Project Overview
Shader Lab is a personal Unity project focused on exploring the creative and technical potential of real-time visual effects through shader programming. Designed as a sandbox environment, this project includes a collection of custom shaders that demonstrate advanced material behaviors and surface effects. Among the showcased effects are glow shaders, bump map blending, ice material transitions, particle-reactive surfaces, and a dramatic dissolve effect for object fading and disintegration. Each shader was developed to enhance visual feedback, build atmosphere, or support gameplay mechanics, often in ways that standard materials could not achieve. The project serves both as a visual experiment and as a toolkit for future integration into gameplay-heavy projects.
The Shader Lab allowed for rapid iteration and deep dives into Unity's shader graph system as well as custom HLSL scripting. A key focus was on optimizing performance while maintaining visual fidelity, making the shaders suitable for use in real-time games. Through this project, complex ideas like UV manipulation, screen-space effects, and object-reactive visuals were translated into clean, modular shaders. The result is not just a technical demo, but a functional portfolio of effects that could serve stylized, sci-fi, or atmospheric game genres. It also deepened my understanding of how visual language impacts player immersion and mechanical clarity in interactive spaces.