Learn Unity Shaders from Scratch

In this course we’re going to look at Unity ShaderLab and the HLSL shading language to create amazing shaders.

Maybe you are

a developer struggling to bring to life a particular game feature because it needs a custom shader.

a developer who always wanted to create custom shaders but was too scared to start.

a developer wanting to add some custom post-processing effects to your 3d renders.

Unity ShaderLab is how you create custom shaders. It comes in 3 flavours, fixed function, vertex-fragment and surface shaders. We won’t be looking at the fixed function route in this course as it is effectively a legacy option and you want to learn modern best practice. The code syntax is based on the C language, but fear not, we will assume you have literally no knowledge of this language at all and we will, as the course title states, learn this from scratch. A shader uses the GPU ( the Graphics Processing Unit) to handle multiple programs at the same time, so it is unbelievably fast.

We will start from really simple examples and progress slowly through each stage of developing a custom shader. You will be able to play with the shader code using Visual Studio, or another code editor if you prefer. You can experiment with different values to see the impact it has on the end result.

Unity shaders are split into vertex shaders and fragment shaders and we will focus initially on the fragment shader, working essentially in a 2d environment. With dozens of shaders in the course resources you will learn the language in gentle stages. Before moving on to use Unity’s surface shader syntax to easily include complex lighting.

Once you’re comfortable with simple shaders we will cover advanced effects such as tessellation, transparency, using the stencil buffer and post-processing.

Creating your own shaders means understanding the HLSL language and that is the aim of the course. You could search for a suitable shader on ShaderToy or ShaderFrog and then try to adapt the code. But without knowing the language you’re going to find that difficult to do. To really be effective you need to know about the language, shaping functions, tiling and lighting calculations. To do this you will need to follow along with the course and complete the many challenges suggested. At the end you will then be able to create any shader that you can imagine.

01 Introduction 001 Welcome to the course 002 Introduction 003 Parallel Processing 004 Cg is not C#

02 First Steps 001 Your first shader 002 Working with vectors in Cg 003 Using the Properties section 004 Blending colours 005 Using step and smoothstep

03 Shaping Functions 001 Drawing a circle 002 Drawing a square 003 Moving our shape 004 Moving the square with the mouse 005 Moving the shape over time 006 Rotating the square 007 Changing the rotation centre and scaling 008 Tiling 009 Drawing circles 010 Drawing lines 011 Combining lines 012 Showing a polygon 013 Creating a brick pattern

04 Noise 002 What’s all that noise_ 003 Using noise to create a fire shader 004 Using noise to create wood and marble

05 Textures 001 A simple use of a texture image 002 Ripple the image 003 Blend between textures

06 Vertex shaders 001 Turning a box into a sphere 002 Using the Unity lighting – Lambert 003 Creating a ball of lava

07 Surface Shaders 001 ShaderLab Surface Shaders – an introduction 002 Bump mapping 003 Fresnel shading 004 Environment mapping 005 Adding a bump map to a reflective surface 006 Blinn Phong lighting 007 Custom lighting 008 Standard lighting 009 Adding a vertex function to a surface shader

08 Advanced effects 001 Lighting in a vertex, fragment shader 002 A position location shader 004 Tessellation 005 Using the stencil buffer 006 Clipping the output

09 Transparent shaders 001 Alpha transparency in a surface shader 002 Space Pirate turns to glass

10 Volumetric Shaders 001 Volumetric Rendering 002 Using textures in the render

11 Post Processing 001 Preparing for post processing 002 Night goggles effect

12 Conclusion 001 Summary

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