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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21. Other Books You May Enjoy

Appendix: Some Quick Refreshers on Shaders in Unity

Discovering compute shaders and compute buffers

Compute shaders are quite a unique tool that has many applications, such as the rendering of procedurally generated shapes (see Figure 7.1, a screenshot taken from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWI07UQbJ9E) or the large calculations in a complex system.

Figure 7.1 – Render of the Mandelbrot Set using compute shaders

In the following sections, we will see what compute shaders are exactly, why they can be useful, how they work hand in hand with compute buffers to properly share data between the CPU and the GPU, and how they are structured.

What are compute shaders?

In a nutshell, compute shaders are a specific type of shader script that are meant to offload processing from the CPU to the GPU.

The main idea is that because the GPU runs code in parallel, it can achieve better performance for computationally intensive tasks and large amounts of data – typically, heavy rendering algorithms...