Book Image

Unity 2018 Shaders and Effects Cookbook - Third Edition

By : John P. Doran, Alan Zucconi
Book Image

Unity 2018 Shaders and Effects Cookbook - Third Edition

By: John P. Doran, Alan Zucconi

Overview of this book

Since their introduction to Unity, shaders have been seen as notoriously difficult to understand and implement in games. Complex mathematics has always stood in the way of creating your own shaders and attaining the level of realism you crave. Unity 2018 Shaders and Effects Cookbook changes that by giving you a recipe-based guide to creating shaders using Unity. It will show you everything you need to know about vectors, how lighting is constructed with them, and how textures are used to create complex effects without the heavy math. This book starts by teaching you how to use shaders without writing code with the post-processing stack. Then, you’ll learn how to write shaders from scratch, build up essential lighting, and finish by creating stunning screen effects just like those in high-quality 3D and mobile games. You'll discover techniques, such as normal mapping, image-based lighting, and animating your models inside a shader. We'll explore how to use physically based rendering to treat light the way it behaves in the real world. At the end, we’ll even look at Unity 2018’s new Shader Graph system. With this book, what seems like a dark art today will be second nature by tomorrow.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Using Unity's built-in CgInclude files

Our first step in writing our own CgInclude files is to understand what Unity is already providing with us for shaders. When writing Surface Shaders, there is a lot happening under the hood, which makes the process of writing Surface Shaders so efficient. We can see this code in the included CgInclude files found in the directory that you installed Unity in at Editor | Data | CGIncludes. All the files contained within this folder do their part to render our objects with our shaders on the screen. Some of these files take care of shadows and lighting, some take care of helper functions, and some manage platform dependencies. Without them, our shader-writing experience would be much more laborious.

You can find a list of the information that Unity has provided us with at the following link:
http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Components...