Introducing shaders and URP
Remember the glowing orb material we created in Section 1, Getting Started with Unity? Let’s explore how its shader property manipulates light to create that glow effect. In this first section, we will be exploring the concept of a shader as a way to program the video card to achieve custom visual effects. We will also be discussing how URP works with those shaders, and the default shaders it provides.
In this section, we will cover the following concepts related to shaders:
- Shader pipeline
- Render pipeline and URP
- URP built-in shaders
Let’s start by discussing how a shader modifies the shader pipeline to achieve effects.
Shader pipeline
Whenever a video card renders a 3D model, it needs different information to process, such as a mesh, textures, the transformation of the object (position, rotation, and scale), and lights that affect the object. With that data, the video card must output the pixels...
