This unit gave us the chance to get our feet wet making shaders using Shaderforge, a sweet little plugin for Unity. This program quickly became one of the most enjoyable tools I’ve found in Unity so far.
For our current work, no shaders are strictly required, but we were given the rundown on a few of the basic output functions and away we went.
The Cell Sort-of
There were a few boys in class who were looking to make a cell shader. Shane told us ‘That’s a whole other kettle of fish’, and we didn’t have the time, but he gave us some tips on how to get there the cheap and dirty way.
This is quite a simple shader to create from scratch, once you know how it works. It looks a bit manky on the sphere, but the effect works well on static shapes.
The illusion is easy to understand when applied to a cube, the faces are displaced outwards and have their normal reversed so you only see the black underside.
The Most Beautiful Shader
He’s a little gem made by panning an image of some nameless male model across a sphere, and simultaneously using the image as co-ordinates for vertex displacement, similar to the last shader.
I love this shader so much that I see it in my dreams as well as my waking nightmares. Sometimes it tells me to cause immeasurable pain to people who don’t use Unreal.
Just a quick shot of some of the shaders we have on a few objects in our background parallax. Also note, our flat shading is across everything now!
We are still yet to run a solid lighting pass, thanks to a few key pointers from our teachers (You guys, you rock!). Once we get the other foreground objects in, and scene props things should look really great!
Still a few glitchy things to work out, but it’s shaping up great!
Found some time to toy around with shader forge going through a couple of the tutorials from the shader forge website.
As much as everyone has said that this tool is powerful, the usual rule of experiencing something rather than being told about it still holds. Having seen how much this tool can do i’m planning on setting aside some time each week to toying around with it and testing out its applications.
Today I decided to buy Shader Forge a commercial plugin for Unity that allows you to create shaders with a node base system(no coding required). It’s a hefty price, but with a one off payment I’ll be getting a lot of use over the next coming months if not years to come.
Anyway these are the shaders I created following some tutorials online(be mindful it’s really hard to find useful tutorials about Shader Forge, so be prepared to play around with it for a while)
EDIT: Here is a image of the water within my latest game
Had another venture into shader forge tutorials today, this time with something to potentially help out with my current project by cleaning up some UI.
A lot goes into this, even something as basic as this radial health bar, I’m so excited to see the possible applications of this tool. The complexity can very quickly get out of hand with this, so staying on top of keeping everything organised is going to be a skill that i will need to work on.