Earlier this year, Unity 2018 introduced one of its cool new features, the ShaderGraph. With it, we now have a new visual editor for creating shaders. Gone are the days of muddling through esoteric lines of Cg, HLSL and ShaderLab. You can now drag and drop to create your very own shaders!

ShaderGraph currently only supports the Lightweight and High Definition Render Pipelines and features several dozen nodes that allow you construct shaders by creating a graph network.

Here are a couple of videos to get you started. First we need to setup our project to use the Scriptable Render Pipeline.

Now we make our first ShaderGraph. It’s super simple but we go over the various parts of the Shader Editor.

These are excerpts from some new material that is being developed for the Unity Technical Artist: Lighting for Game Development course. If you are interested in more about lighting and shading, please check out the complete course here.

Thanks for watching! Part 2 of this series will extend our ShaderGraph to create a glowing highlight effect.

Also, congratulations to Thomas H from Nogata, Japan, who won our October giveaway. Each month one lucky subscriber will be selected to win a free premium course! Just sign up below to make sure you’re included in the monthly drawing.

REFERENCES

Unity3d ShaderGraph

Github: ShaderGraph Getting Started