Unity 2018 Shaders and Effects Cookbook - Third Edition

By : John P. Doran, Alan Zucconi

Unity 2018 Shaders and Effects Cookbook - Third Edition

By: John P. Doran, Alan Zucconi

Overview of this book

Since their introduction to Unity, shaders have been seen as notoriously difficult to understand and implement in games. Complex mathematics has always stood in the way of creating your own shaders and attaining the level of realism you crave. Unity 2018 Shaders and Effects Cookbook changes that by giving you a recipe-based guide to creating shaders using Unity. It will show you everything you need to know about vectors, how lighting is constructed with them, and how textures are used to create complex effects without the heavy math. This book starts by teaching you how to use shaders without writing code with the post-processing stack. Then, you’ll learn how to write shaders from scratch, build up essential lighting, and finish by creating stunning screen effects just like those in high-quality 3D and mobile games. You'll discover techniques, such as normal mapping, image-based lighting, and animating your models inside a shader. We'll explore how to use physically based rendering to treat light the way it behaves in the real world. At the end, we’ll even look at Unity 2018’s new Shader Graph system. With this book, what seems like a dark art today will be second nature by tomorrow.

Preface

Who this book is for

What this book covers

To get the most out of this book

Sections

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Free Chapter

Post Processing Stack

Introduction

Installing the Post Processing Stack

Getting a filmic look using grain, vignetting, and depth of field

Mimicking real life with bloom and anti-aliasing

Setting mood with color grading

Creating a horror game look with fog

Creating Your First Shader

Introduction

Creating a basic Standard Shader

Adding properties to a shader

Using properties in a Surface Shader

Surface Shaders and Texture Mapping

Introduction

Diffuse shading

Accessing and modifying packed arrays

Adding a texture to a shader

Scrolling textures by modifying UV values

Creating a shader with normal mapping

Creating a transparent material

Creating a Holographic Shader

Packing and blending textures

Creating a circle around your terrain

Understanding Lighting Models

Introduction

Creating a custom diffuse lighting model

Creating a toon shader

Creating a Phong Specular type

Creating a BlinnPhong Specular type

Creating an Anisotropic Specular type

Physically-Based Rendering

Introduction

Understanding the metallic setup

Adding transparency to PBR

Creating mirrors and reflective surfaces

Baking lights in your scene

Vertex Functions

Introduction

Accessing a vertex color in a Surface Shader

Animating vertices in a Surface Shader

Extruding your models

Implementing a snow shader

Implementing a volumetric explosion

Fragment Shaders and Grab Passes

Introduction

Understanding Vertex and Fragment Shaders

Using the grab pass to draw behind objects

Implementing a Glass Shader

Implementing a Water Shader for 2D games

Mobile Shader Adjustment

Introduction

Techniques to make shaders more efficient

Profiling your shaders

Modifying our shaders for mobile

Screen Effects with Unity Render Textures

Introduction

Setting up the screen effects script system

Using brightness, saturation, and contrast with screen effects

Using basic Photoshop-like Blend modes with screen effects

Using the Overlay Blend mode with screen effects

Gameplay and Screen Effects

Introduction

Creating an old movie screen effect

Creating a night vision screen effect

Advanced Shading Techniques

Introduction

Using Unity's built-in CgInclude files

Making your shader world in a modular way with CgInclude

Implementing a Fur Shader

Implementing Heatmaps with arrays

Shader Graph

Introduction

Creating a Shader Graph project

Implementing a simple a Shader Graph

Exposing properties to the Inspector via Shader Graph

Implementing a glowing highlight system

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Creating a horror game look with fog

One of the types of games that best utilize the features of the Post Processing Stack is the horror genre. Using things such as depth of field to hide scary objects, as well as static to make the screen more menacing, can really help set your game firmly in the right place and provide the mood you are going for.

Getting ready

Make sure you have completed the Installing the Post Processing Stack recipe before starting this one.

How to do it...

We first create a new Post Processing Profile by right-clicking within the Assets folder in the Project window and then selecting Create | Post Processing Profile. Once selected, it will allow us to rename the item. Go ahead and set the name to HorrorProfile.
Select the Post-process volume object and, from the Inspector window, go to the Post Processing Volume component and assign the Profile property to the HorrorProflie we just created.
Unlike previous settings, though, the fog settings are located in the Lighting window, which can be accessed by going into Window | Lighting.
From there, scroll all the way to the bottom until you reach the Other Settings option. Once there, check Fog and set the color to a value that is close to the skybox. I used the following settings:

If you know the hex values of the color from your graphic editing software you can just type it in the Hex Color property of the Color window.

Next, change the Mode to Exponential and the Density to 0.03:

As you can see, it's already much more spooky that it was previously, but there are still more options that we can change.

Open up the HorrorProfile again and go to the Inspector tab. Press the Add effect... button and select Unity | Ambient Occlusion. Check the Mode option and select Scalable Ambient Obscurance. Afterward, change the Intensity to 2 and the Radius to 20:

Lastly, lighting often has a big effect on the theme of a scene as well. If you're using the example map, select the Directional Light object in the Hierarchy tab and, from the Inspector tab under the Light component, change the Intensity to 0.5 and then adjust the Color to something darker. (I used the same color as in step 4 with a HEX of 5F7684FF.)

Save your game and then start it to see the effect of all of the changes:

The final result of our horror look

How it works...

The Ambient Occlusion option will calculate areas that should have additional shadows. Since our scene is filled with trees, this will make the undersides much darker than they were previously.

For more information on the Ambient Occlusion effect, check out: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/PostProcessing/wiki/Ambient-Occlusion. If you are interested in looking into the other options that the Post Processing stack has, check out: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/PostProcessing/wiki.

Unity 2018 Shaders and Effects Cookbook - Third Edition

By : John P. Doran, Alan Zucconi

Unity 2018 Shaders and Effects Cookbook - Third Edition

By: John P. Doran, Alan Zucconi

Overview of this book

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