You're reading from Become a Unity Shaders Guru Create advanced game visuals using code and graphs in Unity 2022

Product type Paperback

Published in Jul 2023

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781837636747

Length 492 pages

Edition 1st Edition

Languages

Tools

Unity

Concepts

Game Optimization

Author (1):

Mina Pêcheux

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Table of Contents (23) Chapters

Preface

1. Part 1: Creating Shaders in Unity

2. Chapter 1: Re-Coding a Basic Blinn-Phong Shader with Unity/CG FREE CHAPTER

3. Part 2: Stepping Up to URP and the Shader Graph

4. Chapter 2: The Three Unity Render Pipelines

5. Chapter 3: Writing Your First URP Shader

6. Chapter 4: Transforming Your Shader into a Lit PBS Shader

7. Chapter 5: Discovering the Shader Graph with a Toon Shader

8. Part 3: Advanced Game Shaders

9. Chapter 6: Simulating Geometry Efficiently

10. Chapter 7: Exploring the Unity Compute Shaders and Procedural Drawing

11. Chapter 8: The Power of Ray Marching

12. Part 4: Optimizing Your Unity Shaders

13. Chapter 9: Shader Compilation, Branching, and Variants

14. Chapter 10: Optimizing Your Code, or Making Your Own Pipeline?

15. Part 5: The Toolbox

16. Chapter 11: A Little Suite of 2D Shaders

17. Chapter 12: Vertex Displacement Shaders

18. Chapter 13: Wireframes and Geometry Shaders

19. Chapter 14: Screen Effect Shaders

20. Index

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Appendix: Some Quick Refreshers on Shaders in Unity

Entering a world of primitives...

We saw in Chapter 7 that compute shaders are an excellent way to process large data quickly – which is typically what we need for ray marching, since in every frame, we have to step through many rays (one per pixel) to render the scene!

Our ray marching logic will therefore be written in a compute shader file, and then called from a C# script at the time of the render as a full-screen effect. So, the process will reuse the custom scriptable render feature (URPComputeFeature) we prepared in Chapter 7, and we will go through the same steps as in the Applying a compute shader-based screen effect in URP section of Chapter 7.

In the upcoming sections, we will therefore start by preparing a basic compute shader to render a single sphere using ray marching, and then improve it to handle multiple shapes of different types.