Mastering Unity Shaders and Effects
Copyright 2016 Packt Publishing
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First published: September 2016
Production reference: 1210916
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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ISBN 978-1-78355-367-9
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Credits
Author Jamie Dean | Copy Editor Vibha Shukla |
Reviewer Kenneth Lammers | Project Coordinator Shweta H Birwatkar |
Commissioning Editor Akram Hussain | Proofreader Safis Editing |
Acquisition Editor Aaron Lazar | Indexer Mariammal Chettiyar |
Content Development Editor Deepti Thore | Production Coordinator Arvindkumar Gupta |
Technical Editor Manthan Raja |
About the Author
Jamie Dean is a game artist, instructor, and freelancer, with over seven years of teaching experience in higher education. He is currently focused on developing content for mobile games.
Jamie also wrote Unity Character Animation with Mecanim , Packt Publishing, in 2015 .
I would like to thank my family, Carey, Silas, and Rowan, for their love and encouragement, and all the people at Packt Publishing who helped get this project off the ground and keep the momentum. Thanks to Keith, Chip, and rest of my colleagues at Concrete Software Inc. Thanks for the great opportunities!
About the Reviewer
Kenny Lammers has worked over 16 years in the gaming industry as a character artist, technical artist, technical art director, and programmer. Throughout his career, he has worked on titles such as Call of Duty 3, Crackdown 2, Alan Wake, and Kinect Star Wars. He currently owns and operates Ozone Interactive, along with his business partner Noah Kaarbo. Together, they have worked with clients such as Amazon, E-line Media, IGT, Microsoft, and BioLucid.
Kenny has worked for Microsoft Games Studios, Activision, and Surreal, and has recently gone out on his own, operating CreativeTD and co-operating Ozone Interactive.
Kenny authored Unity Shaders and Effects Cookbook , Packt Publishing , and was very happy to be a part of the writing and updating of Unity 5.x Shaders and Effects Cookbook , Packt Publishing .
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Preface
Unity offers a range of tools to get your game project up and running. In version 5, the shaders got a significant upgrade, mostly being replaced with a set of Standard Shaders that can be easily set up to emulate the physical characteristics of real surfaces.
In this book, we will be exploring the options made possible with this new set of shaders and how they interact with lighting and effects in the game scene to produce high quality results.
It has been a long journey towards this level of realism in games. For a long time, the processing overhead of real-time lighting made it problematic. The burden of realism was placed squarely on the texture artist who had to bake static surface effects into the textures of characters and props.
Particularly with dynamic game objects such as characters, this made for some disappointing resultscharacters would move into darker or more brightly lit spaces with a disappointing level of light variation, exposing the simplicity and lack of realism in the game scene.
Advances with graphics, particularly the rapid improvement of graphics cards, have made real-time lighting techniques more cost effective.
This has resulted in higher expectations in gamesmore realistic surfaces that respond to dynamic lighting in a game scene.
In this book, readers will explore these shader and lighting concepts through the context of a typical sci-fi horror game. This will allow us to explore a variety of lighting and surface effects.
What this book covers
In this book, we will work through each of the major shader and effects concepts in different chapters. In each chapter, we will work through a different scene file:
, Getting to Grips with Standard Shaders , introduces the context and explores the capabilities and limitations of Unity's Standard Shaders as we set up the materials for our sci-fi horror-themed spacecraft bridge scene.
, Creating Custom Shaders , continues with spacecraft maintenance scenecreating custom shaders to improve the appearance of the game scene. We will create our first custom shader from scratch and then build on this code to create more complex effects for the helmet transparency and planet's atmosphere.
, Working with Lighting and Light-Emitting Surfaces , delves into the relationship between scene lighting and light-emitting surfaces, creating an animated holographic display for our spacecraft cockpit.