Summary

In this Appendix, we recalled the fundamentals of shader theory and various useful tips for writing shaders in Unity.

We recalled the three steps of a common rendering pipeline (the vertex shader, the rasterization, and the fragment shader), before showing how they are implemented in a basic Unity ShaderLab shader code. We also discussed Unity shader configuration with tags, z-buffering options, and blend modes. We followed that up with some reminders on UV mapping and how to handle textures in the game engine.

With this review of all the essential notions of shaders done, you should now be clear on what shaders are, how they are implemented in Unity with the built-in render pipeline, and what a ShaderLab script usually looks like.