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

Animating fishes and butterflies

To kick things off, let’s discuss a very common application of vertex displacement – the creation of a simple movement animation for a fish or a butterfly.

To do this, we’ll first learn the basics of creating vertex displacement in the Shader Graph; then, we’ll focus on the fish animation and see how to introduce time in the mix. Finally, we’ll reapply these concepts to our butterfly model and adapt the previous logic to create a wing-flapping movement.

Moving fishes thanks to a vertex displacement shader

Our goal will be to use a shader to automatically have our fishes wobble in the water, like this:

Figure 12.1 – A school of fishes deformed and animated thanks to vertex displacement shaders

Figure 12.1 – A school of fishes deformed and animated thanks to vertex displacement shaders

First things first, we need to create our FishWobbling shader and learn how to do vertex displacement. Because we’re working on 3D models, this time, we’ll use the Lit...