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

Rendering 3D scenes on a 2D screen

We’ve seen that a 3D shape cannot be blitted on a screen as-is. This is because the computer just doesn’t have the required information to fill the entire set of pixels from the virtual positions of the shape’s vertices. So, in practice, how do shaders achieve this? In the following sections, we will discuss the working of shaders, both in general and in Unity.

A typical 3D rendering pipeline

Shaders are able to bridge the gap between the scarce 3D data and the denser 2D pixel information, thanks to the following three-step process:

Vertex shader: First of all, the shader has to gather all the data about the shape that is necessary for its render. This is done in the vertex shader: this piece of code is run in parallel on all vertices of the 3D mesh and transforms the initial raw per-vertex data into processed per-vertex data. Usually, this process implies converting the vertex’s position from object space...