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

Taking advantage of shader branching and shader variants

When you first started your journey in the world of shaders and you took your first steps writing vertex and fragment functions, life was easy: you wrote a single piece of code that always executed the same (see the examples shown in the Appendix: Some Quick Refreshers on Shaders in Unity, or in Chapter 1).

But now that you are getting into more advanced rendering schemes, you might want to introduce some conditional behavior into your shader code so that it executes differently under different circumstances – for example, because of one of the following reasons:

  • You want to distinguish between two target platforms and their respective graphics backends
  • You don’t want to execute expensive code such as vertex inputs or large loops
  • You want your shader to sample a different texture depending on some instance-specific data

For all those cases, you might need to add some branching logic to...