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

Understanding the principles and limitations of geometry shaders

First things first, we’re going to start this chapter by having a quick look at the foundational principles of geometry shaders and their most important limitations. In particular, we’ll focus on the specific cases of the macOS X and iOS platforms, which don’t deal well with this type of code and have to be taken into consideration for cross-platform compatibility.

What are geometry shaders?

Geometry shaders are a special type of shaders that, in addition to the usual vertex and fragment stages, also contain an additional step in the render process – the geometry stage.

Contrary to vertex and fragment shader functions, the geometry shader function is totally optional. As we saw throughout this book, there are indeed many effects and renders that can be achieved without using this stage in the shader code. However, if you want to change the geometry of your meshes in depth and you need...