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)

Creating custom Shader Graph functions

While utilizing the built-in Shader Graph nodes is useful, it is also possible to create nodes of our very own utilizing our own custom script files. This can be especially useful when certain actions need to be done several times, such as when you need to use a for loop. In this recipe, we will see how we can use the Custom Function node to generate an output.

Getting ready

Ensure that you have created a project using one of the scriptable render pipelines mentioned in the Creating a URP-based Shader Graph project recipe in Chapter 13, Shader Graph – 2D. For the purpose of this chapter, we will be using the HDRP, so you can select High Definition RP/3D Sample Scene (HDRP) instead of the URP options when creating the new project. Afterward, complete the following steps:

  1. Create a new scene, if you haven't done so already, by going to File | New Scene.
  2. Afterward, we need to have something to show our shader, so let...