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 discussed the fundamentals of programming shaders with Unity’s new URP.

We studied the evolutions of ShaderLab and low-level hardware shader logic syntax between the built-in render pipeline and our new setup, and in particular, we zoomed into some common macro translations that are worth mentioning. We also got an overview of the frequently used tags to help the Unity engine handle cross-platform shaders that contain multiple SubShader and/or Pass tags.

Finally, we applied the theory to a simple example and implemented an unlit URP shader with two properties: a base color and a main texture. We also took this opportunity to look at the material inspector and how, with the new SRPs, it now provides us with some interesting extra options that are material-specific.

This concludes our first look at how to program HLSL-based shaders for the Unity URP – we now have a good idea of how these scripts are structured and how this structure...