Summary

In this chapter, we discovered how to work with the Shader Graph to create our shaders using a node-based visual editor.

We first explored the main benefits of this alternate workflow compared to the creation of shaders via code and then detailed the Shader Graph editor interface.

Then, we worked on a practical example and created a toon shader inspired by the one in Unity’s first open source project, Chop-Chop. This allowed us to learn how to use Sub Graphs to make our logic modular and easy to read, how to do basic texture sampling and color tinting, and how to compute more advanced values, such as lighting contribution, thanks to custom HLSL functions. We also took advantage of the technique of ramp shading to turn our smooth color gradients into sharp color transitions to produce a cel-shaded look in our renders.

In the last section, we introduced the notion of a scriptable render feature to provide our URP with more features and used this tool to add an...