Book Image

Unity 2018 Shaders and Effects Cookbook - Third Edition

By : John P. Doran, Alan Zucconi
Book Image

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.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Creating a night vision screen effect

Our next screen effect is definitely a more popular one. The night vision screen effect is seen in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Halo, and just about any first-person shooter out in the market today. It is the effect of brightening the whole image using that very distinct lime-green color.

In order to achieve our night vision effect, we need to break down our effect using Photoshop. It is a simple process of finding some reference images online and composing a layered image to see what kind of blending modes you will need or in which order we will need to combine our layers. The following screenshot shows the result of performing just this process in Photoshop:

Let's begin to break down our rough Photoshop composite image into its component parts so that we can better understand the assets we will have to gather. In the next recipe,...