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Physically Based Shader Development for Unity 2017

Develop Custom Lighting Systems

  • Book
  • © 2018

Overview

Authors:
  1. Claudia Doppioslash

    1. Liverpool, United Kingdom

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  • The first book about physically based shading for real-time rendering; most of the information can only be found in academic papers and Siggraph talks

  • Unravels the best way to use shaders

  • Shows how to interface with the Unity shader subsystem

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Table of contents (18 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xxiii
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Introduction to Shaders In Unity

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1
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    2. How Shader Development Works

      • Claudia Doppioslash
      Pages 3-16

    3. Your First Unity Shader

      • Claudia Doppioslash
      Pages 17-32

    4. The Graphics Pipeline

      • Claudia Doppioslash
      Pages 33-42

    5. Transforming Coordinate Spaces

      • Claudia Doppioslash
      Pages 43-50

    6. Your First Unity Lighting Shader

      • Claudia Doppioslash
      Pages 51-64

    7. Specular Implementation

      • Claudia Doppioslash
      Pages 65-75

    8. Surface Shaders

      • Claudia Doppioslash
      Pages 77-95

  3. Physically Based Shading

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 97-97
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    2. What Is Physically Based Shading?

      • Claudia Doppioslash
      Pages 99-113

    3. Making a Shader Physically Based

      • Claudia Doppioslash
      Pages 115-120

    4. Post-Processing Effects

      • Claudia Doppioslash
      Pages 121-135

    5. BRDFs Who’s Who

      • Claudia Doppioslash
      Pages 137-154

    6. Implementing a BRDF

      • Claudia Doppioslash
      Pages 155-175

    7. Hooking Into the Standard Shader

      • Claudia Doppioslash
      Pages 177-193

    8. Implementing Advanced Techniques

      • Claudia Doppioslash
      Pages 195-203

  4. Shader Development Advice

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 205-205
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    2. Making Shaders Artists Will Use

      • Claudia Doppioslash
      Pages 207-212

    3. Complexity and Ubershaders

      • Claudia Doppioslash
      Pages 213-216
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Keywords

About this book

Benefit from the latest rendering tech developments, currently covered only in papers and talks from Siggraph, in a way any developer or technical artist using Unity can take advantage of. This book starts by introducing how shader programming works in general, the common principles of different platforms (OpenGL, Vulkan, and DirectX), and the shading languages Unity uses: Cg, GLSL, and ShaderLab.


Physically Based Shader Development for Unity 2017 discusses artistic choices, presenting various techniques (such as translucency and subsurface scattering) and BRDFs (Oren-Nayar, Cook-Torrance, and Ashikhmin-Shirley), and what they can be used for. Finally you’ll cover the importance of optimizing your code by developing approximations, which achieve similar end results, but are computationally cheaper.


By the end of your journey you’ll be able to develop the look of your game or Unity-rendered animated short so that it looks both unique and impressively realistic, thanks to your own custom lighting system.



What You Will Learn   

  • Master shader programming 
  • Gain all you need to know about physically based shading
  • Take almost full control of the shader subsystem
  • Discover what you can achieve with that control
  • Implement a custom physically based lighting system and examine the logic behind every choice

Who This Book Is For  

Most game developers (both indie and AA) that use Unity and technical artists who are responsible for the final look of a game.

Authors and Affiliations

  • Liverpool, United Kingdom

    Claudia Doppioslash

About the author

A Game Developer, Functional Programmer, and Speaker at various programming conferences, Claudia Doppioslash writes about Graphics Programming in Unity and in Rust and about Functional Programming. She’s been programming for many years now: starting from mobile development for iOS and Android, she went on to Game Development, spending most of her time developing custom shader lighting systems for Unity. Now she’s applying Functional Programming to the front-end, with Elm, Purescript and Haskell. She is a moderately Smug Lisp Weenie, and she hasn’t given up making Functional Programming useful for Game Development yet.

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