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 billboarding for in-game UI displays

It is quite common in games to have outdoor scenes with a lot of vegetation, be it trees, bushes, ferns, or a bit of everything. At first sight, these might look like complex assets to optimize and render, since you have all these leaves to show everywhere, requiring a high enough density for the player to really feel the foliage volume... but that’s where the trickery comes in!

To fake this effect of leaves all around you without having to model millions of polygons of foliage, game creators have developed a nice technique over the years: billboarding.

In short, this shading ruse allows us to have some objects face the camera at all times – for example, the leaves in our trees – and thus, use just an image instead of a heavy 3D model. In a completely different context, billboarding can also be applied to extra-diegetic elements such as pickups and UI so that they are more readable in the scene.

In the next sections...