Rendering roadmap | Official Unity Discord | Page 1

visual summit Feb 20, 2026, 6:24 PM

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Hi all
I came from opengl and the part I enjoyed most was shader development. I am just moving to unity and my goal is to basically replicate what Sebastian lague does. I love rendering and creating simulations. I already messed with tinyrenderer and ray tracing in one weekend

Im currently going from start to finish on catlikecoding unity.

Is this a good direction?

What about real time rendering book?

Did I even make the right choice of moving away from opengl. I solely wanna focus on coding. Not shader graph

glacial dune Feb 20, 2026, 6:50 PM

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If you only want to code shaders, consider shadergraph as a wrapper for the "boring" functions that are depending on the rest of the rendering pipeline (lighting managment in particular, passes declaration ...).
You can make a shadegraph with a single Custom Function that you bind to your HLSL file where you write all the code, and only connect the final output to the graph.

visual summit Feb 20, 2026, 8:21 PM

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glacial dune If you only want to code shaders, consider shadergraph as a wrapper for the "bor...

Thanks!
Is it a good start for my to do catlikecoding or do something else first. Seems like I should learn shader graph

glacial dune Feb 21, 2026, 8:25 AM

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Those are also quite good tutorials, if you want to learn shader coding in general.
Just keep in mind that they're made for the built in render pipeline.

visual summit Feb 21, 2026, 2:18 PM

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glacial dune Those are also quite good tutorials, if you want to learn shader coding in gener...

What about compute shaders. Im following catlikecoding atm. I really thought i can just skip to coding only

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Or what would be your advise on me learning shader graph. If so im guessing unity urp cookbook

lime terrace Feb 21, 2026, 3:15 PM

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The large benefit of shader graph comes with the additional of implementing a bunch of functions you'd otherwise have to implement yourself if you were making some lit shader, but otherwise coding works fine if you are doing something very selective.

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You can open most of Unity's shaders in your IDE and get an idea how they are structured. They can get pretty intense when it does implement all the lighting and shadow methods.

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Mostly because a lot of code is structured through multiple different scripts so you'll be digging through them all.

visual summit Feb 21, 2026, 4:20 PM

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Thats my goal. I wanna make pretty insane shaders. Messing with path tracing and things like that

visual summit Feb 22, 2026, 1:42 AM

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So would things like raymarching be something I would touch with compute shaders

visual summit Mar 1, 2026, 3:12 AM

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Currently im at the point of the tutorial series where it is all math. How much time yall reccomend i sit and understand how things like a wave,ripple,multiwave are being created

#Rendering roadmap