Book Image

Unity 2021 Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By : Shaun Ferns
Book Image

Unity 2021 Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By: Shaun Ferns

Overview of this book

If you are a Unity developer looking to explore the newest features of Unity 2021 and recipes for advanced challenges, then this fourth edition of Unity Cookbook is here to help you. With this cookbook, you’ll work through a wide variety of recipes that will help you use the essential features of the Unity game engine to their fullest potential. You familiarize yourself with shaders and Shader Graph before exploring animation features to enhance your skills in building games. As you progress, you will gain insights into Unity's latest editor, which will help you in laying out scenes, tweaking existing apps, and building custom tools for augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) experiences. The book will also guide you through many Unity C# gameplay scripting techniques, teaching you how to communicate with database-driven websites and process XML and JSON data files. By the end of this Unity book, you will have gained a comprehensive understanding of Unity game development and built your development skills. The easy-to-follow recipes will earn a permanent place on your bookshelf for reference and help you build better games that stay true to your vision.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Free Chapter
2
Responding to User Events for Interactive UIs
3
Inventory and Advanced UIs
6
2D Animation and Physics
13
Advanced Topics - Gizmos, Automated Testing, and More
15
Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR)
Shader Graphs and Video Players

Two powerful features of Unity are the Video Player API and the Shader Graph tool. Between them, they offer easier and more configurable ways to work with visual content in games. For example, they help with loading and playing videos on different visible objects, and they also provide a comprehensive way for non-shader programmers to construct sophisticated shader transformations using a visual graphing approach. This chapter explores Unity Shader Graphs and Video Player components. 

The Shader Graph tool

Shader Graph is a tool that allows us to visually build shaders by creating and connecting the inputs and output of nodes. 

Some great Shader Graph features include the following:

  • An instant, visual preview of each node in the graph is provided so that you can see how different nodes are contributing to the final Master output...