Shader Showcase 2 ~ WGD Lightning Talk 2


The Palette Swap shader




He’s going grey after doing this job so long.





Floating-point numbers keep your shaders ship-shape.




fixed4 x = tex2D(_MainTex, i.uv);
float y = x.r * 2;






The Mesh Explosion shader


Directed by Michael Bay.





// Calculate the normal vector in the normal way.
e0 = v0 - v1;
e1 = v2 - v1;
n = normalise(cross(e1, e0));
Just a normal day for a triangle.




Shader Showcase ~ WGD Lightning Talk
















half3x3 magicNumbers = half3x3 

half3 sepia = mul(tex.rgb, magicNumbers);














Seaside Kingdom Doggo raised this game’s review average by 19 points.






TFW you turn up to a formal occasion in casual clothing.








ShaderLab Programming #1 – Sepia Blend Shader

Now that exams are over, I’ve had time to actually breathe and, more importantly, do game dev stuff. I’ve rarely touched computer graphics in the past, but it’s an area I’ve always wanted to explore in detail. This summer, I plan to mostly spend my time learning the intricacies of computer graphics, and that’s partially where Unity’s ShaderLab steps in.

ShaderLab is a graphics language in its own right, but it also encompasses Cg, a high-level shader language by Nvidia, and HLSL, a Microsoft shader language for use with DirectX, both of which were developed together. We don’t need to know too much about the structure of ShaderLab programs for what we’re doing, so I’m largely going to ignore it for now. I needed to create a post-processing effect similar to Unity’s built-in Sepia Tone, which is an on/off effect, with a tweak that allows it to fade in and out instead. It’s for a game I’m working on in which you can turn back time – more on that in the coming days when I’ve put together something a bit more concrete hopefully! Let’s deconstruct this super-simple program and explore what a sepia effect actually is. Unfortunately, Unity’s Sepia Tone shader seems to use some sort of maths wizardry for its fragment shader that I don’t understand, so I’ll also be writing mine mostly from scratch. Here’s the number bullshit right here:

fixed4 frag (v2f_img i) : SV_Target
    fixed4 original = tex2D(_MainTex, i.uv);
    // get intensity value (Y part of YIQ color space)
    fixed Y = dot (fixed3(0.299, 0.587, 0.114), original.rgb);

    // Convert to Sepia Tone by adding constant
    fixed4 sepiaConvert = float4 (0.191, -0.054, -0.221, 0.0);
    fixed4 output = sepiaConvert + Y;
    output.a = original.a;
    return output;

The infinite wisdom of the Internet tells us that to convert a source image to a sepia-tone version, we just define a function of the input colours as follows:

new red = min(in red * 0.393 + in green * 0.769 + in blue * 0.189, 255)
new green = min(in red * 0.349 + in green * 0.686 + in blue * 0.168, 255)
new blue = min(in red * 0.272 + in green * 0.534 + in blue * 0.131, 255)

This formula represents 100% sepia; that is, the source image completely turned into a sepia tone. But we don’t always want a completely sepia image – we need to incorporate some sort of progress measure. Using this formula, we can just interpolate between the input colour and the full sepia tone and use a separate script to control the ‘progress’ of the interpolation. I’ve talked about interpolation before, so if this really big word is confusing, it just means we’re picking a colour on an imaginary line between ‘original colour’ and ‘sepia colour’, with a parameter between 0 and 1. We can now create another function to get our final ‘blended’ sepia colour:

out red = parameter * new red + (1 - parameter) * in red
out green = parameter * new green + (1 - parameter) * in green
out blue = parameter * new blue + (1 - parameter) * blue

With the theory out of the way, we can now create the shader and the script that will control it. We’ll be utilising the post-processing effects provided by Unity, so make sure you import them from the Standard Assets using Assets->Import Package->Effects from the menu bar. We’ll start with the controller script.

There are two main ways to keep track of the progress, so I’ll cover both. The first way is to define a method such that another script can just pass in a float to act as the parameter.

using UnityEngine;

namespace UnityStandardAssets.ImageEffects
    [AddComponentMenu("Image Effects/Color Adjustments/Sepia Blend")]
    public class SepiaBlend : ImageEffectBase
        private float progress = 0f;
        private bool active = false;

        private void SetProgress(float progress)
            this.progress = progress;
            active = (progress == 0f);

        // Called by camera to apply image effect.
        void OnRenderImage(RenderTexture source, RenderTexture destination)
                material.SetFloat("_Progress", progress);
                Graphics.Blit(source, destination, material);

OnRenderImage() is the method called when we want to render a post-processing image. We set the ‘progress’ parameter of the material attached to this project – we’ll see how this works with that material’s shader shortly – and use Graphics.Blit() to apply the texture created by the shader to the screen. The second way to control the progress parameter is to allow external scripts to set the ‘active’ boolean and use a time-based interpolation to decide what the progress should be. The guts of the program will look more like this:

private float progress = 0f;
private bool active = false;

private void SetActive(bool active)
{ = active;

private void Update()
    progress = Mathf.Lerp(progress, active ? 1f : 0f, Time.deltaTime
        * 5f);

// Called by camera to apply image effect.
void OnRenderImage(RenderTexture source, RenderTexture destination)
    material.SetFloat("_Progress", progress);
    Graphics.Blit(source, destination, material);

Now for the actual shader! I’ll explain very quickly what the fragment shader is doing and ignore the vertex shader since it’s doing nothing in this example; I may do another post in the future explaining the details of how the shader is constructed, but I’m glossing over a lot for now. Don’t even worry about it yet.

Shader "Hidden/SepiaBlendEffect"
        _Progress ("Progress", Float) = 0
            ZTest Always Cull Off ZWrite Off

            #pragma vertex vert_img
            #pragma fragment frag
            #include "UnityCG.cginc"

            uniform sampler2D _MainTex;
            uniform float _Progress;

            fixed4 frag(v2f_img i) : SV_Target
                fixed4 original = tex2D(_MainTex, i.uv);
                half3x3 vals = half3x3
                    0.393, 0.349, 0.272, // Values for input red.
                    0.769, 0.686, 0.534, // Values for input green.
                    0.189, 0.168, 0.131  // Values for input blue.

                half3 input = half3(original.rgb);

                half progress = half(_Progress);

                half3 intermed = (progress * mul(input, vals)) + 
                    ((1 - progress) * input);

                fixed4 output = half4(intermed, original.a);

                return output;
    Fallback Off

We’re interested in the stuff between ‘CGPROGRAM’ and ‘ENDCG’ – this is written in Nvidia’s Cg. All we need to know about the structure of shaders for now is that the fragment shader is run on every pixel of a processed image. I’ll also ignore all the types of variables for now and cover those in another post at a later date. Jumping straight to the frag() method, which constitutes the fragment shader, we’ll see a 3×3 table of numbers, vals, that looks strikingly like the one defined for our first function; the table is the transpose of a matrix formed by those functions’s numbers. Our shader performs a matrix multiplication on a vector made of the original rgb values, input, and our magical sepia number matrix vals (which is why it had to be transposed), then we do our interpolation to get intermed. Afterwards, we put together the final output by adding the original colour’s alpha onto intermed, and boom! We have our Sepia Blend shader. Now all that remains is to attach the SepiaBlend script to the main camera and assign the SepiaBlendEffect shader to the script, then we’re good to go.

I hope this has been a helpful introduction to the world of computer graphics. I’ve uploaded the three scripts to avoid you having to copy everything out (both variants of SepiaBlend.cs are included; pick your preferred version). Let me know if everything turns into a bugfest when you attempt to run any of the examples and I’ll try to diagnose the problem.