Book Image

Unity 5.x Shaders and Effects Cookbook

By : Alan Zucconi
Book Image

Unity 5.x Shaders and Effects Cookbook

By: Alan Zucconi

Overview of this book

Since their introduction to Unity, Shaders have been notoriously difficult to understand and implement in games: complex mathematics have always stood in the way of creating your own Shaders and attaining that level of realism you crave. With Shaders, you can transform your game into a highly polished, refined product with Unity’s post-processing effects. Unity Shaders and Effects Cookbook is the first of its kind to bring you the secrets of creating Shaders for Unity3D—guiding you through the process of understanding vectors, how lighting is constructed with them, and also how textures are used to create complex effects without the heavy math. We’ll start with essential lighting and finishing up by creating stunning screen Effects just like those in high quality 3D and mobile games. You’ll discover techniques including normal mapping, image-based lighting, and how to animate your models inside a Shader. We’ll explore the secrets behind some of the most powerful techniques, such as physically based rendering! With Unity Shaders and Effects Cookbook, what seems like a dark art today will be second nature by tomorrow.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Unity 5.x Shaders and Effects Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Setting up the screen effects script system


The process of creating screen effects is one in which we grab a fullscreen image (or texture), use a shader to process its pixels on the GPU, and then send it back to Unity's renderer to apply it to the whole rendered image of the game. This allows us to perform per-pixel operations on the rendered image of the game in real time, giving us a more global artistic control.

Imagine if you had to go through and adjust each material on each object in your game to just adjust the contrast of the final look of your game. While not impossible, this would take a bit of labor to perform. By utilizing a screen effect, we can adjust the screen's final look as a whole, thereby giving us a more Photoshop-like control over our game's final appearance.

In order to get a Screen effect system up and running, we have to set up a single script to act as the courier of the game's current rendered image or, what Unity calls, the Render Texture. By utilizing this script...