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)

Diffuse shading

Before starting our journey into texture mapping, it is important to understand how diffuse materials work. Certain objects might have a uniform color and smooth surface, but are not smooth enough to shine in reflected light. These matte materials are best represented with a Diffuse Shader. While, in the real world pure diffuse materials do not exist, Diffuse Shaders are relatively cheap to implement and are largely applied in games with low-poly aesthetics, so they're worth learning about.

There are several ways in which you can create your own Diffuse Shader. A quick way is to start with Unity's Standard Surface Shader and edit it to remove any additional texture information.

Getting ready

Before...