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

Exploring the Unity Compute Shaders and Procedural Drawing

Up until now, we have focused mainly on the most common application of shaders in video games: the rendering of objects in 3D scenes. We have seen various tools and techniques and studied complex shading tricks, but they all aimed at visualizing some geometry on our 2D screen.

However, shader scripting is a very interesting type of development that can be used to solve other problems, too. For example, because, at its core, it is about writing low-level code to run in parallel for many data points, the art of shader creation can be transposed to another fascinating topic: the efficient processing of expensive computational tasks.

In Unity, it is possible to greatly increase the speed of some large calculations by taking advantage of the power of shaders and offloading the work from the CPU to the GPU, using compute shaders. This, in turn, can lead to delightful advanced techniques in the field of procedural drawing.

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