Introducing Shaders
We created Materials in the previous chapter, but we never discussed how they internally work and why the Shader property is super important. In this first section of the chapter, we will be exploring the concept of a Shader as a way to program the video card to achieve custom visual effects.
In this section, we will cover the following concepts related to Shaders:
- Shader Pipeline
- Render Pipeline and URP
- URP Built-in Shaders
Let's start by discussing how a Shader modifies the Shader Pipeline to achieve effects.
Shader Pipeline
Whenever a video card renders a 3D model, it needs input data to process, such as a Mesh, Textures, the transform of the object (position, rotation, and scale), and lights that affect that object. With that data, the video card must output the pixels of the object into the Back-Buffer, the image where the video card will be drawing our objects. That image will be shown when Unity finishes rendering all...