Alan Zucconi

Hi everyone! 👋 The ones of you who have been following my blog for some time, might remember my longest series ever about iridescent shaders in Unity. The series focused on diffraction grating, which is one of the main optical phenomena responsible for iridescent reflections. The last two posts, ho

This post completes the tutorial on CD-ROM and DVD shaders. Part 7. CD-ROM Shader: Diffraction Grating (Part 2) Spoiler alert: Viking Villages and CD-ROM curtains. You can read the rest of the series here: Part 1. The Nature of Light Part 2. Improving the Rainbow (Part 1) Part 3. Improving the Rainb

This post will guide you through the creation of a shader that reproduces the rainbow reflections that can be seen on CD-ROMs and DVDs. Part 6. CD-ROM Shader: Diffraction Grating (Part 1) This has been the longer series so far; it has been a long journey, but finally there's some shader code! You ca

This post introduces the mathematics behind the optical phenomenon known as diffraction grating, which is responsible for iridescent reflections in many materials. Part 5. The Mathematics of Diffraction Grating You can read the rest of the series here: Part 1. The Nature of Light Part 2. Improving t

The first post in this series, The Nature of Light, introduced the dual nature of light, exhibiting behaviours which are typical of both waves and particles. In this part, we will see how those two aspects are both necessary for iridescence to arise. Part 4. Understanding Diffraction Grating The fir

This is the third part of the series on Iridescent Materials in Unity. The previous post showed several of the most common techniques used in shaders to reproduce the colours of the visible spectrum. This post introduces a novel approaches which results are virtually indistinguishable from the actua

This is the first part of the tutorial on iridescence. This new series will explore the very nature of light, in order to understand and to replicate how material exhibits colourful reflections. The tutorial is oriented to Unity game developers, although the techniques described can be easily implem