In response to this weeks theme of "tinkering", I worked within Shadergraph in Unity to create four distinct shaders, that all used the same base texture. I created the texture in Krita, then used it in various ways such as a normal map, emissive and also experiemented with applying transparency and making the material double sided.
By using a single texture, I was able to iterate quickly without getting caught up in details and also gave myself an oportunity to learn more about how the tool behaves and what I can potentially do with it. Because of the many ways that a texture can be used, I at no point found myself feeling constrained.
Shaders are used just about everywhere in games. In fact it's hard to imagine what many popular titles would look like without them. Some technical artists that inspire me, and that I definiely need to follow some tutorials from are Freya Holmér and Manuela Malasaña. As for the work I did on these shaders specifically I took some inspiration from these by Gabriel Aguiar, as it looks like they also use a base texture and then iterate upon that.
