Book Image

Become a Unity Shaders Guru

By : Mina Pêcheux
5 (1)
Book Image

Become a Unity Shaders Guru

5 (1)
By: Mina Pêcheux

Overview of this book

Do you really know all the ins-and-outs of Unity shaders? It’s time to step up your Unity game and dive into the new URP render pipeline, the Shader Graph tool, and advanced shading techniques to bring out the beauty of your 2D/3D game projects! Become a Unity Shaders Guru is here to help you transition from the built-in render pipeline to the SRP pipelines and learn the latest shading tools. With it, you’ll dive deeper into Unity shaders by understanding the essential concepts through practical examples. First, you’ll discover how to create a simple shading model in the Unity built-in render pipeline, and then in the Unity URP render pipeline and Shader Graph while learning about the practical applications of both. You’ll explore common game shader techniques, ranging from interior mapping to adding neon outlines on a sprite or simulating the wobble of a fish. You’ll also learn about alternative rendering techniques, like Ray Marching. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned to create a wide variety of 2D and 3D shaders with Unity’s URP pipeline (both in HLSL code and with the Shader Graph tool), and be well-versed with some optimization tricks to make your games friendly for low-tier devices as well.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Part 1: Creating Shaders in Unity
3
Part 2: Stepping Up to URP and the Shader Graph
8
Part 3: Advanced Game Shaders
12
Part 4: Optimizing Your Unity Shaders
15
Part 5: The Toolbox

Generating a grid of randomized cubes

Alright – we now know what compute shaders and compute buffers are. To truly understand how they can be used in a real-life scenario, however, let’s discuss a basic example where compute shaders can greatly improve performance: the generation of a grid of randomly positioned and colored cubes.

We will first see how this simple process can be performed with a naive approach that runs on the CPU to get familiar with the problem, and then explore the limitations of this implementation. Finally, we will transfer our logic over to the GPU by using a compute shader and see how it boosts our performance.

Writing a naive C# implementation

Before diving into GPU offloading and performance enhancement, it stands to reason that we must first establish a baseline – or, in other words, a reference to compare our “improved” version against. So, first, let’s create a simple implementation of our random color...