A look at Unity

I've decided to look into the shader options of unity since its already on our school laptops and i wanted to mess around with a fancy engine. Everything I'm looking at today i got off of unities help area/website. First thing i got to say, theres more than 80 built in shaders and shaderLab as a way to create more of your own. Shaderlab lets you add surface, vertex, fragment, and fixed function shaders, while the preset shaders revolve around vertex-lit, diffuse, specular, bumped diffuse, and bumped Specular. From there the built in shaders split into 5 parts; basic, transparent, transparent cutout, self illuminated, and reflective.

  

The first shader I'm going over is Parallax Bumped Specular, sounds complicated, but its just normal mapping with better depth. Its adds a height map from the normal maps on the object and creates greater depths on rendered objects. Makes these stones look like the have really deep rivets. The height maps are achieved by getting alpha maps from the normal maps where black is no depth and white is max depth. The specular portion is based of the blinn-phlong lighting model. The reflective and highlighted part on the left is a simulated blurred reflection of the light. The Shininess slider effects the strength of the reflection. A more complicated version of what what we've done in tutorials, but still not that complex.

The farther you get in the list the cooler stuff gets. First on the left we have a transparent version of our last shader, the transparent values of the object are taken from the alpha channels of the main texture. So its works just the same as transparency for sprites. Next the middle picture its self illuminating a cool simple shader, you add a texture to be the illumination map, based on the alpha values, black being no light and white being max light. The white sections light up no matter how much light is hitting them, so it creates a glow in the dark effect. Finally reflection on the right, its a simple reflection and it requires a cubemap to actually show a reflection. Like before with illumination, the strength of the shader is based on the alpha channel of a texture, and once again, black means no reflection and white means full reflection.

Another shading method that can be used in unity is the Surface Shader. The surface shader interacts well with Unity's lighting pipeline well so its priority use is for shaders that deal with lights. It doesn't have its own language like GLFX, but it can be used for some interesting effects. 

Heres an example of one surface shader. This effect  is created by moving vertices along their normals. The surface shader is able to do this because data from the vertex shader can be passed on to the surface shader which goes pixel by pixel. it can be summed up simply with this line  

v.vertex.xyz += v.normal * _Amount; 

where "amount" is a multiplier between -1 and 1, that can be attached to a slider in unity. 

I'd like to go through a few more shaders and some custom stuff made by me in unity, but I also want to check out other engine's shader options, like the unreal engine.