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

Recalling the basics of z-buffering and blending modes

Another essential component of a shader is how it interacts with the rest of the environment, or in other words, what kind of behavior you expect from an object using your shader. Should it always be rendered in front of the rest? Should it be visible both from the front and the back? Should it be partially transparent and mix with the background color?

This scene interaction can be separated into two parts:

On the one hand, it is crucial to decide whether your camera should render your shader in the front or in the back – to optimize the rendering process, a clever thing to do is to check whether some opaque objects are masking others, and thus we can decide whether we can ignore the ones further away or discard all the faces that are not visible from our point of view. To do this, we can rely on the technique of z-buffering.
On the other hand, there are still cases where you will have one or more objects...