Lingheng Tony Tao

Writing · 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. 0Unity Shader #0 Maths BasicsVectors, matrices, coordinate spaces and the handful of operations that carry almost every shader you will write.September 5, 2021
  2. 1Unity Shader #1 Render PipelineFollowing one draw call from the CPU to the framebuffer: culling, render queues, SetPass, and each programmable GPU stage.September 19, 2021
  3. 2Unity Shader #2 Code BasicsThe shape of a ShaderLab file: Properties, SubShader, Pass, and the vertex/fragment pair that does the actual work.October 3, 2021
  4. 2.1Unity Shader #2.1 Basic CommandsThe render-state commands available inside a Pass: blending, depth, culling, stencil — the switches most effects are built from.October 10, 2021
  5. 3Unity 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.October 24, 2021
  6. 4Unity Shader #4 Drawing Shapes on UVTreating UV space as a canvas: circles, rectangles, rings and grids drawn purely from arithmetic on the texture coordinate.November 7, 2021
  7. 5Unity 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.November 21, 2021
  8. 6Unity Shader #6 Scan & HologramScan lines, a travelling sweep and a hologram look — built from time, world position and a couple of well-chosen masks.December 5, 2021
  9. 7Unity 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.December 19, 2021
  10. 8Unity Shader #8 DissolveNoise-driven dissolve: the clip threshold, the glowing edge band, and driving the whole thing from a C# script.January 9, 2022
  11. 9Unity Shader #9 Raindrops on LensWater running down the camera lens, built in Shader Graph: droplet placement, refraction offset and the trails they leave behind.January 23, 2022
  12. 13Unity 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.March 6, 2022
  13. 101URP #1 Universal Lit & URP ShaderLabReading Unity's own Universal Lit shader to learn how a URP ShaderLab file is actually organized.March 27, 2022