volumetric explosions, snow shaders, and other effects to life.

Chapter 6, Fragment Shaders and Grab Passes, explains how to use grab passes to make materials that emulate the deformations generated by these semi-transparent materials.

Chapter 7, Mobile Shader Adjustment, helps you optimize your shaders to get the most out of any devices.

Chapter 8, Screen Effects with Unity Render Textures, shows you how to create special effects and visuals that would otherwise be impossible to achieve.

Chapter 9, Gameplay and Screen Effects, tells you how post-processing effects can be used to complement your gameplay, simulating, for instance, a night vision effect.

Chapter 10, Advanced Shading Techniques, introduces the most advanced techniques in this book, such as fur shading and heatmap rendering.

The following is a list of the required and optional software to complete the recipes in this book:

This book is written for developers who want to create their first shaders in Unity 5 or wish to take their game to a whole new level by adding professional post-processing effects. A solid understanding of Unity is required.

In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it, How it works, There's more, and See also).

To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Enter the following code into the Properties block of your shader."

A block of code is set as follows:

void surf (Input IN, inout SurfaceOutput o)
{
  float4 c;
  c = pow((_EmissiveColor + _AmbientColor), _MySliderValue);
  o.Albedo = c.rgb;
  o.Alpha = c.a;
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

void surf (Input IN, inout SurfaceOutputStandard o) {
  fixed4 c = pow((_Color + _AmbientColor), _MySliderValue);
  o.Albedo = c.rgb;
  o.Metallic = _Metallic;
  o.Smoothness = _Glossiness;
  o.Alpha = c.a;
}

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "In the Project tab in your Unity editor, right-click on the Assets folder and select Create | Folder."

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