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

Discovering Unity PBR-related tooling

Nowadays, many video games aim for renders that are as realistic as possible, and the PBR, or PBS, has become a new standard. It is, therefore, an important technique to master for modern technical artists, so let’s see how to apply it in Unity when using the URP pipeline.

In the following sections, we will have a quick glance at the shader keywords and variants that are required to make our shader lit. Then, we will have a quick look at the important tooling the URP provides us with for PBR, set up our shader keywords, and finally, introduce the four data structures our shader will use.

A quick overview of shader keywords and variants

So, before we actually dive into adding lighting to a URP shader and turning it into a lit PBS shader, we need to have a quick look at the notion of shader keywords and shader variants. We will not go into a fully detailed explanation here because we will have another in-depth run at those concepts...