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)

Chapter 2: Creating Your First Shader

This chapter will cover some of the more common diffuse techniques found in today's game development shading pipelines. Let's imagine a cube that has been painted white uniformly in a 3D environment with directional light. Even if the color that's been used is the same on each face, they will all have different shades of white on them, depending on the direction that the light is coming from and the angle that we are looking at it from. This extra level of realism is achieved in 3D graphics through the use of shaders, special programs that are mostly used to simulate how light works. A wooden cube and a metal one may share the same 3D model, but what makes them look different is the shader that they use.

This chapter will introduce you to shader coding in Unity. If you have little to no previous experience with shaders, this chapter is what you need to understand what shaders are, how they work, and how to customize them. By the end of this chapter, you will have learned how to build basic shaders that perform basic operations. This chapter also covers some debugging information to help in case there are errors in your shaders. Armed with this knowledge, you will be able to create just about any Surface Shader.

In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:

  • Creating a basic Standard Shader
  • Adding properties to a shader
  • Using properties in a Surface Shader