Make Metal Objects Look Good in AR
Photorealistic materials are sometimes key to providing great AR experiences. Not all AR experiences require objects to look like they’re real, some are very cartoony (like Pokemon Go). But if you’re looking to make great metal objects in AR keep reading!
In this tutorial I use Unity and the Unity ARKit Plugin.
For Escape The Room — AR, it was key to have metal materials in the game. Metal fit with the art style of the world, and we wanted to create a cohesive experience, so getting these metal objects to look good was very important. One of the worlds with metal in it is the “space” world. In this world the user sees multiple objects, and needs to solve puzzles in these objects to unlock the final puzzle and win the game.
This is the Blender Render of one of the objects:
Rendering in Blender and porting over to Unity are two different things, so some tweaks were needed to make this object look good! I used Megascans to get these PBR materials, and recommend the site to anyone looking for great PBR materials.
Heavy Metal
This is the object in AR, but why does it look black and not metallic??? Unity does things a little differently than Blender, and the key to all of this is the Reflection Probe.
This is what my shader looks like.
I used the roughness shader so I could get the scratched detail like in the above render. Now what you need to do is add a Reflection Probe to your GameObject.
And the result?
Great! Now you may need to customize this a little bit to make your game more efficient. If you look at the Reflection Probe component it has an option for Refresh Mode. You should read through the documentation here for a better understanding, but here are some main points.
- If you use Realtime rendering it will update the reflections to show other objects in the scene. Its cool, but very expensive for your hardware, and with AR its never going to be quite perfect. Your scene doesn’t know what your actual floor or coutnertop looks like, it only knows what the other Unity objects look like. It isn’t necessary to make a great experience
- You can tint the Skybox Color to change the color of the reflection. I set mine to a blueish tint to fit the style of the world, you should tint your’s to reflect the art style of your AR experience.
The Refresh Mode of my object is On Awake, so it only gets called once, but has some context of the scene around it.
That’s all for the article, I hope you learned something! Leave a comment if you have any tips about materials and reflection probes in AR. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @EscapeRoomApp for more updates! Happy building!
