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 7: Vertex Functions

The term shader originates from the fact that C for Graphics (Cg) has been mainly used to simulate realistic lighting conditions (shadows) on three-dimensional (3D) models. Despite this, shaders are now much more than that. They not only define the way objects are going to look, but they can also redefine their shapes entirely. If you want to learn how to manipulate the geometry of a 3D object via shaders, this is the chapter for you.

In Chapter 2, Creating Your First Shader, we explained that 3D models are not just a collection of triangles. Each vertex can contain data that is essential to render the model itself correctly. This chapter will explore how to access this information in order to use it in a shader. We will also explore in detail how the geometry of an object can be deformed simply by using Cg code.

In this chapter, you will learn the following recipes:

  • Accessing a vertex color in a Surface Shader
  • Animating vertices in a Surface...