Book Image

Unity 2021 Shaders and Effects Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By : John P. Doran
Book Image

Unity 2021 Shaders and Effects Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By: John P. Doran

Overview of this book

Shaders enable you to create powerful visuals for your game projects. However, creating shaders for your games can be notoriously challenging with various factors such as complex mathematics standing in the way of attaining the level of realism you crave for your shaders. The Unity 2021 Shaders and Effects Cookbook helps you overcome that with a recipe-based approach to creating shaders using Unity. This fourth edition is updated and enhanced using Unity 2021 features and tools covering Unity's new way of creating particle effects with the VFX Graph. You'll learn how to use VFX Graph for advanced shader development. The book also features updated recipes for using Shader Graph to create 2D and 3D elements. You'll cover everything you need to know about vectors, how they can be used to construct lighting, and how to use textures to create complex effects without the heavy math. You'll also understand how to use the visual-based Shader Graph for creating shaders without any code. By the end of this Unity book, you'll have developed a set of shaders that you can use in your Unity 3D games and be able to accomplish new effects and address the performance needs of your Unity game development projects. So, let's get started!
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Implementing a simple Shader Graph

To get acquainted with the interface of Shader Graph, let's create something similar to what we have seen before by sampling a texture to create a simple shader.

Getting ready

Ensure that you have created a project using the URP, as described in the Creating a URP-based Shader Graph project recipe. Afterward, complete the following steps:

  1. Create a new scene, if you haven't done so already, by going to File | New Scene.
  2. Afterward, we need to have something to show our shader, so let's create a new sphere by going to GameObject | 3D Object | Sphere:

Figure 13.6 – The setup for this recipe

How to do it...

We will start off by creating a simple shader graph:

  1. From the Project window, create a new shader by going to Create | Shader | Universal Render Pipeline | Lit Shader Graph, and name it SimpleGraph. For organization, I placed the graph within a new folder (Chapter 13/Shaders...