Shaders
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Shaders

All rendering in Unity is done with Shaders - small scripts that let you configure the how the graphics hardware is set up for rendering. Unity ships with 60+ built-in shaders (documented in the Built-in Shader Guide). You can extend this by making your own shaders.

Shaders in Unity can be written in one of three different ways:

Regardless of which type you choose, the actual meat of the shader code will always be wrapped in ShaderLab, which is used to organize the shader structure. It looks like this:

Shader "MyShader" {
    Properties {
        _MyTexture ("My Texture", 2D) = "white" { }
        // other properties like colors or vectors go here as well
    }
    SubShader {
        // here goes the 'meat' of your
        //  - surface shader or
        //  - vertex and fragment shader or
        //  - fixed function shader
    }
    SubShader {
        // here goes a simpler version of the SubShader above that can run on older graphics cards
    }
} 

We recommend that you start by reading about some basic concepts of the ShaderLab syntax in the ShaderLab reference and then move on to the tutorials listed below.

The tutorials include plenty of examples for the different types of shaders. For even more examples of surface shaders in particular, you can get the source of Unity's built-in shaders from the Resources section. Unity's Image Effects package contains a lot of interesting vertex and fragment shaders.

Read on for an introduction to shaders, and check out the shader reference!

Page last updated: 2011-12-05