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

A Little Suite of 2D Shaders

In the previous chapters, we talked about shader performance, and we took quite a meta look at how technical artists can optimize rendering in a Unity project. These are obviously crucial skills to have as an advanced shader creator, but they’re often not the most enjoyable part of the job.

Rather, a shader artist wants to create shaders, right?

Well, good news! In this chapter and the upcoming ones, we will go through little galleries of shaders and learn various techniques with a hands-on approach by studying a variety of common use cases. Ideally, these examples will serve both as references for your future projects and primers for more experimentation on your part.

And to begin with, let’s discuss 2D shaders! To do so, we’ll talk about the following topics:

  • Implementing color-swap, hue-shift, saturate, negate, and pixelate effects
  • Making 2D outlines
  • Having fun with overlay textures, dissolves, and holograms...