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Shader Fundamentals (CatlikeCoding)

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Description

Rendering 2: Shader Fundamentals is Jasper Flick's second Catlike Coding Unity tutorial on how meshes become pixels. It continues part one's matrix work and replaces the default Standard shader with a custom unlit program on a minimal sphere scene.

The article disables skybox and direct lighting to expose culling, materials, SubShader passes, CG/HLSL vertex and fragment programs, properties, varyings, and texture sampling with tiling and offset. It also shows compiled shader output for different graphics APIs.

Written for beginners who finished part one; examples use Unity 5.4 Built-in Pipeline syntax, though the pipeline story still applies to handwritten shaders today.

Free on catlikecoding.com, linking forward in the Rendering series on lighting, shadows, and deferred shading. Catlike Coding is often recommended to Unity programmers learning rendering from code first.