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)

Introduction

First released in Unity 2018.1, Shader Graph allows you to create shaders using a visual interface by connecting nodes instead of having to dive into the code. This will allow developers, including artists, to be able to create shaders in a similar manner to material editors in 3D modeling programs such as Autodesk Maya and Blender, or the material editor in the Unreal Engine. At the time of writing, Shader Graph is only supported for certain kinds of projects and doesn't allow the same flexibility as writing the shaders from scratch.