Shaders and Materials - Overview

Optimizing Shaders for Mobile Platforms

Transparencies

Additional Material and Shader Best Practices

Demo: Draw Calls and SRP Batcher

Shaders and Materials play a crucial role in determining how target hardware will process and render your 3D objects. In this project, you will explore best practices that will keep the shaders lightweight and fast when running on phones with limited resources.

Shaders and Materials

Course Introduction

The Optimization Process

Profiling Tools

Geometry - Introduction 

Triangle and Polygon Usage

Level of Detail

Additional Geometry Best Practices

Demo: Level of Detail

Textures - Introduction

Texture Size, Color Space, and Compression

Texture Atlases

Texture Filtering

Mipmapping

UV Unwrap, Visual Impact, and Texture Channel Packing

Alpha Channels and Normal Map Best Practices

Editing Texture Settings

Demo: Texture Atlases

Lighting - Overview

Light Modes and Types

Lighting for Static Objects

Light Probes

Shadows

Demo: Baked Lighting

Conclusion/Next Steps

Welcome to 3D Art Optimization for Mobile Applications! In this introductory project, we will review the course's main learning objectives, discuss the practice of optimization, and identify the optimization tools available at your disposal.

Introduction/Optimization and Profiling

This project will highlight optimizations for 3D models that can make a game more efficient while maintaining aesthetic intent, improving the performance and experience on mobile devices. 

Geometry

This project will highlight the different implementation considerations and optimizations that take advantage of a Texture’s flexibility. When given the correct settings and applied correctly over their many use cases, Textures play a major role in achieving your desired visual effects. 

Textures

Lighting is one of the most important aspects of real-time 3D visuals. It can set the mood, guide interactions, and identify goals and objectives. In this project, you will learn about and compare the differences between the available lights and light modes that you can use in your 3D mobile application.

Lighting

ARMUnityMobileOptimization.zip

In this intermediate course, participants will learn how to produce performance-optimized 3D assets and scenes for mobile applications. Topics will cover tips on optimizing Geometry, Textures, Materials, Shaders, and Lighting. This course was created with technical artists and content creators in mind.

Arm & Unity Presents: 3D Art Optimization for Mobile Applications

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Keep Shaders Simple

Profile Shader Complexity

Math Operations In the Vertex Shader

Avoid Using Complicated Math Operations

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we examine additional best practices when optimizing your 3D mobile application's Materials and Shaders. 

When overdraw is unavoidable, make the Shader as simple as possible. Keep these principles in mind:

Use the simplest Shader possible (such as an unlit Shader) and avoid using unnecessary features.

Use Unity's built-in Shader designed specifically for particles.

To minimize overdraw, reduce the number and/or size of particles in your game.

Adding Texture samplers, transparency, and other features make a Shader more complex and can affect rendering. We recommend that you profile your Shaders often.

Arm provides tools to do this, such as Mali Offline Shader Compiler and Streamline. However, these tools require a higher level of graphics knowledge  

It’s common in projects to achieve a specific look through the combination of a vertex Shader and a fragment Shader.

Vertex Shaders work on every vertex while pixel Shaders run on every pixel. Usually, there are more pixels that are being rendered than there are vertices on screen. This means that the pixel Shader runs more often than the vertex Shader. Because of this, we recommend that you move computation from the pixel Shader to the vertex Shader whenever possible.

Moving computation operations to a vertex Shader usually means moving the processed data onto the pixel Shader. Even though this is generally a good idea, you must pay attention to the tiler in case it becomes the bottleneck. As usual, after working on optimizations, you must do further profiling to determine the best solution for your particular situation.

Mathematical operations within Shaders customize the desired look and behavior.

But these math operations are not equal in terms of performance cost. Therefore, you must pay attention to their usage. Some of the more complicated operations include sin(), pow(), cos(), divide(), and noise().

Basic operations, such as addition and multiplication, are faster to process. It's best to keep the number of slower math operations as small as possible. The amount of complicated math that is used must be kept lower on older devices, such as ones using GLES 2.0.

There are many different ways to optimize Shader code, but to understand where the real bottlenecks are occurring, you have to profile your application. Profiling is also recommended to compare the before and after effect of any optimization that you make. In the next tutorial, we’ll dive into an example of how Shaders and Materials can be optimized in Unity using the SRP Batcher. 

Additional Material and Shader Best Practices

1. Keep Shaders Simple

2. Profile Shader Complexity

3. Math Operations In the Vertex Shader

4. Avoid Using Complicated Math Operations

5. Conclusion

Complete this tutorial