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

Reviewing textures and UV mapping

To finish this quick review of the shader fundamentals, let’s have a short discussion on textures and UV mapping. Although we often think of the albedo (which means, the main color) when we hear the word texture, the truth is that shaders use a wide range of textures for diverse reasons, and they can be a valuable tool for optimizing your rendering. Of course, using 2D textures on 3D objects naturally implies converting between these two worlds, thus the need for the UV mapping process.

In the following sections, we are going to quickly refresh our knowledge of UVs and textures before discussing special types of textures and studying how to declare and use textures in a Unity shader code.

Wrapping a 2D image on a 3D shape

Textures are, as you know, 2D images. Therefore, the first step to using them in a 3D scene, and on 3D objects, is to find a technique to project this 2D plane onto the 3D shape. This is done via the process of UV...