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What are the best practices for creating custom shaders?

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Shaders are programs that run on the graphics card and control how your game renders colors, lighting, shadows, effects, and more. Creating custom shaders can give your game a unique look and feel, but also requires some knowledge and skills. In this article, we will cover some of the best practices for creating custom shaders, such as choosing the right tools, optimizing performance, debugging errors, and following coding standards.

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Choose the right tools:

Utilize visual shader creation tools for easier experimentation. For more control, switch to text-based tools like HLSL or GLSL.### *Optimize performance:Reduce shader instructions and use lower precision data types. This ensures your game runs smoothly, especially on low-end hardware.

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Dan McCreadie

Game Director @ Outright Games | BAFTA…
Martin Contel

Technical Art Director at Housemarque

1 Choose the right tools

Depending on your game engine and platform, you may have different options for creating custom shaders. Some engines, like Unity and Unreal, offer visual tools that let you create shaders by connecting nodes and adjusting parameters. These tools can be useful for beginners or artists who want to experiment with different effects without writing code. However, they may also limit your control and flexibility over the shader logic and output. If you want more freedom and power, you may prefer to use a text-based tool, like ShaderLab, HLSL, GLSL, or Cg. These tools allow you to write shader code directly and access low-level features of the graphics card. However, they also require more technical skills and knowledge of the syntax and conventions of each language.

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Wahab Ahmad

CEO | Serial Entrepreneur | Web3 Gaming | P2E Games | Web3 Blockchain | Unreal Engine | Roblox | Fortnite | Vision Pro | Unity 3D | Metaverse | AR & VR | Generative AI Web & Mobile Apps | Cloud Security | Devops
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Depending on your game engine and platform, you may have different options for creating custom shaders. Some engines, like Unity and Unreal, offer visual tools that let you create shaders by connecting nodes and adjusting parameters. These tools can be useful for beginners or artists who want to experiment with different effects without writing code. These tools allow you to write shader code directly and access low-level features of the graphics card. However, they also require more technical skills and knowledge of the syntax and conventions of each language.

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2 Optimize performance

Shaders can have a major effect on the performance of your game, especially on mobile devices or low-end hardware. Thus, it's essential to optimize your shaders as much as possible, without sacrificing the quality and functionality of your effects. Some of the common ways to optimize shaders are reducing the number of instructions and calculations in the shader code, using lower precision data types such as half or fixed, utilizing texture compression and mipmapping to reduce memory and bandwidth usage, and batching and instancing to draw multiple objects with the same shader and material in one draw call. All of these techniques can help reduce the overhead and state changes of the graphics pipeline.

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Dan McCreadie

Game Director @ Outright Games | BAFTA Full Member
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Optimise levels and gameplay as early as you can, this means having benchmarks and budgets for all disciplines. If the game cannot handle the shader tech without major performance hits consider having bespoke solutions put in for problematic areas or look to have a more optimised shader.

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3 Debug errors

Debugging shaders can be difficult due to the lack of clear error messages or feedback. Fortunately, there are tools and techniques that can help you find and fix errors in your shader code and output. For instance, you can use a shader editor or IDE with syntax highlighting, code completion, error checking, and debugging features such as Shader Forge, Visual Studio, VS Code, or Shadered. Additionally, a graphics debugger or profiler allows you to inspect and modify the state of the graphics pipeline. Examples include RenderDoc, Nsight, or PIX. You can also use a shader debugger or validator to step through your shader code and see the values and results of each instruction and variable. Examples include Shader Debugger, HLSL Debugger, or GLSL Validator. Finally, debug output or visualization techniques such as color coding, wireframes, outlines, overlays, debug views, buffers, and textures enable you to see the intermediate or final results of your shader calculations and effects.

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4 Follow coding standards

Coding standards are an essential set of rules and conventions that can help you write consistent, readable, and maintainable shader code. It can also help you avoid errors, bugs, and conflicts. When developing shaders, use meaningful and descriptive names for variables, functions, and parameters. Avoid using abbreviations or numbers that may be confusing. Additionally, follow consistent formatting and indentation for your code, as well as the style and conventions of the shader language. Comments and documentation should explain the purpose, logic, and parameters of your code. Aim to use comments sparingly and only when necessary. To organize your code into separate files or modules, use modularity and reusability. Additionally, avoid duplicating code or hard-coding it; instead, use include directives, macros, or libraries to import external code.

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5 Learn from examples

One of the best ways to learn and improve your shader skills is to study and analyze existing shaders and effects. You can find many examples of shaders and effects online, such as on ShaderToy, Shadertuts, or the Asset Store. You can also look at the source code and documentation of the shaders and effects that come with your game engine or tool. By looking at how other shader programmers create and implement their shaders and effects, you can learn new techniques, tricks, and best practices that you can apply to your own shaders. You can also modify, tweak, or combine existing shaders and effects to create new and original ones.

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Dzmitry Bazyleu

Lead Unity Developer | Certified Unity Expert | 14+ years of experience | Game Development
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Learning shaders through examples is a great idea. Here is working recipe on how to quickly dive into shaders: 1. Watch several videos on how shaders work in general and why they are needed. No need to deep dive. 2. Do 2-3 of the simplest and shortest tutorials on creating shaders from scratch. Go through these tutorials, you don't have to understand everything. Main goal is to get some experience. 3. Main learning loop: Set a goal for yourself on a specific shader, for example, a fire shader / 2D water shader. Then find similar existing shaders and start tinkering with them. Make you own shader - copy and modify code from existing shaders, this is how you learn. Repeat this process. Each iteration, you will understand more and more.

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6 Experiment and have fun

Finally, the most important practice for creating custom shaders is to experiment and have fun with them. Shaders are a creative and expressive way to add visual flair and polish to your game. You can use shaders to create realistic or stylized effects, such as water, fire, smoke, glow, distortion, or cel-shading. You can also use shaders to create dynamic or interactive effects, such as weather, time of day, damage, or feedback. The possibilities are endless, and you can always try new ideas and see what works and what doesn't. Shaders are also a rewarding and satisfying way to learn and improve your game development skills, as you can see the results of your code immediately on the screen. So don't be afraid to experiment and have fun with shaders, and share your creations with others.

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7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?

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Martin Contel

Technical Art Director at Housemarque
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When creating realistic materials for your game, simply following a PBR approach isn't always enough. To really nail the look, you must compare what you're making with a real-world sample, a ground-truth reference captured under conditions that you can control and replicate inside your game engine. Replicating the properties of real materials is like solving a puzzle with lots of moving parts. And illuminating your reference sample from various angles allows you to see how its features, like shininess, texture, or translucency, behave under different conditions in the real world. Having these real-world references is crucial to achieving the perfect look, hitting the bull's-eye of photorealism that most AAA games aim for.

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What are the best practices for creating custom shaders?

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

1 Choose the right tools

2 Optimize performance

3 Debug errors

4 Follow coding standards

5 Learn from examples

6 Experiment and have fun

7 Here’s what else to consider

Game Development

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What are the best practices for creating custom shaders?

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

1 Choose the right tools

2 Optimize performance

3 Debug errors

4 Follow coding standards

5 Learn from examples

6 Experiment and have fun

7 Here’s what else to consider

Game Development

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