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

Summary

In this chapter, we explored the technique of ray marching and discovered how to apply it to the rendering of simple shapes or more advanced effects, such as clouds.

We first talked about the theory behind ray marching and focused on the importance of SDFs for defining arbitrarily complex surfaces.

Then, we saw how to implement a basic ray marching algorithm in Unity to render either a sphere or several random shapes. We also took this opportunity to reuse the compute shaders we introduced in Chapter 7, and we discussed how this technique allows us to create an infinity of procedural scenes quickly and easily.

Finally, we dived into a famous application of ray marching: the rendering of volumetrics such as clouds. We made our own skybox shader that creates a blue sky filled with clouds and used ray marching to give the clouds more volume. We then simulated light absorption and transmittance using color gradients and clever visual tricks.

This concludes our overview...