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)

Implementing a Fur Shader

The look of a material depends on its physical structure. The shaders attempt to simulate them, but, in doing so, they oversimplify the way light behaves. Materials with a complex macroscopic structure are particularly hard to render. This is the case for many fabrics and animal furs. This recipe will show you how it is possible to simulate fur and other materials (such as grass) that are more than just a flat surface. In order to do this, the same material is drawn multiple times over and over, increasing in size every time. This creates the illusion of fur.

The shader presented here is based on the work of Jonathan Czeck and Aras Pranckevičius:

Getting ready

In order for this recipe to work...