Coding in Unity: Introduction to Shaders

Coding in Unity: Introduction to Shaders

Learn the basic concepts and language you will need to program your own shaders and image effects for Unity's built-in render pipeline, for Unity 5 or above. 

Learn and Understand Shaders with this Unity Course.

•  Learn about the different properties of a mesh that can be accessed and changed via a shader.

•  Write your own vertex and fragment, and surface shaders.

•  Create your own image effects.

• Write custom lighting models.

• Understand ShaderLab and CG/HLSL.

Make your game look unique using shaders.

In this course, you will learn the basics of programming shaders, from simple colour changes to whole screen image effects. We'll go through the different types of shader, Unity's quirks and in-built functions, and the different bits of code that make up a shader, before writing a full surface shader with a texture, normal map, metallic and emissive effects. We'll also look at writing a custom inspector for your shader. Once we've covered these basics, we'll look at creating an number of image effects, custom lighting models including cel shading, a sprite shader with a sway effect, and a dissolve effect.

A common criticism of Unity is that games made with the engine all have a similar look. Combat this by writing your own shaders rather than relying on Unity's inbuilt ones - learn how to improve the look and feel of your game.

By the end of this course, you will understand the basics of shader coding and will be able to create your own shaders. Source code is included to help you on your way.

This course is designed for people who can already use Unity and can program in C#, but who have no previous experience of programming shaders.

I present examples of increasing difficulty for each type of shader (surface, vertex/fragment and image effect) designed to help you to understand how shaders work so that you can be confident in creating your own effects. 

For extra support, you can ask questions in the Q&A section, and I’ve provided the completed code examples for download in each Section. You’ll receive a certificate of completion once you finish the course.

Make your game look unique through image effects, shaders and custom lighting by learning Unity's ShaderLab language.

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What you will learn

• Program surface shaders - Unity's approach to making it easier to write lit shaders.
• Code lower level fragment and vertex shaders.
• Program post-processing images effects.

Rating: 3.85

Level: Intermediate Level

Duration: 3.5 hours

Instructor: Jenny Hide