While most Software Engineers interested in game development will be most excited about the programming aspect of making a game, you’ll need some familiarity with graphics, animation, and sound to be successful. This is especially true if you’re trying to work solo. While a wealth of assets and resources are available in the Asset Store, there’s a decent amount you still need to know to execute well when putting these resources together. In this installment, we’ll discuss Rendering, Render Pipelines, and Lighting in Unity.
This is Unity for Software Engineers, a series for those seeking an accelerated introduction to game development in Unity.
Shaders & Materials
Shaders are programs that help transform a mesh (made out of vertices and faces) into a 3D rendered image. Shaders are parameterized with any number of properties, such as a texture image representing the surface’s appearance, normal maps representing finer bumps on the mesh, and much more. The shader code you write determines what kind of properties it receives if any.
In Unity, each Rendering Pipeline (discussed below) comes with its own set of standard shaders. All rendering pipelines include a “Simple Lit” shader as the most common shader, which helps render an object affected by lighting. In all…
