2.5D Sun In Depth Part 2: The Edge Ring

The Edge Ring:

The edge ring is the orange model in the image above. The shader is much simpler than the sun surface so this will be a shorter entry.

The Shader

There is 1 main texture and 2 tiling parameters for it, 3 fire textures with tiling parameters, and a factor parameter to ramp the whole thing up and down.

Tags {
"Queue"="Transparent"
"IgnoreProjector"="True"
"RenderType"="Transparent"
}

There are more tags and extra bits of text at the beginning because it is a blended shader and needs to have a bit more information about how it is supposed the be drawn.

The Queue is when in the rendering pipeline this material should be drawn. A value of transparent makes it drawn after all off the opaque stuff has been drawn.

Setting IgnoreProjector to True keeps projector entities from trying to draw on this surface.

Setting RenderType to Transparent is useful for shader replacement which I'm not really worried about here. More info about subshader tags is available in the unity manual.

LOD 200
ZWrite Off
ZTest LEqual
Blend SrcAlpha OneMinusSrcAlpha

LOD has to do with limiting what shaders can be used from script. Idealy you would make a a few shaders with different LODs and fallback to them if performance was an issue.
ZWrite Off: don't write to the depth buffer.
ZTest LEqual: only draw if this surface is in front of opaque geometry (if it's Z value is less than or equal to the Z value of the depth buffer)
Blend SrcAlpha OneMinusSrcAlpha: This is for alpha blending, more blending modes are described in the unity manual

half4 mainTex = tex2D (_MainTex, IN.uv_MainTex * _MainTiling1.xy + _Time.y * _MainTiling1.zw );

half4 mainTex2 = tex2D (_MainTex, IN.uv_MainTex * _MainTiling2.xy + _Time.y * _MainTiling2.zw );

In these lines I just grab the main texture twice with different tiling parameters. The values for the first tiling parameter are (3,1,-0.01,0) this will tile the texture 3 times horizontally, once vertically, and scroll it ever so slowly horizontally. The values for the second parameter are (5,1,0.01,0) which tiles it a little more and scrolls it in the opposite direction.

half4 fireTex1 = tex2D (_FireTex1, IN.uv_MainTex * _Tiling1.xy + _Time.y * _Tiling1.zw ); 

half4 fireTex2 = tex2D (_FireTex2, IN.uv_MainTex * _Tiling2.xy + _Time.y * _Tiling2.zw ); 

half4 fireTex3 = tex2D (_FireTex3, IN.uv_MainTex * _Tiling3.xy + _Time.y * _Tiling3.zw );

In these lines I grab the 3 fire textures with their tiling and scrolling properties. these textures all tile multiple times horizontally and scroll up vertically with slight horizontal scrolling to help hide repeating patterns.  The first fire texture is the same as the wave texture from the sun surface, the second is similar but modifies slightly, and the third is like some stringy fire.

mainTex = ( mainTex2 + mainTex ) * 0.5;

I Add the 2 main textures together and multiply them by 0.5. This would be the same as if they were lerped together with 0.5 blending.

float4 edge = mainTex * mainTex;

I wanted a tighter edge so I multiplied the main texture by itself and saved it off to a variable. This can be made adjustable by using pow( mainTex, _SomeParameter ) and you will be able to adjust the tightness in the material, however the pow() function is more instructions than just multiplying things together multiple times.

mainTex *= fireTex1.xxxx + fireTex2.xxxx + fireTex3.xxxx * 0.3;

With the edge saved off I multiply the main texture by the sum of all my fire textures, the last fire texture was a little too much so I multiplied it down by 0.3;

mainTex += edge;

Add the edge back into the main texture.

mainTex.xyz *= _Factor;

Multiply the color by the factor parameter and we are done!

o.Albedo = 0.0;
o.Emission = mainTex;

o.Alpha = saturate( mainTex.w );

This is another unlit material so the main texture goes into the Emission and the blend mode needs an alpha so I saturate the main texture's alpha and put it there. The alpha needs to be saturated because when the edge was added to the main texture there is a possibility that the alpha could go over 1 and when the alpha is out of the 0-1 range the blending gets super wonky.

Below is the final result, keep in  mind that this will have the sun surface behind it.

The final result of the sun edge shader