Unity 2021 Shaders and Effects Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By : John P. Doran

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!

Preface

Who this book is for

What this book covers

To get the most out of this book

Download the color images

Chapter 1: Post Processing Stack

Technical requirements

Installing the Post Processing Stack

Getting a filmic look using grain, vignetting, and depth of field

Mimicking real life with bloom and anti-aliasing

Setting the mood with color grading

Creating a horror game look with fog

Free Chapter

Chapter 2: Creating Your First Shader

Technical requirements

Creating a basic Standard Shader

Adding properties to a shader

Using properties in a Surface Shader

Chapter 3: Working with Surface Shaders

Technical requirements

Implementing diffuse shading

Accessing and modifying packed arrays

Creating a shader with normal mapping

Creating a Holographic Shader

Chapter 4: Working with Texture Mapping

Technical requirements

Adding a texture to a shader

Scrolling textures by modifying UV values

Creating a transparent material

Packing and blending textures

Creating a circle around your terrain

Chapter 5: Understanding Lighting Models

Technical requirements

Creating a custom diffuse lighting model

Creating a toon shader

Creating a Phong Specular type

Creating a Blinn-Phong Specular type

Creating an Anisotropic Specular type

Chapter 6: Physically Based Rendering

Technical requirements

Understanding the metallic setup

Adding transparency to PBR

Creating mirrors and reflective surfaces

Baking lights into your scene

Chapter 7: Vertex Functions

Technical requirements

Accessing a vertex color in a Surface Shader

Animating vertices in a Surface Shader

Extruding your models

Implementing a snow shader

Implementing a volumetric explosion

Chapter 8: Fragment Shaders and Grab Passes

Technical requirements

Understanding Vertex and Fragment Shaders

Using grab passes to draw behind objects

Implementing a Glass Shader

Implementing a Water Shader for 2D games

Chapter 9: Mobile Shader Adjustment

Technical requirements

Techniques to make shaders more efficient

Profiling your shaders

Modifying our shaders for mobile

Chapter 10: Screen Effects with Unity Render Textures

Technical requirements

Setting up a screen effects script system

Using brightness, saturation, and contrast with screen effects

Using basic Photoshop-like Blend Modes with screen effects

Using the Overlay Blend Mode with screen effects

Chapter 11: Gameplay and Screen Effects

Technical requirements

Creating an old movie screen effect

Creating a night-vision screen effect

Chapter 12: Advanced Shading Techniques

Technical requirements

Using Unity's built-in CgInclude files

Making your shader work in a modular way with CgInclude

Implementing a Fur Shader

Implementing Heatmaps with arrays

Chapter 13: Shader Graph – 2D

Technical requirement

Creating a URP-based Shader Graph project

Implementing a simple Shader Graph

Exposing properties to the Inspector via Shader Graph

Creating a Sprite Outline Shader

Chapter 14: Shader Graph – 3D

Technical requirements

Implementing a glowing highlight system

Portal Shaders in Unity

Creating custom Shader Graph functions

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Implementing a glowing highlight system

To start off, let's look at a real-world example of a shader we could potentially use. When playing certain kinds of games, you may notice that, when the player faces an object they can interact with, the object may glow, such as in Dontnod Entertainment's Life is Strange, The Fullbright Company's Gone Home, and even in recent mobile games such as Jam City's Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery. This is something that we can easily do in Shader Graph, which will also allow us to see a non-trivial example of Shader Graph being used.

Getting ready

Ensure that you have created a project using one of the scriptable render pipelines mentioned in the Creating a URP-based Shader Graph project recipe in Chapter 13, Shader Graph – 2D. For the purposes of this chapter, we will be using the HDRP, so you can select High Definition RP/3D Sample Scene (HDRP) instead of the URP options when creating the new project.

Note

In...

Unity 2021 Shaders and Effects Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By : John P. Doran

Unity 2021 Shaders and Effects Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By: John P. Doran

Overview of this book

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Implementing a glowing highlight system

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