A couple of exercises to experiment with the new Unity Lightweight Rendering Pipeline (LWRP) and the Unity Graph Shaders. At this time, this visual programming tool is a developing technology. It is still rather buggy (as I found), but when refined will be a great asset in the Unity toolkit.
Planet and Moon Shader
Unity make it really easy to generate “standard” planets like Mars on the left. However, the Moon is a tricky body to write a shader for, as it’s a fairly reflective body, so the bright side is reflecting sunshine AND (in some conditions) the dark side is partially illuminated by light reflecting off the earth. For this shader, a number of uniforms are compared to the surface normals to establish the emission and albedo.
Car Paint Shader
Also using the Unity Graphs Shaders, a model was downloaded from (THIS LINK) and a number of shaders applied to different materials (glass, plastics, etc). The most complex being the Car Paint Shader, which used Fresnel reflections and a 2D colour map. The before and after are shown below.
