Hi Guys!
We’ve teamed up with Alex Telford to bring you a new “Noob to Pro Shader writing in Unity 4” series!
This multi-part multi-series series is aimed at taking your skills from flat color fragment shaders, to full on DirectX-11 uber-shaders!
And of course, it’s aimed at artists, not programmers so it’s all human readable code
We will be learning how to write clean, well formatted vertex/fragment shaders from scratch without the need for any surface shaders or cgincludes, while explaining everything from what a float variable is to controlling shaders with scripts and even creating custom image effects!
So here’s a sneak peak at some of the shaders, and we are open for suggestions if you want to learn anything specific.
And as an added bonus:
Maya/Max users - these shaders are written in the same language as the viewport CGFX shaders so you will have the knowledge to write shaders in both unity and maya/max!
I’m super excited to get this underway so I hope you’re excited too!
If you have any questions feel free to ask them here!
Terrain and Water - there seems to be a lot of requests for these, I’ll add it to Alex’s list and see if he can come up with something epic
Shield fx - Can you link to an example? (movie or game, just helps us see what you mean)
Clouds - We are covering volumetrics in the advanced portion
Sky - This is as easy as a rotating sphere (top half has Day cube map, bottom half has night) or a color lerp. we will learn the techniques for this in the introduction portion
nice. i know this is for artist, but I would love to see some actual CG code thrown in…so the skills will be more easily transferable outside of unity. I think both programmers and artist would benefit from that.
Hi Kablammyman, The way CG shaders are written are like this:
//Software Specific Interface stuff (interface stuff, culling etc)
//CG Shader
//Closing Tags and Fallbacks
The CG Shader part will work in any software with the exception of things like _World2Object has a different name in other software. We also have a 3DS Max site where Alex may come in and do some conversion tutorials for max and maya after the series.
Would anyone be willing to make a shader tutorial focused on creating negative light sources? I keep hearing that “it’s possible with shaders”, but no one’s really explained how, and I don’t really need shaders for anything else, so I don’t want to have to learn the ins and outs of shader coding. Is that lazy? Probably. But I don’t want to have to wade through the tutorials looking for a way to do one small thing.
Still kind of pisses me off that Unity doesn’t support simple negative light sources.
