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Technical Art/13 parts

Unity Shader

Shader notes written from the technical-artist side: the maths, the pipeline, and then a run of concrete effects built in ShaderLab and URP.

  1. 01Unity Shader #0 Maths BasicsVectors, matrices, coordinate spaces and the handful of operations that carry almost every shader you will write.2021-09-05 · 7 min read
  2. 02Unity Shader #1 Render PipelineFollowing one draw call from the CPU to the framebuffer: culling, render queues, SetPass, and each programmable GPU stage.2021-09-19 · 9 min read
  3. 03Unity Shader #2 Code BasicsThe shape of a ShaderLab file: Properties, SubShader, Pass, and the vertex/fragment pair that does the actual work.2021-10-03 · 7 min read
  4. 04Unity Shader #2.1 Basic CommandsThe render-state commands available inside a Pass: blending, depth, culling, stencil — the switches most effects are built from.2021-10-10 · 3 min read
  5. 05Unity Shader #3 URP UpgradePorting a Built-in RP shader to URP: tags, HLSL blocks, the new include paths, and the helper functions that replaced the old ones.2021-10-24 · 4 min read
  6. 06Unity Shader #4 Drawing Shapes on UVTreating UV space as a canvas: circles, rectangles, rings and grids drawn purely from arithmetic on the texture coordinate.2021-11-07 · 5 min read
  7. 07Unity Shader #5 Rim LightA Fresnel rim light from first principles — the dot product, the power curve, and the shader plumbing that carries a normal to the fragment stage.2021-11-21 · 7 min read
  8. 08Unity Shader #6 Scan & HologramScan lines, a travelling sweep and a hologram look — built from time, world position and a couple of well-chosen masks.2021-12-05 · 6 min read
  9. 09Unity Shader #7 Anime Toon ShaderJapanese-style cel shading in URP: inverted-hull outlines and a ramp-driven two-tone shading model, with the failure cases spelled out.2021-12-19 · 6 min read
  10. 10Unity Shader #8 DissolveNoise-driven dissolve: the clip threshold, the glowing edge band, and driving the whole thing from a C# script.2022-01-09 · 4 min read
  11. 11Unity Shader #9 Raindrops on LensWater running down the camera lens, built in Shader Graph: droplet placement, refraction offset and the trails they leave behind.2022-01-23 · 7 min read
  12. 12Unity Shader #13 Post-ProcessingScreen-space post effects end to end: grabbing the camera target, the blit, and a run of concrete effects from grayscale to bloom.2022-03-06 · 11 min read
  13. 13URP #1 Universal Lit & URP ShaderLabReading Unity's own Universal Lit shader to learn how a URP ShaderLab file is actually organized.2022-03-27 · 2 min read