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 circle around your terrain

Many RTS games display distances (range attack, moving distance, sight, and so on) by drawing a circle around the selected unit. If the terrain is flat, this can be done simply by stretching a quad with the texture of a circle. If that's not the case, the quad will most likely be clipped behind a hill or another piece of geometry. This recipe will show you how to create a shader that allows you to draw circles around an object of arbitrary complexity. If you want to be able to move or animate your circle, we will need both a shader and C# script.

The following screenshot shows an example of drawing a circle in a hilly region using a shader:

Getting ready

Despite working with every...