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)

Creating a Shader Graph project

Unlike all of the previous shaders we have written, the Shader Graph tool requires users to have a project that is using the Lightweight Render Pipeline. The Lightweight Render Pipeline is meant for lower-end hardware, and is focused on drawing with a single-pass and decreasing the draw count wherever possible. For this first recipe, you will ensure that your project is set up correctly, by using the settings that Shader Graph needs.

How to do it...

To get started, we first need to create our new project:

  1. From the Unity Hub, when creating a new project, set the Template to Lightweight RP (Preview):

Shader Graph is currently only compatible with the Lightweight Render Pipeline, so this ensures...