So, the other day at work we were exploring various methods of adding nice lighting effects to a Unity scene without actually using real time lighting (in order to maintain the best possible performance on low end mobile devices). I took this to be the perfect opportunity to learn Unity’s new Shader Graph. If you’re not familiar, Shader Graph is Unity’s new node based visual shader editor. Currently, it only works with one of Unity’s new render pipelines (lightweight or HD), so if you’d like to try it out and haven’t yet, be sure to set up a project appropriately using Unity Hub or the package manager. Once I got the project set up, I thought I’d look at using shader graph to create fake specular lighting and thought I’d share what I discovered. First, specular lighting is not all that complex or involved which is why I thought it’d be pretty well suited for lightweight fake lighting. If you do a quick google search (as I did), you’ll see specular highlighting basically boils down to the following formulae. The reflected direction, R, is calculated like this: R = 2N(N·L)-L where N is the normalized world normal of the reflecting […]
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