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

Making 2D outlines

After this brief introduction to 2D sprite shaders, we will move on to another nice topic for 2D shaders: the auto-outlining of sprites, thanks to dynamic and tweakable stroke shaders. Our goal here is to build more and more advanced shaders to introduce new effects gradually and create more complex outlines around our sprites.

We will first begin with a simple outline using one solid color, then we will see how to use post-processing and HDR emissive colors to add glow, and finally, we will study how to make animated shaders that use the current time in their logic.

Implementing a simple outline

First of all, let’s see how to implement a simple sprite outline for a pixel-perfect sprite. This is a simple technique for adding a stroke that relies only on copying and translating. It doesn’t handle corners, so it doesn’t work very well for smooth sprites, but here is how it will look on our sample pixel-perfect sphere: