Typically, I ignore ads and product placements on social media. But a few days ago, I was looking through #gameDev on Twitter and came across something that really grabbed my attention: the Unity Shader Bible.
Let me be completely honest. I have not read this book…yet! This is not a recommendation to buy. It just looked really intriguing to me and I wanted to share it. Especially since I’ve just started learning shaders myself. (I’ve even highlighted one of my favorites before: the Spectrum shader from Valorant).
What’s In the Book?
Note, paraphrasing from the Unity Shader Bible official website.
The Unity Shader Bible has 370+ pages ranging from beginner to advanced concepts. Everything is broken down into 3 chapters that progress linearly. Here’s a rough outline:
- Intro to shader language
- Normals, vertices, tangents
- Shader structure
- Properties and global variables
- SubShaders and commands
- Intrinsic functions
- Matrices
- Lighting, shadow, and surface
- Simple lighting model
- Normal map and implementation
- Reflection types
- Lighting and shadow analysis
- Surface shaders
- Shader Graph
- Compute shader, ray tracing, and sphere tracing
- Threads, ray cast, GPGPU
- Compute Shader structure
- Computer Shader semantics
- Kernals
- Implicit surfaces and smooth minimum explanation
- Ray Tracing rendering config
How Much is the Book?
The Unity Shader Bible is available in a digital format for $34.99 or in a paperback version for $54.99.
If you are interested, there is also a free sample of the book available as well. Just fill out the form found on their website and they email the sample to you.
Conclusion
Overall, I think the Unity Shader Bible looks really interesting. Again, I have not bought or read it yet. It’s on my reading list for the next few months. But it really intrigued me, so I wanted to make others aware of it.
If you have read the book, I’d love to hear your opinion on it. Leave us a comment below and let us know your thoughts and opinions on it.
