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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Overview

What are Shaders and Materials?

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we will define the role that shaders and materials play in rendering the 3D objects our project, along with the learning objectives for this project.

Shaders and Materials play a crucial role in determining how target hardware will process and render your 3D objects, so it’s important to understand how they function and can be optimized. If your Materials or Shaders aren’t configured correctly, it can result in severe bottlenecks that can strain mobile devices’ already limited resources. 

Learn about optimized mobile Shaders that play well with Unity’s Universal Render Pipeline.

Compare different transparency implementations and their respective benefits/payoffs.

Explore best practices that will keep the shaders lightweight and fast when running on phones with limited resources.

A Shader is a small program that tells the GPU how to draw an object on the screen and every calculation that must happen in order to draw the object. For writing Shaders, there are two common scripting languages: High-Level Shading Language (HLSL) and OpenGL Shading language (GLSL).

Shaders are applied to GameObjects through Materials  that define the look of that object. A Material is used to set the parameters made available by a Shader. For example, a Material might specify the colors, Textures, and numeric values referenced by a Shader.

The following screenshot shows an HLSL Shader applied to a Material in Unity:

Unity also provides a node-based tool called Shader Graph that lets you build your Shaders visually instead of via hand-written code. The following screenshot shows how you can build a Shader Graph by creating and connecting nodes in a graph network:  

Materials and Shaders are a core part of the 3D rendering process; understanding how they work is essential to the optimization process. In the next tutorial, we’ll explore the best practices for optimizing Shaders for mobile platforms. 

Shaders and Materials - Overview

1. Overview

2. What are Shaders and Materials?

3. Conclusion

Complete this tutorial