Unity 2018 Shaders and Effects Cookbook

Transform your game into a highly polished, refined product with post-processing effects and advanced shading techniques in Unity 2018

Since their introduction to Unity, Shaders have been seen as notoriously difficult to understand and implement in games: complex mathematics have always stood in the way of creating your own Shaders and attaining that level of realism you crave.

Unity Shaders and Effects Cookbook seeks to change that with a recipe-based approach to teaching you how to create shaders using Unity. It is designed to guiding you through the process of understanding vectors, how lighting is constructed with them, and how textures are used to create complex effects without the heavy math.

We'll start with seeing the possible ways to use shaders without writing code such as the Post-Processing Stack. Afterwards we will learn how to write shaders from scratch, building up to essential lighting and finishing up by creating stunning screen effects just like those in high quality 3D and mobile games. You'll discover techniques including normal mapping, image-based lighting, and how to animate your models inside a Shader. We'll explore how to use physically based rendering! We’ll even look at Unity 2018’s new Shader Graph system. With this book, what seems like a dark art today will be second nature by tomorrow.

This book is for developers who want to create their first Shaders in Unity 2018 or wish to take their game to a whole new level by adding professional post-processing effects. A solid understanding of Unity is required to get the most from this book.

John P. Doran is a passionate and seasoned Technical Game Designer, Software Engineer, and Author who is based in Redmond, Washington.

For over a decade, John has built games in roles ranging from game designer to lead UI programmer. Additionally, John has taught game development in Singapore, South Korea, and the United States. To date, he has authored over 10 books pertaining to game development.

You can follow him on Twitter @jodoran