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 a toon shader

One of the most commonly used effects in games is toon shading, which is also known as celluloid (CEL) shading. This is a non-photorealistic rendering technique that makes 3D models appear flat. Many games use it to give the illusion that the graphics are being drawn by hand rather than modeled in 3D. In the following diagram, you can view a sphere rendered with a toon shader (on the left-hand side) and a sphere rendered with a standard shader (on the right-hand side):

Figure 5.8 – A toon shader (left) versus a standard shader (right)

Achieving this effect using just surface functions is not impossible, but it would be extremely expensive and time-consuming. In fact, the surface function only works on the properties of the material, not its actual lighting condition. As toon shading requires us to change the way light reflects, we need to create a custom lighting model instead.

Getting ready

Let's start this recipe by...