Become a Unity Shaders Guru: Create advanced game visuals using code and graphs

Discover the new URP render pipeline, the Shader Graph tool, and a range of advanced shading techniques to bring out the beauty of your 2D/3D game projects
Key Features

• Discover the new shader tools (URP and Shader Graph) provided in Unity 2022 and work either in HLSL code, or with visual node-based editing
• Learn advanced tricks to optimize your rendering pipeline
• Experience how to apply these concepts to create a variety of 2D and 3D game shaders

Book Description

Do you really know all the ins-and-outs of Unity shaders? Time to step up your game and dive into the new URP render pipeline, the Shader Graph tool, and advanced shading techniques to bring out the beauty in your 2D/3D game projects!

“Become a Unity Shaders Guru” is here to help you transition from the built-in render pipeline to the SRP pipelines and learn the latest shading tools. It dives deeper into Unity shaders by explaining the essential concepts through practical examples. You will first get a refresher on how to create a simple shading model in the Unity built-in render pipeline, and then move on to the Unity URP render pipeline and Shader Graph, discovering a wide range of applications in the process. You will explore common game shader techniques, ranging from interior mapping to burning down a candle or simulating the wobble of a fish. You will even read about alternative rendering techniques, like Ray Marching.

By the end of this book, you’ll have learned to create a wide variety of 2D and 3D shaders with Unity’s URP pipeline (both in HLSL code and with the Shader Graph tool), and you’ll know some optimization tricks to make your games more friendly to low-tier devices.

What you will learn

• Understand the main differences between the legacy render pipeline and the SRP ones
• Create shaders in Unity 2022, with HLSL code and the Shader Graph 10 tool
• Implement common game shaders with the URP Render Pipeline and get a feel for their various applications (VFX, animation, procedural generation and many more)
• Experiment with offloading work from the CPU to the GPU
• Recognize the available optimization tools, and when to use them
• Discover useful URP shaders to learn from, and re-adapt to your liking in your own projects

Who This Book Is For

This book is intended for Technical Artists who have worked with Unity and want to get a deeper understanding of Unity render pipelines and its visual node-based editing tool. Seasoned game developers who are looking for reference shaders using the recent URP render pipeline may also find this book useful. A basic level programming experience in HLSL can help you with the code-oriented chapters, and you should already be familiar with Unity, its layout and its common usage.