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

Exploring SubShader and Pass tags

First of all, the shader tags are a list of one or more key-value pairs that allow you to custom-configure your SubShader or your Pass blocks. There are several built-in ones, and you can also define your own to then access them in your C# script using the Material.GetTag API. Most of the time, however, the predefined ones are enough.

At the time of writing this book, Unity documents list a total of eight SubShader tags. Some are very specific and rarely used, but there is one that is worth addressing: the Queue tag. It defines in which render queue a geometry with this shader will be. This is one of the key options that determines in which order this geometry will be rendered compared to the others.

To have precise control over the render order of your shaders, Unity lets you choose between two types of queue values:

  • Either you use one of the built-in queues, among Background, Geometry, Alpha Test, Transparent, and Overlay (from first...