Shader Graph

Shader Graph is a visual scripting tool designed to allow artist-driven shader creation. Shaders are scripts that inform the graphics pipeline how to render materials. A material is an instance of a shader with parameters set for a certain mesh inside of a GameObject. A simple example of this could be leather. If you think of leather, you could probably think about many different types of leather. What color is it? Is it shiny? Does it have a unique texture? All of these options are parameters in the shader that can be set in the material to render the object properly.

In Unity, a shader is written in High-Level Shader Language (HLSL). Knowing how to properly write this code requires a detailed understanding of the graphics pipeline in your computer and can be a bit daunting to get going. The graphics pipeline is a complex conceptual model. Simplified, the computer goes through layers and stages to understand what 3D visual graphics are in a scene, then takes that...