Since their introduction to Unity, shaders have been seen as notoriously difficult to understand and implement in games. Complex mathematics has always stood in the way of creating your own shaders and attaining the level of realism you crave.

Unity 2018 Shaders and Effects Cookbook changes that by giving you a recipe-based guide to creating shaders using Unity. It will show you everything you need to know about vectors, how lighting is constructed with them, and how textures are used to create complex effects without the heavy math.

This book starts by teaching you how to use shaders without writing code with the post-processing stack. Then, you’ll learn how to write shaders from scratch, build up essential lighting, and finish by creating stunning screen effects just like those in high-quality 3D and mobile games. You'll discover techniques, such as normal mapping, image-based lighting, and animating your models inside a shader. We'll explore how to use physically based rendering to treat light the way it behaves in the real world. At the end, we’ll even look at Unity 2018’s new Shader Graph system.

With this book, what seems like a dark art today will be second nature by tomorrow.

John P. Doran is a passionate and seasoned technical game designer, software

engineer, and author who is based in Redmond, Washington. For over a decade,

John has built games in roles ranging from game designer to lead UI

programmer. Additionally, John has taught game development in Singapore,

South Korea, and the United States. To date, he has authored over 10 books

pertaining to game development.

Alan Zucconi is a passionate developer, author, and lecturer, recognized as one

of Develop's 30 under 30. His expertise has been built over the past 10 years,

working in the intersection between creativity and education. Starting in 2015,

he published a series of educational tutorials for other developers and machine

learning enthusiasts