Daniel Ilett - Building Quality Shaders for Unity®: Using Shader Graphs and HLSL Shaders

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So youve decided to start writing shaders in Unity. Thats a good decision if I do say so myself! Before I started writing shaders, I saw many people in the game development space talk about them in hushed tones, as if they were some kind of arcane secret bestowed from the heavens, but its my belief that anyone can write shaders with a soft introduction. Its like learning any other skill; you dont learn to ride a push-bike by imitating Evel Knievel right off the bat.

This is the kind of book I wish I had when I was learning to write shaders in Unity. The early chapters establish the core concepts and syntax youll need to know when writing shaders, and throughout the course of the book, I will steadily introduce more complex topics until we have covered some of the lesser-known shader topics in Unity. By that point, you should be able to create complicated, versatile effects by yourself.

Every example in the book will work in Unity 2021.3, which is the latest Long-Term Support (LTS) version of the engine at the time of the writing of this book. If you are reading this book in the future and there is a later LTS version, then every example will most likely still work, although you may potentially need to change the names of functions and macros. If you are using an earlier version than 2021.3, most of the effects will work, but there are features that are completely missing in certain versions. The book will still be helpful if you are working on a project started in an earlier Unity version and you are unable to upgrade to a newer version, and I will warn you when I am using a recently added feature.

With thanks to Lewis, who reads all my tweets out loud back to me seconds after posting. Something tells me he wont be reading this whole book to me. You also had to deal with me in the morning before Id had a coffee, which couldnt have been easy.

Thank you also to my family, especially my mum, who has apparently been saying Did you know hes writing a book? whenever my name comes up in conversation with people.

With thanks to the Warwick Game Design Society and its members, who have given me a space to flourish and work on games while at university. You also showed me how to eat a gigantic slice of chocolate fudge cake in under a minute, which surely got us some strange looks from other pubgoers. There are too many of you to count!

Finally, my thanks to the Apress team and everyone who was involved in writing this book with me. From the first invitation to write the book to every bit of advice and correction, youve all been invaluable partners on this journey.