Unity 2021 Shaders and Effects Cookbook

in 2020 Unity introduced shader graph & VFX graph as a way for people who didn't want to learn to code HLSL to create shaders. It is a successful feature in my opinion, lots of studios now use it. This book dedicates the last chapter to shader graph, almost like an afterthought. The bulk of it is HLSL, just FYI.

This book requires a basic understanding of Unity. That being said, the author goes through the steps needed one at a time in clear instructions.Much better than trying to decipher some YouTube video on the subject.Well worth the $$.

This book introduces mainly to the Built-In Render Pipeline, explaining the basics of Unity's Cg implementation ShaderLab. It gives a very good overview of Unity logic when it comes to shaders and how to pass data around, and has a handful of quick to implement recipes that will indeed help out your game look better and run faster.However, it has a few limitations. It does not introduce to the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) specifications, which are entirely different of the Built-In. Now, most principles remain the same and it shouldn't be too difficult to acclimate to URP coming from Built-In, but it requires upgrading everything you'd written with the help of this book.It does hover on Shader Graph for URP and HDRP, but again, it is relatively superficial (just a couple of chapters).Sometimes the author also glosses over a few #pragma tags and leaves the reader in the blue for finding the documentation, but it's rare, and googling the mysterious tag will bring you the right documentation. It would have been agreeable however to have more information about Unity's CG, its organization, and what to fetch in what kind of case.But the biggest problem in my view is that it doesn't give any advanced conception on maths and image processing algorithms. Most of the book is step-by-step boilerplate to get specific shaders running.I do find it a bit expensive for what it is. What is in it is very good, but it's lesser than what's advertised on the cover.TL; DR:Pros:- Extremely clear, step-by-step tutorials you can't go wrong with- Good explanation of every single step- Good clever small tips to improve performance in simple projects- Good introduction to shaders for people who barely wrote any shader before- Quick and concise overview of Unity ShaderLab's properties and logic- Fast to implement (you can go through the entire book in less than a week)- Repeats simple work patterns so they sink inCons:- No in-depth explanations of image processing theory and the useful maths for shaders out of trivial functions- Doesn't say anything about ShaderLab for URP and HLSL- Optimization tips don't dive very deep- Not enough on Shader Graph- A lot of space in the book is taken for boilerplate operations which gets repetitive over timeIf you are entirely new to shaders (or almost), I cannot recommend this book enough. It will clarify most if not all of the confusion one can have as a beginner when seeing a Unity shader, and help you to start to have a grasp on the nice world of shader, with more satisfying results than trying to learn GLSL or HLSL with tutorials online. Beginner in technical art and VFXs, this book is for you.If you already have a good idea of what a shader is and have already written a few of them in the Built-In and would like to go to the next level, this book might well just fall short.

But it arrived with a completely bent cover.

I ordered printed version and suprised to see color images being printed with low contrast black and white printer. The book includes link to color images to download, but if I wanted to see things on a screen I would have ordered digital version not printed.