John P. Doran - Unity 2018 Shaders and Effects Cookbook

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First published: June 2013

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Third edition: June 2018

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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.

Alan Zucconi is a passionate developer, author, and lecturer, recognized as one of Develop's 30 under 30 . His expertise has been built over the past 10 years, working in the intersection between creativity and education. Starting in 2015, he published a series of educational tutorials for other developers and machine learning enthusiasts

Andrew Hlynka is a software engineer and game developer from Windsor, Ontario, Canada. He earned his MSc degree in Computer Science in 2015 from the University of Windsor and has worked in the industry for over five years on software projects involving multimedia, interactive displays, games, mobile apps, and hybrid simulation systems. He continues his research in innovative animation techniques for games as an independent developer, publishing his projects under Dust Scratch Games.

Michael Miles is a Manufacturing Engineer working in the aerospace industry by day and is a Unity game designer, C#, JavaScript, and Python developer at all other times. With these skills, and upon discovering Unity3D and Blender, Michael began creating interactive training and production-ready instruction tools for the assembly of the aircraft his company builds.

When not in front of the screen of a computer, he likes to play games with family and friends or immerse himself in books whose genres range from fantasy to theoretical physics.

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Unity 2018 Shaders and Effects Cookbook is your guide to becoming familiar with the creation of shaders and post-processing effects in Unity 2018. You will start your journey at the beginning, exploring the Post Processing Stack to see some of the possible ways you can use shaders to affect what you see without having to write scripts at all. Afterwards, we learn how to create shaders from scratch, starting by creating the most basic shaders and learning how the shader code is structured. This foundational knowledge will arm you with the means to progress further through each chapter, learning advanced techniques such as volumetric explosions and fur shading. We also explore the newly added Shader Graph editor to see how you can create shaders through a drag and drop interface as well! This edition of the book is written specifically for Unity 2018 and will help you to master physically-based rendering and global illumination to get as close to photorealism as possible.

By the end of each chapter, you will have gained new skills that will increase the quality of your shaders and even make your shader writing process more efficient. These chapters have been tailored so that you can jump into each section and learn a specific skill from beginner to expert. For those who are new to shader writing in Unity, you can progress through each chapter, one at a time, to build on your knowledge. Either way, you will learn the techniques that make modern games look the way they do.