Learn Unity Shaders from Scratch

A complete guide to Unity ShaderLab, URP Shaders, Shader Graph and the HLSL Shading Language

Created by: Nicholas Lever
Game developer

What Will I Learn?

• The mysteries of writing Unity shaders
• You will be gently introduced to how to approach the problem of creating a custom shader.
• You will learn the full details of the HLSL shader language.
• You will learn to use the Surface Shader syntax to add custom shaders on top of Unity lighting.
• You will start with simple unlit 2D shaders and work up to advanced effects such as volumetric shaders and clipping.
• Learn to create shaders that work with the Universal Render Pipeline (URP)
• Learn to use Shader Graph to create your shaders

Requirements

• All you need is a copy of Unity, freely available for students.
• A knowledge of the basics of using Unity is assumed, this is readily available by many online tutorials.
• No knowledge of shaders is assumed.
• A knowledge of a programming language would help but is not assumed.

Target audience

• Unity developers who need to go beyond the shaders available on the platform.
• Developers keen to learn the HLSL shading language for other development platforms such as Unreal.