A simple breakdown of the rendering pipeline
Unsurprisingly, a lot goes into creating a virtual 3D world and then displaying it on a 2D screen. Unity obfuscates a lot of the low-level rendering process so we don't have to deal with it, but to master anything related to graphics it's important to have a fundamental understanding of what's happening behind the scenes.
Every step of the rendering process is handled within something called the rendering pipeline. In this section, we'll go over each step in detail so you can gain a full understanding of what graphics are.
Defining the geometry
The first part of rendering is collecting the objects to be rendered. Every object in a scene is a collection of vertices, or the points of the object's geometry, and indices, which define the faces between the points.
Every set of three indices defines a triangular face of the object. Triangles are handy for defining complex surfaces because each individual triangle can only exist on one plane, so several...