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

Why subscribe?

21. Other Books You May Enjoy

Appendix: Some Quick Refreshers on Shaders in Unity

Learning some Unity shader compilation tricks

As a seasoned shader artist, you probably know that when it comes down to it, rendering is no piece of cake. If you’ve ever tried to make your own rendering system from scratch instead of relying on a game engine such as Unity and its pre-made rendering pipelines, then you know that writing shader code is just one step among many to actually display something on the screen. Out in the wild, you also have to worry about graphics backends, platform-specific compilation, cross-platform API compatibility, and much more!

And with the ever-growing variety of possible target devices, and in particular, the growing usage of mobiles and tablets for gamers, saying that you are going to produce a fully cross-platform game means you’ll need to think about dozens of graphics APIs and backends that can be very different from each other.

Now, of course, this is where 3D and game engines shine: by abstracting away this low-level rendering...