Getting Cozy with Shader Forge for Unity 3D

Lesson 1 will get you up and running with the Shader Forge editor quickly. We will step through each of the features, learn about how to work with nodes, and learn how to organize our shader development.

The best thing to do when learning a new tool is to make something! In this lesson we will build up a very basic shader, using the most basic elements in the Shader Forge editor.

In this lesson we will learn how to build our own custom lit shader, which will give you the power to create just about any type of shader you want. Understand how to utilize Shader Forge to create custom lighting and shaders is key to your shader creation adventures!

Building on Lesson 3 we will evolve our basic custom shader to add normal maps, and learn how we can use ambient lighting to give our shader a bit more realism. By the end of this lesson you will have learned how to set up your very own custom shader, which supports all your basic needs for any AAA game.

In todays world of Game graphics, games make heavy use of Cubemaps, or a spherical image broken up into 6 individual images. Using these Cubemaps, provides a tool to create much more realistic lighting and shading, and has become the backbone of PBR lighting in todays game engines. In this lesson we will walk through the basics of how to utilize Cubemaps and look at ways we can generate these Cubemaps.

Lets pick up where we left off in Lecture 6 and finish off our study of Ambient Cube Maps and Lighting.

Texture splatting and Vertex colors have been a staple in the real time rendering pipeline for quite some time now. So it's a good idea to learn how it is done using Shader Forge. By the end of lesson 4 you will have created your very own vertex blended shader, which can blend up to four textures. Very useful for terrain or modular environment geometry.

We can take the Ramped lighting effects seen in lesson 7 one step further by also taking into account the view direction. Let's take a look at how we can create a fake BRDF (Bi-Directional Reflectance Distribution Function), and see how we can take advantage of every pixel in a 2D texture lookup.

With the rise of mobile gaming, achieving more toon like effects with your shaders, has never been more relevant. So in honor of the toon-esque mobile games out there, we will build a toon shader, complete with outlines, and ramped lighting.

Whew! That was a ton of stuff crammed into our brains. This lesson will conclude the “Getting Cozy with Shader Forge” Series, and will review everything that we learned.