Book Image

Unity 2021 Shaders and Effects Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By : John P. Doran
Book Image

Unity 2021 Shaders and Effects Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By: John P. Doran

Overview of this book

Shaders enable you to create powerful visuals for your game projects. However, creating shaders for your games can be notoriously challenging with various factors such as complex mathematics standing in the way of attaining the level of realism you crave for your shaders. The Unity 2021 Shaders and Effects Cookbook helps you overcome that with a recipe-based approach to creating shaders using Unity. This fourth edition is updated and enhanced using Unity 2021 features and tools covering Unity's new way of creating particle effects with the VFX Graph. You'll learn how to use VFX Graph for advanced shader development. The book also features updated recipes for using Shader Graph to create 2D and 3D elements. You'll cover everything you need to know about vectors, how they can be used to construct lighting, and how to use textures to create complex effects without the heavy math. You'll also understand how to use the visual-based Shader Graph for creating shaders without any code. By the end of this Unity book, you'll have developed a set of shaders that you can use in your Unity 3D games and be able to accomplish new effects and address the performance needs of your Unity game development projects. So, let's get started!
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Installing the Post Processing Stack

Before we can use the Post Processing Stack, we must get it from the Package Manager. A Unity package is a single file that contains various assets that can be used in Unity, similar to a ZIP file. Previously, Unity used the Asset Store to share these files with users, but with time, the Package Manager has been added to give users an easy way to get free content from Unity. We will be using the Package Manager again in Chapter 13, Shader Graph – 2D, but for now, we will be using it for the Post Processing package that it contains.

Getting ready

To get started with this recipe, you will need to have Unity running and have created a new project with the 3D template. This chapter also requires you to have an environment to work from. The code files provided with this book contain a .unitypackage file called Chapter1_StartingPoint.unitypackage in the Unity Packages folder. It contains a basic scene and content for creating the scene with...