Shader Series

Writing shaders is an art and a science.  It’s a skill that game programmers should have but, often don’t today.  Even many tech artists focus more on tools that solve their problems at a high level and not on the nitty gritty shader work. This shader tutorial collection aims to fix that.

It used to be that any game on any engine had tons of custom shaders to even get basic rendering done.  Nowadays the custom shader isn’t necessary most of the time which makes its creation a far less common skill to have. Many programmers never master the skill. What they don’t realize is that when it is used, it can be used very powerfully.  

This shader tutorial series will take you from wherever you are, even “I think I’ve heard of shaders” all the way to making beautiful effects from scratch.

There are many tools that help with shader creation by using node based editors to design a shader.  In this tutorial, I will explore both tool driven development, and code driven. At the core, my main goal is to teach concepts, and then applications on top of those concepts. In many instances, code is a clearer medium for teaching a concept, but not in all cases.

For the most part these tutorials will focus on how to work within Unity. Similar to the sentiment towards node graphs, however, my sentiment here is that where possible I will teach the general concept, and perhaps just display it within Unity. Thus I’m hoping many of these Unity example will conceptually carry over to whatever platform you may be using.  

As I create new posts, I’ll link them here.

If there are specific topics you’d like covered, please let me know in the comments below.

1. High Level Concepts
2. Basic Shaders
3. Shaders In Unity
4. Unity Shader Graph
5. Colors as Math (update for shader graph)
6. Custom Shader Graph Nodes
7. Intro to Vertex and Geometry Shaders OR (newer) Geometry Shaders in URP
8. How To Calculate Shader Graph Normals
9. Paper Shader in Unity
10. Paper Burn Shader
11. Full Screen Shaders in HDRP, URP, and Built In Renderer
12. Heat Haze in Shader Graph
13. Old Movie Shader Graph
14. Shockwave Shader Graph

Do something. Make progress Have fun.