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 the Shader Graph with a Toon Shader

Up until now, in this book, we have focused on shaders written with code. We first saw the legacy way of using Cg for the built-in render pipeline, and we then explored the more recent HLSL-based shader scripting for the new URP.

This knowledge of what goes on under the hood is fundamental if you wish to really make advanced and optimized shaders. However, with the introduction of the Shader Graph tool in the SRP pipelines, non-developers have now started to take a look at shader creation too, and many have joined the community of technical artists to share their own amazing visuals.

So, in this chapter, we are going to explore this second route and discuss the basics of using the Shader Graph by working on a frequent indie aesthetic: toon-shading!

We will do so by covering the following topics:

  • What is the Shader Graph?
  • Learning the essentials of Shader Graph
  • Improving our toon shader