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Become a Unity Shaders Guru

You're reading from  Become a Unity Shaders Guru

Product type Book
Published in Jul 2023
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781837636747
Pages 492 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages
Author (1):
Mina Pêcheux Mina Pêcheux
Profile icon Mina Pêcheux

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 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 21. Other Books You May Enjoy Appendix: Some Quick Refreshers on Shaders in Unity

Entering a world of primitives...

We saw in Chapter 7 that compute shaders are an excellent way to process large data quickly – which is typically what we need for ray marching, since in every frame, we have to step through many rays (one per pixel) to render the scene!

Our ray marching logic will therefore be written in a compute shader file, and then called from a C# script at the time of the render as a full-screen effect. So, the process will reuse the custom scriptable render feature (URPComputeFeature) we prepared in Chapter 7, and we will go through the same steps as in the Applying a compute shader-based screen effect in URP section of Chapter 7.

In the upcoming sections, we will therefore start by preparing a basic compute shader to render a single sphere using ray marching, and then improve it to handle multiple shapes of different types.

Rendering a sphere with ray marching

To begin with, let’s set up a first basic ray marching compute shader to...

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