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  • Book Overview & Buying Unity 5.x Shaders and Effects Cookbook
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Unity 5.x Shaders and Effects Cookbook

Unity 5.x Shaders and Effects Cookbook

By : Zucconi
4.1 (9)
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Unity 5.x Shaders and Effects Cookbook

Unity 5.x Shaders and Effects Cookbook

4.1 (9)
By: Zucconi

Overview of this book

Since their introduction to Unity, Shaders have been 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. With Shaders, you can transform your game into a highly polished, refined product with Unity’s post-processing effects. Unity Shaders and Effects Cookbook is the first of its kind to bring you the secrets of creating Shaders for Unity3D—guiding you through the process of understanding vectors, how lighting is constructed with them, and also how textures are used to create complex effects without the heavy math. We’ll start with 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 the secrets behind some of the most powerful techniques, such as physically based rendering! With Unity Shaders and Effects Cookbook, what seems like a dark art today will be second nature by tomorrow.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
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11
Index

Implementing heatmaps with arrays

One characteristic that makes shaders hard to master is the lack of a proper documentation. Most developers learn shaders by messing up with the code, without having a deep knowledge of what's going on. The problem is amplified by the fact that Cg/HLSL makes a lot of assumptions, some of which are not properly advertised. Unity3D allows C# scripts to communicate with shaders using methods such as SetFloat, SetInt, SetVector, and so on. Unfortunately, Unity3D doesn't have a SetArray method, which led many developers to believe that Cg/HLSL doesn't support arrays either. This is not true. This post will show you how it's possible to pass arrays to shaders. Just remember that GPUs are highly optimized for parallel computations, and using for loops in a shader will dramatically drop its performance.

For this recipe, we will implement a heatmap, as shown in the following image:

Implementing heatmaps with arrays

Getting ready

The effect in this recipe creates a heatmap from a...

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