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

Creating a URP wireframe shader

To better understand the ins and outs of these geometry shaders, let’s take a very common use case – the creation of a runtime wireframe shader. Our goal in this section will be to make the geometry of our mesh apparent live, outside of edit mode. This type of effect can be very useful for debugging, sci-fi games, or even retro-futuristic visuals à la Tron:

Figure 13.5 – An example of a wireframe shader partially applied to a spaceship model

Figure 13.5 – An example of a wireframe shader partially applied to a spaceship model

The shader will be unlit, and we will make the size of the strokes tweakable so that users can easily pick the thickness they want and modify the render to their liking. Therefore, let’s go through this shader step by step by first setting up our URP shader, then adding the geometry stage, and finally, fine-tuning a few details to get smoother visuals.

Preparing our URP wireframe shader

To begin, we’re going to create our shader as a new...