Cg Programming/Unity/Lighting Textured Surfaces

This tutorial covers per-vertex lighting of textured surfaces.

Earthrise as seen from Apollo 8.

It combines the shader code of Section “Textured Spheres” and Section “Specular Highlights” to compute lighting with a diffuse material color determined by a texture. If you haven't read those sections, this would be a very good opportunity to read them.

Texturing and Diffuse Per-Vertex Lighting

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In Section “Textured Spheres”, the texture color was used as output of the fragment shader. However, it is also possible to use the texture color as any of the parameters in lighting computations, in particular the material constant   for diffuse reflection, which was introduced in Section “Diffuse Reflection”. It appears in the diffuse part of the Phong reflection model:

 

where this equation is used with different material constants for the three color components red, green, and blue. By using a texture to determine these material constants, they can vary over the surface.

Shader Code

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In comparison to the per-vertex lighting in Section “Specular Highlights”, the vertex shader here computes two additional output colors: diffuseColor and specularColor, which use the semantics TEXCOORD1 and TEXCOORD2.

The parameter diffuseColor is multiplied with the texture color in the fragment shader and specularColor is just the specular term, which shouldn't be multiplied with the texture color. This makes perfect sense but for historical reasons (i.e. older graphics hardware that was less capable) this is sometimes referred to as “separate specular color”; in fact, Unity's ShaderLab has an option called “SeparateSpecular” to activate or deactivate it.

Note that a property _Color is included, which is multiplied (component-wise) to all parts of the diffuseColor; thus, it acts as a useful color filter to tint or shade the texture color. Moreover, a property with this name is required to make the fallback shader work (see also the discussion of fallback shaders in Section “Diffuse Reflection”).

Shader "Cg per-vertex lighting with texture" {
   Properties {
      _MainTex ("Texture For Diffuse Material Color", 2D) = "white" {} 
      _Color ("Overall Diffuse Color Filter", Color) = (1,1,1,1)
      _SpecColor ("Specular Material Color", Color) = (1,1,1,1) 
      _Shininess ("Shininess", Float) = 10
   }
   SubShader {
      Pass {    
         Tags { "LightMode" = "ForwardBase" } 
            // pass for ambient light and first light source
 
         CGPROGRAM
 
         #pragma vertex vert  
         #pragma fragment frag
 
         #include "UnityCG.cginc" 
         uniform float4 _LightColor0; 
            // color of light source (from "Lighting.cginc")
 
         // User-specified properties
         uniform sampler2D _MainTex;    
         uniform float4 _Color; 
         uniform float4 _SpecColor; 
         uniform float _Shininess;
 
         struct vertexInput {
            float4 vertex : POSITION;
            float3 normal : NORMAL;
            float4 texcoord : TEXCOORD0;
         };
         struct vertexOutput {
            float4 pos : SV_POSITION;
            float4 tex : TEXCOORD0;
            float3 diffuseColor : TEXCOORD1;
            float3 specularColor : TEXCOORD2;
         };
 
         vertexOutput vert(vertexInput input) 
         {
            vertexOutput output;
 
            float4x4 modelMatrix = unity_ObjectToWorld;
            float4x4 modelMatrixInverse = unity_WorldToObject; 
 
            float3 normalDirection = normalize(
               mul(float4(input.normal, 0.0), modelMatrixInverse).xyz);
            float3 viewDirection = normalize(_WorldSpaceCameraPos 
               - mul(modelMatrix, input.vertex).xyz);
            float3 lightDirection;
            float attenuation;
 
            if (0.0 == _WorldSpaceLightPos0.w) // directional light?
            {
               attenuation = 1.0; // no attenuation
               lightDirection = normalize(_WorldSpaceLightPos0.xyz);
            } 
            else // point or spot light
            {
               float3 vertexToLightSource = _WorldSpaceLightPos0.xyz
                  - mul(modelMatrix, input.vertex).xyz;
               float distance = length(vertexToLightSource);
               attenuation = 1.0 / distance; // linear attenuation 
               lightDirection = normalize(vertexToLightSource);
            }
 
            float3 ambientLighting = 
               UNITY_LIGHTMODEL_AMBIENT.rgb * _Color.rgb;
 
            float3 diffuseReflection = 
               attenuation * _LightColor0.rgb * _Color.rgb
               * max(0.0, dot(normalDirection, lightDirection));
 
            float3 specularReflection;
            if (dot(normalDirection, lightDirection) < 0.0) 
               // light source on the wrong side?
            {
               specularReflection = float3(0.0, 0.0, 0.0); 
                  // no specular reflection
            }
            else // light source on the right side
            {
               specularReflection = attenuation * _LightColor0.rgb 
                  * _SpecColor.rgb * pow(max(0.0, dot(
                  reflect(-lightDirection, normalDirection), 
                  viewDirection)), _Shininess);
            }
 
            output.diffuseColor = ambientLighting + diffuseReflection;
            output.specularColor = specularReflection;
            output.tex = input.texcoord;
            output.pos = UnityObjectToClipPos(input.vertex);
            return output;
         }
 
         float4 frag(vertexOutput input) : COLOR
         {
            return float4(input.specularColor +
               input.diffuseColor * tex2D(_MainTex, input.tex.xy),
               1.0);
         }
 
         ENDCG
      }
 
      Pass {    
         Tags { "LightMode" = "ForwardAdd" } 
            // pass for additional light sources
         Blend One One // additive blending 
 
         CGPROGRAM
 
         #pragma vertex vert  
         #pragma fragment frag 
 
         #include "UnityCG.cginc" 
         uniform float4 _LightColor0; 
            // color of light source (from "Lighting.cginc")
 
         // User-specified properties
         uniform sampler2D _MainTex;    
         uniform float4 _Color; 
         uniform float4 _SpecColor; 
         uniform float _Shininess;
 
         struct vertexInput {
            float4 vertex : POSITION;
            float3 normal : NORMAL;
            float4 texcoord : TEXCOORD0;
         };
         struct vertexOutput {
            float4 pos : SV_POSITION;
            float4 tex : TEXCOORD0;
            float3 diffuseColor : TEXCOORD1;
            float3 specularColor : TEXCOORD2;
         };
 
         vertexOutput vert(vertexInput input) 
         {
            vertexOutput output;
 
            float4x4 modelMatrix = unity_ObjectToWorld;
            float4x4 modelMatrixInverse = unity_WorldToObject;
 
            float3 normalDirection = normalize(
               mul(float4(input.normal, 0.0), modelMatrixInverse).xyz);
            float3 viewDirection = normalize(_WorldSpaceCameraPos 
               - mul(modelMatrix, input.vertex).xyz);
            float3 lightDirection;
            float attenuation;
 
            if (0.0 == _WorldSpaceLightPos0.w) // directional light?
            {
               attenuation = 1.0; // no attenuation
               lightDirection = normalize(_WorldSpaceLightPos0.xyz);
            } 
            else // point or spot light
            {
               float3 vertexToLightSource = _WorldSpaceLightPos0.xyz
                  - mul(modelMatrix, input.vertex).xyz;
               float distance = length(vertexToLightSource);
               attenuation = 1.0 / distance; // linear attenuation 
               lightDirection = normalize(vertexToLightSource);
            }
 
            float3 diffuseReflection = 
               attenuation * _LightColor0.rgb * _Color.rgb
               * max(0.0, dot(normalDirection, lightDirection));
 
            float3 specularReflection;
            if (dot(normalDirection, lightDirection) < 0.0) 
               // light source on the wrong side?
            {
               specularReflection = float3(0.0, 0.0, 0.0); 
                  // no specular reflection
            }
            else // light source on the right side
            {
               specularReflection = attenuation * _LightColor0.rgb 
                  * _SpecColor.rgb * pow(max(0.0, dot(
                  reflect(-lightDirection, normalDirection), 
                  viewDirection)), _Shininess);
            }
 
            output.diffuseColor = diffuseReflection; // no ambient
            output.specularColor = specularReflection;
            output.tex = input.texcoord;
            output.pos = UnityObjectToClipPos(input.vertex);
            return output;
         }
 
         float4 frag(vertexOutput input) : COLOR
         {
            return float4(input.specularColor +
               input.diffuseColor * tex2D(_MainTex, input.tex.xy),
               1.0);
         }
 
         ENDCG
      }
   }
   Fallback "Specular"
}

In order to assign a texture image to this shader, you should follow the steps discussed in Section “Textured Spheres”.

Summary

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Congratulations, you have reached the end. We have looked at:

  • How texturing and per-vertex lighting are usually combined.
  • What a “separate specular color” is.

Further reading

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If you still want to know more

< Cg Programming/Unity

Unless stated otherwise, all example source code on this page is granted to the public domain.