Unity Shader Graph: Create Shaders & Dynamic FX

Unity Shader Graph: Create Shaders & Dynamic FX

About Unity Shader Graph: Create Shaders & Dynamic FX

This course presents a comprehensive guide to creating vertex and fragment shaders using Unity's visual programming tool Shader Graph.  There's no need for prior knowledge or programming of shaders needed. Filled to the brim with follow-along and shader creation challenges, this course will give you a thorough grounding in shader development and the fundamental practices in Physical-Based Rendering (PBR) with a member of the Unity Game Engine's Educational Advisory Board and an acclaimed academic and teacher with over 30 years experience. This course will guide you through the process of creating your own visual surface effects for colouring and lighting game objects. It gently covers the mathematics of light and surfaces and steps you through the recreation of some of the most popular shaders, including Fresnel, Complex Water, Holograms, Flowing Lava, Liquids, Fire, and more.  The shader concepts will be presented in an easy-to-understand manner to help grasp the graphics pipeline and provide you with an essential toolkit of rendering knowledge, that will have you developing your own transparent, animated, and texturised shaders in Unity's Built-In, Universal, and High-Definition Render Pipelines. 

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.