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

Technical requirements

To try out the shader examples shown in this chapter, you should install Unity with a version from 2021 or later and make a project using the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) pipeline.

In all the demos of this chapter, I will use the following three images:

All these images are PNG images with a transparent background. They are used as sprites in a Sprite Renderer component placed on a simple empty Unity game object in the scene, like this:

Figure 11.1 – Object setup with a 2D Sprite Renderer component and the sample dwarf image

Figure 11.1 – Object setup with a 2D Sprite Renderer component and the sample dwarf image

You can check out how the scene is organized and find all the Shader Graph Assets for this chapter, as well as the demo images and textures in the GitHub of the book at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Become-a-Unity-Shaders...