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)

Implementing a volumetric explosion

The art of game development is a clever trade-off between realism and efficiency. This is particularly true for explosions; they are at the heart of many games, yet the physics behind them is often beyond the computational power of modern machines. Explosions are, essentially, nothing more than very hot balls of gas; hence, the only way to correctly simulate them is by integrating a fluid simulation into your game. As you can imagine, this is unfeasible for a runtime application, and many games simulate them simply with particles. When an object explodes, it is common to simply instantiate fire, smoke, and debris particles so that together they can achieve believable results. This approach, unfortunately, is not very realistic and is easy to spot. There is an intermediate technique that can be used to achieve a much more realistic effect: volumetric explosions. The idea behind this concept is that explosions are not treated like a bunch of particles...