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.

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Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Preface
Preface
Who this book is for
What this book covers
To get the most out of this book
Sections
Get in touch
Free Chapter
1
Post Processing Stack
Post Processing Stack
Introduction
Installing the Post Processing Stack
Getting a filmic look using grain, vignetting, and depth of field
Mimicking real life with bloom and anti-aliasing
Setting mood with color grading
Creating a horror game look with fog
2
Creating Your First Shader
Creating Your First Shader
Introduction
Creating a basic Standard Shader
Adding properties to a shader
Using properties in a Surface Shader
3
Surface Shaders and Texture Mapping
Surface Shaders and Texture Mapping
Introduction
Diffuse shading
Accessing and modifying packed arrays
Adding a texture to a shader
Scrolling textures by modifying UV values
Creating a shader with normal mapping
Creating a transparent material
Creating a Holographic Shader
Packing and blending textures
Creating a circle around your terrain
4
Understanding Lighting Models
Understanding Lighting Models
Introduction
Creating a custom diffuse lighting model
Creating a toon shader
Creating a Phong Specular type
Creating a BlinnPhong Specular type
Creating an Anisotropic Specular type
5
Physically-Based Rendering
Physically-Based Rendering
Introduction
Understanding the metallic setup
Adding transparency to PBR
Creating mirrors and reflective surfaces
Baking lights in your scene
6
Vertex Functions
Vertex Functions
Introduction
Accessing a vertex color in a Surface Shader
Animating vertices in a Surface Shader
Extruding your models
Implementing a snow shader
Implementing a volumetric explosion
7
Fragment Shaders and Grab Passes
Fragment Shaders and Grab Passes
Introduction
Understanding Vertex and Fragment Shaders
Using the grab pass to draw behind objects
Implementing a Glass Shader
Implementing a Water Shader for 2D games
8
Mobile Shader Adjustment
Mobile Shader Adjustment
Introduction
Techniques to make shaders more efficient
Profiling your shaders
Modifying our shaders for mobile
9
Screen Effects with Unity Render Textures
Screen Effects with Unity Render Textures
Introduction
Setting up the screen effects script system
Using brightness, saturation, and contrast with screen effects
Using basic Photoshop-like Blend modes with screen effects
Using the Overlay Blend mode with screen effects
10
Gameplay and Screen Effects
Gameplay and Screen Effects
Introduction
Creating an old movie screen effect
Creating a night vision screen effect
11
Advanced Shading Techniques
Advanced Shading Techniques
Introduction
Using Unity's built-in CgInclude files
Making your shader world in a modular way with CgInclude
Implementing a Fur Shader
Implementing Heatmaps with arrays
12
Shader Graph
Shader Graph
Introduction
Creating a Shader Graph project
Implementing a simple a Shader Graph
Exposing properties to the Inspector via Shader Graph
Implementing a glowing highlight system
13
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Packing and blending textures

Textures are useful for storing not only loads of data, not just pixel colors as we generally tend to think of them, but also for multiple sets of pixels in both the x and y directions and RGBA channels. We can actually pack multiple images into a single RGBA texture and use each of the R, G, B, and A components as individual textures themselves by extracting each of these components from the shader code.

The result of packing individual grayscale images into a single RGBA texture can be seen in the following screenshot:

Why is this helpful? Well, in terms of the amount of actual memory that your application takes up, textures are a large portion of your application's size. We can, of course, reduce the size of the image, but then we would lose details in how it can be represented. So, to begin reducing the size of your application, we can look...

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