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 a series of simple 2D shaders and effects.

We first discussed how to use Unity’s built-in Shader Graph Nodes to easily tweak the colors of a sprite globally, for example by changing the hue or saturation. We then saw why color-swapping can be useful and how we can implement it via the Shader Graph editor or HLSL code before talking about dynamic pixelation for quick pixel-art approximation.

After that, we focused on 2D outlines and gradually built several shaders that implemented more and more complex effects, starting from a simple pixel-perfect stroke up to an animated emissive contour. We also took this opportunity to have a look at post-processing in URP and how we can use the built-in tools of the render pipeline to add a Bloom effect and make our HDR emissive colors glow in the scene.

Finally, we worked on a few shader utilities that could be used directly in a video game to show a specific character state with a texture overlay...