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

Using the built-in render pipeline

Up until now, we have looked at Unity’s built-in or legacy render pipeline. This was a good way to learn how to make shaders in this game engine. However, this pipeline also has its share of limitations.

So, in this first section, let’s discuss the advantages and drawbacks of this pipeline, as well as how we can extend it, thanks to CommandBuffers.

A handy but limited pipeline

The built-in pipeline has several advantages:

The most obvious plus is that it is readily available as soon as you create a new Unity project with a basic template. It lets you get familiar with the whole toolchain of shaders, materials, and mesh renderers.
Since it’s been around for a long time, the built-in render pipeline is also compatible with a large number of pre-existing shaders, VFX, third-party tools, and learning resources.
Of course, because it is a general-purpose render pipeline, it handles most of the common use cases...