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 basic Standard Shader

In Unity, when we create a game object, we then attach additional functionality through the use of components. In fact, every game object is required to have a Transform component; there are a number of components included in Unity already, and we create components of our own when we write scripts that extend from MonoBehaviour.

All the objects that are part of a game contain a number of components that affect their look and behavior. While scripts determine how objects should behave, renderers decide how they should appear on the screen. Unity comes with several renderers, depending on the type of object that we are trying to visualize; every 3D model typically has a MeshRenderer component attached to it. An object should have only one renderer, but the renderer itself can contain several materials. Each material is a wrapper for a single shader...