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)

Understanding Vertex and Fragment Shaders

The best way to understand how Vertex and Fragment Shaders work is by creating one yourself. This recipe will show you how to write one of these shaders, which will simply apply a texture to a model and multiply it by a given color, as shown in the following screenshot:

Notice how it works similarly to how the Multiply filter in Photoshop works. That's because we will be doing the same calculation done there!

The shader presented here is very simple, and it will be used as a starting base for all the other Vertex and Fragment Shaders.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we will need a new shader. Follow these steps:

  1. Create a new shader (Multiply).
  2. Create a new material (MultiplyMat...