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

Understanding the fundamentals of ray marching

Before diving into the practical applications and implementation tricks of ray marching, let’s first have a quick run through the concepts it relies on.

In the upcoming sections, we will first introduce the concept of signed distance functions (SDFs) for representing arbitrarily complex shapes, then understand how this notion can be used to actually compute 3D renders, and finally, have a look at how to add shading to ray marching visualizations.

Describing a shape with SDFs

At the core of the ray marching process is a concept called the signed distance function, or SDF. To put it simply, SDFs are mathematical functions that take a point in space (represented by its X, Y, and Z coordinates) and return how far it is from a surface.

It may seem like a strange idea to compute surfaces at first, but the power of SDFs is that they can describe quite complex shapes in just a few lines, and they allow us to render surprising...