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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Using the Unlit Shader for Mobile Platforms

Lit vs. Unlit Shaders

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we will review best practices for optimizing shaders on your intended mobile platform using the correct lit and unlit shaders in Unity.

Unity has a collection of built-in Shaders located in the Universal Render Pipeline (URP). The following screenshot shows you where you can find URP-dedicated Shaders 

As of 2019.4, only the built-in Unlit Shaders under the ‘Mobile’ section will work with Unity's Universal Render Pipeline (URP). If you intend to use a mobile-focused lit shader, you should use the “Universal Render Pipeline/Simple Lit” shader as a foundation as this is a simpler and more performant lit shader in URP. 

It’s a good practice to use only the Shader features needed to customize a Material. Unity will create an optimized run-time version of the Shader you’ve chosen and configured. This reduction in Shader complexity helps with performance on mobile platforms. 

When creating a Shader, you can decide how the Material will react to light. Most Shaders are classified as either lit or unlit.

An unlit Shader is the fastest and computationally cheapest shading model. Use it if you’re targeting a lower-end device. Key points to consider include:

Lighting does not affect an unlit shading model. This means that many calculations, such as specularity calculations, aren’t needed. The result is either cheaper or faster rendering.

Using a stylized art direction that resembles a cartoon works well with unlit shading. This style is worth considering when you’re developing games for mobile platforms.

 A lit Shader uses more processing power than an unlit Shader. However:

Light affects a lit Shader and allows the surface to have specularity.

This is probably the shading model that is most used in mobile games today.

The following image shows the difference between a lit and an unlit object:

The same tower Mesh and Texture have been applied, but using different Shaders. Lights don’t not affect unlit Shaders, so they need less computation in order to be rendered on-screen. This results in better performance, especially on less-powerful devices. 

It’s important to consider which Shader and Material features are absolutely necessary to achieve the desired visual style for your application and limit the use of features that don’t directly contribute to that style. In the next tutorial, we’ll examine the impact of transparent Materials on mobile application performance. 

Optimizing Shaders for Mobile Platforms

1. Using the Unlit Shader for Mobile Platforms

2. Lit vs. Unlit Shaders

3. Conclusion

Complete this tutorial