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)

Modifying our shaders for mobile

Now that we have seen quite a broad set of techniques for making really optimized shaders, let's take a look at writing a nice, high-quality shader targeted for a mobile device. It is actually quite easy to make a few adjustments to the shaders we have written so that they run faster on a mobile device. This includes elements such as using the approxview or halfasview Lighting function variables. We can also reduce the amount of textures we need and even apply better compression for the textures we are using. By the end of this recipe, we will have a nicely optimized normal-mapped, Specular Shader for use in our mobile games.

Getting ready

Before we begin, let's get a fresh new scene...