Unity Shaders and Effects Cookbook

by Kenneth Andrew Lammers

Unity Shaders and Effects Cookbook

268 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Josh Maines · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not many Unity3D development books cover shaders in detail. This book is definitely filling a gap by covering shaders in their entirety. That said, the book is set to a very slow pace, and a lot of people who are learning about shaders would most likely prefer the fast-paced approach of just looking at the code, which is an area this book does not excel at.

I have read the first 3 chapters, which cover diffuse shading, texture effects, and specular shading effects. These three chapters are a great introduction to shaders and texture/UV modification scripts. The later chapters seem to go into great detail about a lot of topics which everyone who uses Unity should know a lot about. Most people probably do not have a Unity Pro license, so the final two chapters will not be useful for those people. However, there are some small pieces of information in those final two chapters which will probably still prove useful for a lot of developers who wish to change how the Unity editor works or make Unity extensions. If you have a creative mind, the book covers a lot of interesting starting templates for bigger projects. It even covers animated textures, which are useful for things like sprite sheet animations and texture atlases.

If I had this book just a month sooner, I would have learned so much from this book. That said, it covers a lot of very interesting topics and gives the information to you in a way that is easy to understand. I can easily justify the $22 price tag for the digital version of this book, and I strongly recommend it to both Unity newbies and intermediate level users. It teaches vital information that is not explained as well elsewhere at this time. Whether you are just getting started with shaders or just need a reminder every now and then, this book could be your shader bible.

[Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been working with shaders in Unity for a few months now, learning most of what I needed from the internet as I went. This can be a tiresome process, scouring forums and unanswered question postings for a hint when you have a problem. This book, Unity Shaders and Effects Cookbook, put out by Packt Publishing, is a solid read for someone looking to learn a bit more about the inner workings of shaders, and how to put that to use for their own projects.

The learning curve for shaders is notoriously difficult, so it's no surprise that books aimed at beginners are hard to find. Unity Shaders and Effects Cookbook is no exception, as it feels aimed at readers with a basic understanding, who are looking to move into an intermediate understanding. The writing is easy enough to understand, with relevant screenshots to help the reader grasp these difficult subjects.

Some of the example shaders seem more complex than they need be to get a point across, so I suggest bearing with it and ignoring the excess code you don't grasp until you're further along in the book. Since shaders are also very hard to debug, you'll likely have to leave all the code provided, whether you understand it yet or not, in order for the shader to compile and display correctly. By the end of the book, you should have a solid understanding of what each shader is doing.

As an added bonus, if you decide to go with an eBook version, there are some helpful weblinks provided for extra reference.

[Brian Riordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

My background is a programmer that has used Unity (and written games in native code) but never written any shader code before.

This book is a great intro to shaders and taking the shaders included in Unity and modifying them to improve the look of your game. Each chapter is standalone and it covers things like reflections, cloth, car paint, effects like night a night vision effect through a scope or giving a scene an old movie look, optimizing your shaders for mobile devices...

The examples are easy to follow. The support code does not include the Unity scenes or textures necessary for some of them, but they are easy to create.

What I really like about the book is it gives you tools you can use today. It's a little light on theory, but getting up and productive quickly is the point of the book.

[Vikas Chaudhary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before starting this book, you should have knowledge of basics of cg shaders or you should go through cg shader tutorials on unity documentation. this book actually helps how to work with shaders. before going through this book i did not know that i can do so much with shaders. topics which has been covered in this book are very awesome. people might be using these concepts but i never found these things in any of books or websites before. very important topic covered in this book was sprites, all the plugins available on unity store used same concept. after this book you will learn how to play with textures, how to use them, blend them to give various photoshop effects.
This is best book available for writing your own customized shaders. I enjoyed it .

[Timur Koshel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice examples, good explanations, but big part of book is outdated.

[Sahil Ramani · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has a few things going for itself. For one, its one of the few books in the niche shader programming world. Add to that the fact that this book addresses in the now ubiquitous Unity engine, and this book gives you all the tools you'll need to get your hands dirty with shaders in your game.

Pros :

1. Good collection of generic shaders.
2. Good breadth of the various types of shaders you may need in your game.
3. Good, sometimes detailed explanation of what's happening under the hood of your shader.

Cons :

1. Isn't written for Unity 4.0, so they have a few shaders for UI development, not exactly relevant anymore, but good to know nonetheless.
2. Some of the shaders seem basic, but that's probably by design. This book isn't for the experienced shader writers anyway.
3. Sometimes I felt I was being spoonfed with algorithms and implementations, without details on why this is so. Limits you from exploring multiple different approaches to solve problems.

That said, this book really help me understand skin/cloth shaders for my game, and also, their implementation of vertex editing on shaders is being explored for my next game.

[Merwyn Fernandes · Rating 5 out of 5]

From a beginner’s point of view I would recommend reading chapter one as you are not taught how to set up a basic shader anymore. So although the recipes do provide you with a step by step guide in How To Do It, you will not be walked through information that you have previously learned in earlier chapters. Once you are familiar with the basics, you’re able to jump to any recipe that you feel is suitable for your project, instead of going through each one. Read more about the book

[Mathias Søholm · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book gets to the point, and lets you write some shaders straight away.
It doesn't provide in-depth information about many of the techniques used, so it's a pretty easy read. This leaves you with a lot of questions to be answered, and some exploring to do.
Which in many ways is a good thing.

Overall a solid intro to surface shaders.

[Teresa Madruga · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whether you are new to shaders or just learning how to adapt glsl to cg unity-like language, this book is a great time saver.