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

Concepts

Game Optimization

Author (1):

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

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21. Other Books You May Enjoy

Appendix: Some Quick Refreshers on Shaders in Unity

Studying a common use case – the rendering of volumetric clouds

So far, we have seen how ray marching allows us to create arbitrarily complex shapes based on SDFs and 3D surfaces. This makes it easy to create procedural scenes with solid shapes, like the ones shown in Figure 8.12.

But ray marching can also be taken one step further, to actually render 3D volumes. For example, thanks to this technique, we can create fairly realistic clouds like these ones:

Figure 8.13 – Volumetric clouds rendered on the scene skybox using ray marching

So, our goal here will be to create a material shader for the skybox of the scene, to have it display volumetric clouds similar to the ones shown in Figure 8.13.

In the following sections, we are going to implement our shader step by step and discuss how we can adapt our ray marching principles to the case of volume rendering. Then, we will see how we can use mathematical noise to create interesting shapes...