The Unity Shaders Bible

Written by

Fabrizio Espíndola

Senior Technical Artist at

The Unity Shaders Bible is a comprehensive guide to creating shaders in Unity. The book covers everything, starting with the basics and finishing with advanced concepts such as raytracing and compute shaders. It provides a detailed explanation of languages like Cg, HLSL, ShaderLab, and Shader Graph.

The book is written in a clear and concise style, and it is suitable for readers of all levels of experience. Whether you are a beginner who is just starting to learn about shaders, or an experienced artist who wants to learn more about the latest techniques, The Unity Shaders Bible is a valuable resource.

If you are interested in learning more about shaders, or if you want to improve your skills in Unity, then The Unity Shaders Bible is a must-have book.

1. Introduction to the shader programming language.

• It covers previous knowledge (normals, vertices, tangents, and more).
• Shows the structure of a shader in ShaderLab, Cg, and HLSL language.
• Analogy between properties and global variables.
• SubShader and commands (ColorMask, Stencil, Blending and more).
• Intrinsic functions (step, smoothstep, ceil, floor and more).
• Matrices and much more.

2. Lighting, shadow and surface.

• We will review a simple lighting model.
• Look at the normal map and its implementation.
• Ambient, diffuse, specular and environmental reflection.
• Lighting and shadow analysis.
• Standard Surface shader, inputs and outputs.
• Shader Graph and much more.

3. Compute shader, ray tracing and sphere tracing.

• It covers advanced concepts (threads, ray cast, GPGPU, and more).
• The structure of a Compute Shader and buffer variables.
• Compute Shader semantics (SV_DispatchThreadID, SV_Group, and more).
• Kernel explanation.
• Implicit surfaces and smooth minimum explanation.
• Ray Tracing rendering configuration and more.

It includes a package with more than 40 shader exercises.