A gentle introduction to shaders (Alan Zucconi)
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Alan Zucconi
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Alan Zucconi's A gentle introduction to shaders in Unity3D (June 2015) is part one of his Gentle Introduction series on alanzucconi.com, aimed at Unity developers new to GPU programs.
It connects vertices, materials, and shaders in Unity's pipeline, covering ShaderLab Properties and SubShader layout, inspector uniforms, Queue tags, ZTest, and the surface-versus-vertex/fragment split for lighting versus effects.
Little prior shader knowledge is assumed; fixed-function shaders are skipped as obsolete. Short Cg/HLSL samples preview Lambert surfaces and a flat-color pass developed in later posts.
Five linked chapters and a downloadable package follow; this page is free online with no registration.
Often listed among introductory Unity shader reads and referenced from Zucconi's later PBR and image-effect tutorials.
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