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)

Using the Overlay Blend mode with screen effects

For our final recipe, we are going to take a look at another type of blend mode, the Overlay Blend mode. This blend mode actually makes use of some conditional statements that determine the final color of each pixel in each channel. So, the process of using this type of blend mode requires a bit more coding to work. Let's take a look at how this is done in the next few recipes.

How to do it...

To begin our Overlay Screen effect, we will need to get the code of our shader up and running without errors. We can then modify our script file to feed the correct data to the shader:

  1. Create a new shader by duplicating the ScreenGreyscale code and selecting it from the Project tab...