The first opportunity your game has to grab a potential player’s attention is always through what they see on the screen. Before they even have a chance to feel how well your game controls, hear the great sound effects or understand how fun it is, they look at it. In that brief first glance you have a chance to make an impression that may lead to them deciding whether or not they are interested to buy your game. As game production technology becomes increasingly available and more and more games are being released, standing out from the crowd becomes a challenge. Having unique, compelling visuals becomes more important every day.

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Get Amplify Shader Editor Free Until May 31, Amplify Shader Editor is included free with Unity Plus subscriptions as part of the Accelerator Pack, which also includes 2 other top-selling productivity assets that will help you fast track your development and get your project to the finish line faster. And now the sweetest deal just got sweeter — all subscribers will also receive a bonus Essentials Pack (for a total value up to $375). Learn more

Having great art direction and stylish assets are a positive start, but there is an additional ingredient which can be overlooked by developers. The way that those assets are rendered — specifically, their shaders. When a game engine is preparing to render a frame to the screen there are a few key pieces of data that are required. These pieces include the mesh (or 3D model), the position of the camera, and any lights. We can think of this data as what we are going to render. The missing ingredient is how that data will be rendered as colored pixels on the screen using a program called a shader.

In Unity, shaders must be assigned to a Material. Each Material holds a set of property values. Properties may define things like colors to use, how smooth or metallic a surface should appear, or fields for textures or normal maps. The shader uses the values stored in the material along with its specific rendering instructions to transform all of this data into a two dimensional image on your player’s screen.

Creating custom shaders by writing them in code, either CG or HLSL, is challenging, and has a fairly steep learning curve. Fortunately, graphical shader editing helps to reduce some of the challenges that may arise from typing or syntax errors, and allows you to quickly see the visual effect you are creating. Tools like Amplify Shader Editor offer user-friendly node based visual tools to allow you to create your own custom shaders without typing code. Working in a visual, graphical environment allows you to quickly experiment and try new shader ideas. This improved pace of iteration allows you to hone in on a unique visual style to make your game stand out. In the following Live Training session we will create a transparent, refractive material to simulate an ‘invisibility cloak’ effect using Amplify Shader Editor.

For additional learning material on Amplify Shader Editor check out this tutorial on the Learn area of the Unity website.

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Until May 31, the Accelerator Pack, which includes Playmaker, Ultimate FPS, and Amplify Shader Editor, is included free with new Unity Plus subscriptions — now including a bonus Essentials Pack (a total value up to $375).

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