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 BlinnPhong Specular type

Blinn is another more efficient way of calculating and estimating specularity. It is done by getting the half vector from the view direction and light direction. It was brought into the world of Cg by Jim Blinn. He found that it was much more efficient to just get the half vector instead of calculating our own reflection vectors. It cut down on the code and processing time. If you actually look at the built-in BlinnPhong lighting model included in the UnityCG.cginc file, you will notice that it is using the half vector as well, hence it is named BlinnPhong. It is just a simpler version of the full Phong calculation.

Getting ready

To start with this recipe, perform the following steps:

  1. This...