- Ray Tracing Gems (Series)
Two-volume free online book series on real-time ray tracing techniques from industry experts.
100% match
· <shaders><advanced><access><free><hybrid><production><shadows><techniques> - 5 ways to draw an outline (Alexander Ameye)
Five Ways to Draw an Outline is Alexander Ameye's 2021 note (alexanderameye.github.io / ameye.dev).
100% match
· <shaders><access><free><games><methods><pipelines><real><style> - A gentle introduction to shaders (Alan Zucconi)
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.
100% match
· <shaders><access><developers><free><games><knowledge><long><pipelines> - A Look at Spyro's Portals - Rendering the Background
Daniel Pokladek's November 2020 post begins a Unity series on Spyro Reignited portal shaders, focusing on the background visible through the opening while later installments cover
100% match
· <access><free><games><modern><pipelines><real><series><style> - Alexander Ameye
's blog at ameye.dev (alexanderameye.github.io) is a static Eleventy site documenting Unity graphics engineering experiments.
Sixteen indexed notes explain URP scriptable render passes, Shader Graph stylized water, realtime caustics, cavity and halftone effects, hemisphere sampling, holographic cards, and several outline methods.
100% match
· <shaders><access><free><games><pipelines><real><technical><time> - Believable Caustics Reflections (Alan Zucconi)
Believable Caustics Reflections is Alan Zucconi's September 2019 Unity blog post on faking pool-style ripple caustics without ray tracing, sparked by Florian Gelzenleuchter's popular shader GIF.
One tileable texture is sampled twice in a Surface shader at different scales and scroll speeds, combined with min(), then tinted onto albedo with slight RGB UV offsets for dispersion.
The walkthrough covers _ST tiling, _Time animation, HDR albedo above 1.0, and Post Processing Stack v2 bloom.
100% match
· <shaders><access><com><free><pipelines><real><technical><time> - Blending Meshes into Terrain (Inresin)
Louis Waloschek's April 2020 Inresin tutorial blends static meshes into Unity Terrain using baked depth masks and Amplify surface shaders.
100% match
· <code><shaders><advanced><access><free><games><pipelines><real> - Blur Renderer Feature Example/Template for URP / Unity 2021.2 (Alexander Ameye)
Custom Render Passes in Unity is Alexander Ameye's July 2021 ameye.dev note on URP ScriptableRendererFeature and ScriptableRenderPass boilerplate, heavily commented where Unity SRP documentation still feels sparse.
The sample applies a two-pass box blur: blit camera color to a temporary buffer, blur vertically then horizontally, with adjustable strength and downsampling.
100% match
· <code><shaders><access><api><effects><free><pipelines><real> - Constraint-Based Tile Generators (BorisTheBrave)
Constraint-Based Tile Generators is BorisTheBrave's October 2021 survey unifying WaveFunctionCollapse and Model Synthesis as constraint-based tile generators that fill a grid under hard local rules.
Boris organizes variants by model (adjacency versus overlapping patches), constraint inference from samples, labels, or tile borders, solvers from arc consistency to Z3, cell and tile heuristics, contradiction handling, and non-square grids.
100% match
· <access><call><free><part><pipelines><real><technical><techniques> - Cyanilux
(cyanilux.com) is Cyan's personal site for free Unity shader tutorials, organized into long-form Posts and effect-focused Breakdowns with expandable screenshots.
Posts explain Shader Graph basics, depth, vertex displacement, custom URP renderer features, and render passes.
100% match
· <shaders><access><effects><free><pipelines><real><technical><time> - Deferred Shading (CatlikeCoding)
Rendering 13 on Catlike Coding is Jasper Flick's chapter on Unity deferred shading, part of the Built-in RP Rendering series (Unity 5.5).
100% match
· <advanced><access><free><part><pipelines><real><series><shading> - Easing Functions
Easings.net is a free interactive cheat sheet by Andrey Sitnik and Ivan Solovev for choosing easing functions that control how a parameter changes over normalized animation time.
The catalog lists quad, cubic, quart, quint, exponential, circular, elastic, and bounce curves in ease-in, ease-out, and ease-in-out forms.
100% match
· <access><free><page><pipelines><real><technical><time><working> - Easy Outlines (Daniel Ilett)
Daniel Ilett's June 2021 Bytesize Gamedev article on danielilett.com shows crisp block-color outlines on 3D Unity meshes via Universal Render Pipeline Shader Graph, without post-processing.
You build an Unlit URP graph, enable two-sided rendering, and alpha-clip front faces with Is Front Face, Branch, and a 0.5 threshold so only an expanded back-face shell renders.
100% match
· <shaders><access><free><games><pipelines><real><series><technical> - Fast Subsurface Scattering (John Austin, May 2020)
John Austin's May 2020 johnaustin.io post adds subsurface scattering to Unity's Universal Render Pipeline for a soft Oculus Quest VR look under tight mobile fill-rate limits.
Instead of deferred light-buffer blur, he uses forward wrapped diffuse from a Journal of Graphics Tools paper, with Valve-style wrapping, normalization, and a custom HLSL LightingSubsurface pass.
100% match
· <shaders><access><free><lighting><materials><pipelines><real><scattering> - Froyok
Léna Piquet's technical-art blog at froyok.fr/articles.html, where she shares years of real-time rendering notes alongside her Adobe Substance 3D Painter work.
Coverage centers on Unreal Engine 4: custom bloom and lens-flare post-processes, distance-field textures, portals, render-target UI, and selective engine-source changes.
100% match
· <access><creed><engine><free><games><pipelines><real><technical> - GPUGems - Chapter 38. Fast Fluid Dynamics Simulation on the GPU
Harris's GPU Gems Chapter 38 explains fast, stable 2D fluid simulation on the GPU.
100% match
· <access><com><free><html><pipelines><real><series><technical> - Grass Geometry Shader (Roystan)
Erik Roystan Ross's Unity Grass Shader Tutorial on roystan.net is a Built-in RP walkthrough, billed at about sixty minutes, that extends a downloadable starter scene in HLSL.
A
100% match
· <shaders><advanced><access><engine><free><pipelines><real><shadows> - Grass System (MinionsArt)
MinionsArt's Grass System page on minionsart.github.io indexes a Unity foliage toolkit whose tutorials and packages sit on Patreon.
100% match
· <code><shaders><access><com><free><links><pipelines><real> - Harry Alisavakis
ShaderQuest walks from 3D mesh concepts through ShaderLab, URP and built-in pipeline examples, syntax, colors, and shaping functions, with updating GitHub sample projects.
100% match
· <shaders><access><free><pipelines><real><series><technical><time> - Impossible Geometry: Non-Euclidean Cubes
Alan Zucconi's 2015 Unity post opens his Impossible Geometry series on alanzucconi.com.
100% match
· <access><free><part><pipelines><real><series><technical><time>