Introducing shaders and URP
We created Materials in Part 1 of the book, but we never discussed how they internally work and why their Shader property is important. In this first section of this chapter, we will be exploring the concept of a shader as a way to program the video card to achieve custom visual effects. We will also be discussing how URP works with those shaders, and the default shaders it provides.
In this section, we will cover the following concepts related to shaders:
- Shader Pipeline
- Render Pipeline and URP
- URP built-in shaders
Let’s start by discussing how a shader modifies the Shader Pipeline to achieve effects.
Shader Pipeline
Whenever a video card renders a 3D model, it needs different information to process, such as a Mesh, Textures, the transform of the object (position, rotation, and scale), and lights that affect that object. With that data, the video card must output the pixels of the object into the back...