Unity 5 Shader Development course on CGCircuit

[Chris]

So I've been eyeing this ambitious course over on CGCircuit, Shader Development Using Unity 5. I'm really keen to learn more about all that good stuff but that $200 price tag is somewhat steep for me. Has anyone here taken the course, and if so would you recommend it?

While I'm at it, if anyone has any tips on good tutorials and resources regarding the subject, I'd love to hear them!

[Ryan]

This is one I liked a lot on youtube:

and then I picked up this book afterwards that I'm currently going through.

Unity 5.x Shaders and Effects Cookbook

Don't know anything about that course though.

[TobiasW]

Whew, $200 is really something and would be a bit much for me as well.

I'm currently preparing to learn shaders in Unity myself. Here's what I found. (Note that I haven't read them yet, but I added them to my list because I either know other things by the authors or they just seem very promising.)

Apart from the first one, everything in this list is free. PluralSight is pretty awesome though!

• Introduction to Scripting Shaders in Unity by Joshua Kinney ($29/month for the PluralSight subscription)
• Unite Europe 2016 - A Crash Course to Writing Custom Unity Shaders! by Andy Touch
• Unity 5 Shader Programming by digitalerr0r
• This 15 part (with more coming, probably) series on Rendering (actually mostly about shaders ) by Catlike Coding
• A lot of more specific shader topics and examples by Alan Zucconi
• The newer shader articles by Kyle Halladay look interesting, especially The Basics of Fresnel Shading, Coloring Shadows, Getting Started With Compute Shaders In Unity, A Burning Paper Shader, Screen Space Distortion and a Sci-fi Shield Effect by Kyle Halladay, Distorting Object Shapes in Screen Space, A Pencil Sketch Effect and Fixeds, Floats and a Block Damage Effect
• Lots of example shaders and a few tutorials by Shaders Laboratory on YouTube
• The Cg Programming/Unity wiki has quite some tutorials (and a lot in the "missing" section just to make you aware of what you are missing out )
• Compute And Geometry Shader Tutorial by NemoKradXNA

[mikeC]

I felt obliged to create an account just to respond to this question. Yes, I have used this course and I found it extremely useful. There are about 73 videos and they cover a ton of information. If you're a little unsure about some of the math you find in shaders, you will have a much better understanding after these videos. If you ever wanted to know every step of the rendering pipeline, all of the transform spaces, details and differences between standard lighting, advanced lighting and brdf lighting, you will learn all of this.

Let me put it this way. If you can spare the money, the information you get out of the videos is well worth the money and it is the most comprehensive set of tutorials I've ever seen. FYI, I don't know the guy that gives the tutorial and I get no benefit from promoting this video other than trying to help share this valuable knowledge. I believe these videos are also hosted on another site for a slightly different price. You can also find shortened versions of the videos on youtube. Check those out if you have any doubts.

[Chris]

That's a great list, good job assembling it!

A big appeal of the course I mentioned is just the fact that everything's organized in one place, and in a logical order. Finding something like that when it comes to shader programming is really hard! I feel that once you've gotten a solid foundation down, you can gleam a lot more from the random articles you find while googlig on the subject.

[TobiasW]

Glad you like the list; hope it'll also prove to be some value to you!

And I just remembered that I forgot an important series of articles in my list up there: the Render Hell series by @simonschreibt. I can't even begin to describe how good it is.

A big appeal of the course I mentioned is just the fact that everything's organized in one place, and in a logical order. Finding something like that when it comes to shader programming is really hard! I feel that once you've gotten a solid foundation down, you can gleam a lot more from the random articles you find while googlig on the subject.

Being a beginner regarding shader programming myself, I can definitely see that appeal of the course. If you take it, report back later how you liked it! And when deliberating whether to choose it, don't forget the two resources @mikeC mentioned: The preview playlist and the $174 version on what I assume to be the author's website.

[Chris]

Exactly the kind of candid reply I was looking for, thank you When writing this post I was worried that I'd come across a bit "omg why is this tutorial so expensive wtf", which I hope I managed to avoid! Generally I've no issues paying for tutorials, but since the price was a bit higher than normal I just wanted to check for recommendations before I made a decision. Your reply definitely helped me, so thank you!

[simonschreibt]

Really nice list! And thank for mentioning me

[zeynebim10]

I totally agree with you. @simonschreibt

[TobiasW]

Did any of you buy the course yet and can report back? I have to admit that I'm still curious - and might buy it myself at some point. (Before you posted this, @Chris, I didn't even know it existed, and now I want it. Aaargh.)

In the meantime, I've started working down the list I posted above, and the aforementioned 16 part rendering/shader series by Catlike Coding (basically a "how to build everything the Standard Shader does) is absolutely fantastic. It goes above and beyond any other free tutorial I've seen - it's more like a book in its detailedness and length.

I hope I'm not being spammy by highlighting the link again. I'm just so happy I found this gem and felt like it deserved a more prominent place than hidden in the list.

PS: I also discovered the Makin' Stuff Look Good YouTube channel and it's equally fun to watch and informative. He's mostly doing breakdowns of effects and how to recreate them in Unity. My only complaint is that there's not more of them.