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

Creating waves with vertex displacement

In this second section, we’ll continue our exploration of the vertex displacement technique with another common use case – the creation of waves on the surface of a water plane.

Here, we’ll keep things simple and focus on sinusoidal waves. These are not the most realistic, but this way, the computation will remain fairly straightforward; still, this example will be a good opportunity to see how the resolution of a mesh can impact the result of a vertex displacement shader and how, sometimes, we can mathematically compute the exact value of displaced normals.

Understanding the importance of mesh resolution

Before diving into the shader itself, let’s briefly talk about the geometry we need to get the proper effect.

In the previous section, Animating fishes and butterflies, we saw how vertex displacement shader can simulate interesting movements even on very simple geometries (for example, the split quad of...