Learn Unity Shaders from Scratch

Learn to build a simple unlit shader by creating a new scene, adding a quad, and implementing vertex and fragment shaders that return a solid red color.

Explore CGI vectors in Unity shaders by creating type 2–4 vectors, converting types, passing values from Unity to shaders, and using swizzling, time uniforms, and trig to animate color.

Learn how the Unity properties panel feeds a color property into a Cg shader, then blend color a and color b over time using delta and swizzle.

Discover how vertex shader UV values interpolate in the fragment shader to blend two colors across a quad in Unity, using a V2F data structure.

Learn to create hard color edges and soft transitions in Unity shaders using step and smoothstep, adjusting edge values and eye position to produce yellow blocks and circles.

Draw a circle in a shader using the step function on the distance from the center with radius 0.25 and position x y, and color inside with fixed yellow value.

Learn how to draw a square in Unity shaders by building a custom rect function that tests a fragment against a centered rectangle using the step function, returning 1 inside.

Move the square around the screen by adjusting its center and size, and render a yellow square using the rect method and a fixed color vector. Try a two-squares challenge.

Move a shader-driven square in Unity by mapping mouse position to texture coordinates via a raycast on a quad, then pass the UVs to the shader at runtime.

Move a square in a circle using time, sine, and cosine in a Unity shader, and update the center with time and radius to control the orbit.

Learn to rotate a square in Unity shaders using a two-dimensional rotation matrix, rotating about the square's center by subtracting and adding the center, driven by time.

Rotate around a chosen anchor by adding a fourth parameter to the rect function and using an anchor point, then build rotation and scaling matrices for time-based transformations.

Switch uv coordinates for the quad to 0–1 range and use a tile count with the frac function to create multiple squares, teaching uv space and tiling in Unity shaders.

Learn to draw circles in Unity shaders by testing pixel distance from a center, using radius-based circle tests, and adding soft edges and outlines with smoothstep.

Learn to draw lines in Unity shaders from scratch, using a line test with smoothstep and edge thickness. Apply UV coordinates and coordinate space conversion to render diagonal lines.

Combine multiple lines and circles in Unity shaders to create a rotating sweep around the screen center, using UV coordinates, color addition, dot products, and gradient tricks.

Learn to render a polygon using a six-parameter polygon function, calculating test point, center, radius, and sides with rotation and trigonometric math.

Create a brick pattern in Unity shaders using horizontal and offset rows with UV coordinates and mortar logic. Color with break and multicolor options, and add noise for realism.

Discover how noise adds naturalism to Unity shaders using random functions and Ken Perlin's smoothing to create varied textures.

Move noise in the y direction with the time uniform, layer three noise textures at scales, then blend red and yellow colors using alpha and tiling for a fire shader.

Leverage noise functions, including the pearling technique, to create wood and marble textures in Unity shaders, tweaking ring scale, contrast, and color to control look and patterns.

Explore texturing in shaders by applying an image to a quad, sampling with tex2D using UV coordinates, and experimenting with flipping, rotating, and grayscaling the texture.

Explore how to create a ripple effect on an image by selecting different texels from a texture, driven by time-based parameters and center-based coordinates.

Blend between two textures in Unity shaders using a custom material and a UI button to drive a time-based fade with start time and delta.

Turn a box into a sphere with a vertex shader in Unity, blending between the model position and a radius-controlled sphere, animated by delta time to breathe.

Learn Lambert lighting in Unity by converting normals to world space, calculating lighting with the dot product of world normal and directional light, and ensuring lighting values stay nonnegative.

Learn to build a lava bowl in Unity using a vertex shader driven by noise, turbulence, and P noise, then color via a fragment shader and small texture.

Explore shader lab surface shaders by implementing a surface function with input and output structs, using lambert lighting to combine albedo, texture, and UVs for a textured character.

Learn how bump mapping uses a texture to define normals and offset lighting via the fragment shader, sampling a normal map's rgb channels.

Explore fresnel shading to add a rim light in Unity, using rim color, width, and power, driven by the dot product of the surface normal and view direction.

Learn how to implement environment mapping in Unity by using cube maps to reflect surroundings, control reflection strength, and integrate the vertex world reflection vector in a surface shader.

Add a bump map to a reflective surface in Unity shaders, enabling per-pixel reflections with bump map UVs, normal unpacking, and updated input and serve functions.

Explore Blinn-Phong lighting and how specular highlights arise from surface gloss and specular power. See how Unity surface shaders utilize Lambert and Blinn-Phong models to control shininess and reflections.

Create a simple Lambert lighting shader using a lighting function with the normal and light direction dot product and max clamp, then explore ramp lighting and an outline pass.

Learn Unity shaders from scratch explores standard lighting with a physically based shader, adding smoothness, metallic, bump maps, rim lighting, and instancing to optimize rendering.

Add a vertex function to a Unity surface shader. Move vertices along their normals using a user adjustable extrusion amount exposed as a property.

Learn to implement shadows in a vertex fragment shader for Unity lighting, adding Lambert lighting, ambient color, directional light calculations, and multi-compile shadow variants.

Implement a position location shader that highlights the clicked walk target with a white circle by using world position, a radius, and a circle color in the fragment shader.

Master tessellation in Unity by subdividing triangles and displacing interior vertices along interpolated normals to create a smooth Phong displacement.

Learn to use the stencil buffer in Unity to reveal a house interior by rendering a quad first, writing stencil ref 1, and drawing only where the stencil passes.

Learn how to clip shader output in Unity using clip, frac, and world position y to reveal or hide a character with a time based reveal effect.

Explore alpha transparency in Unity surface shaders by using the alpha channel of textures, adjusting render queues, alpha fade, and shadow passes to create stained-glass window effects.

Learn to turn a textured mesh into glass using a vertex and fragment shader, grab pass, and an environment map. Tune transparency, reflection, and blending with bump maps and normals.

Explore volumetric rendering in Unity shaders by ray casting to render a colored sphere inside a cube, using ray marching, clipping, and camera-space calculations to achieve volumes.

Master ray marching in Unity shaders by sampling a 12 by 12 texture atlas of 144 smoke textures, and accumulate alpha to render volumetric clouds.