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

What is the Shader Graph?

To begin with, let’s do a quick review of what the Shader Graph is exactly.

In the next sections, we will see what this tool is useful for and who it can benefit, how we can add it to a Unity project, and how to navigate its interface.

A tool for everyone…or not

As we have mentioned previously in Chapter 2, the Shader Graph is a new node-based shader creation tool Unity added to the engine in 2017, when they added the SRP pipelines. This visual tool was made with multiple goals in mind:

Ease-of-use: First and foremost, the Shader Graph is meant to be beginner-friendly – in particular, it simplifies the process to allow artists and non-coders from the team to actively participate in the development of the graphics. But it can even be useful for shader developers too because it usually makes prototyping more straightforward and more pleasant.
Instant feedback: Another key characteristic of the Shader Graph is that it...