TL;DR — This is an article about one of my 2017 Unity project. Here you will know see the story, the concept trailer, VFX demonstration and the codes behind it, photo mode, and some screenshots. The walkthrough video of the gameplay demo is at the end of the article.
✍︎ Outline of this article:
✍︎ Introduction / Concept Trailer
✍︎ Building the Scene
✍︎ Fracturing the Scene
✍︎ Photo Mode
✍︎ Full walkthrough / Work in Progress
✍︎ Assets UsedThe world around you is actually nothing more than an elaborate fabrication of some unknown superior intelligence. — Stephen Hawking
INTRODUCTION / CONCEPT TRAILER
In the near future, a war occurred. The government is secretly operating researches of parallel universe to summon so-called “shadow” armies from other dimensions. The experiments goes wrong, and all researchers in the lab in charge are sucked into an unknown dimension. Only their “traces of lights” and shadows remain.
The story is to challenge between realism and science fiction. The idea of manipulating light using Particle System is from “Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture,” where the residents of a village suddenly disappeared after an incident, and their memories are visualized with floating lights. Since the time to work on this project is limited, representing humans with lights seems to be a simple way to implement, hence the concept of this idea of parallel universe.
BUILDING THE SCENE
The concept of the gate has evolved from a checker-styled tiling background to a more solemn design of huge light strips. The gate itself is a portal to other dimensions, and currently the white lines represent some sort of power cables to power up the portal.
FRACTURING THE SCENE
Another effect I always want to try is the fracture-like constructing and deconstructing objects, like the effect seen in the Assassin’s Creed franchise when the game loads from a checkpoint. This also matches this project’s theme of constructing and deconstructing a simulated world.
However, there seems to be no tutorials of how this effect can be done, I have consider using an image shader that takes the depth buffer as input but I know very little about coding shaders so it is currently not an option. My final solution is to directly modify the mesh in realtime. After a day of research (There are many great lessons on how mesh geometry, I started from Unity’s own manual.) I came up with the following concept:
More into the codes: All vertices are stored in an array, and by changing three parameters (displace distance, chunk size and displacement vertices) we can simulate the effect of fragmenting objects, which is unfortunately a very inefficient and expensive method.
PHOTO MODE
For this project, I also implemented an in-game photo mode that allows players to pause the game and play with the free camera, adjusting all kinds of PostProcessing Stack parameters including chromatic aberration, field of view, depth of field and focal length. This photo mode is tested on both keyboard and PS4’s DualShock 4 joysticks.
FULL WALKTHROUGH / WORK IN PROGRESS
This visual effect is very hard to implement and to make it look really good, it requires camera movement and dynamic mesh displacement (I never know the exact term to describe this effect), so currently the things I have worked on are static objects, lighting, post processing and cinematic.
Below is the full demo walkthrough of the game, feel free to tell me your thoughts! :)
ASSETS USED
All assets in this project are free.
- 3D Scifi Kit Starter Kit by Creepy Cat
- DOTween (HOTween v2) by Demigiant
- Sci-Fi Styled Modular Pack by KARBOOSX
- Particle Attractor by MOONFLOWER CARNIVORE
- Particle Ribbon by MOONFLOWER CARNIVORE
- 18 High Resolution Wall Textures by A DOG’S LIFE SOFTWARE
- Cinemachine by UNITY TECHNOLOGIES
- PostProcessing Stack by UNITY TECHNOLOGIES
- Ice shader — Tutorial by SAUCY SUSHI SHOP
This article is modified from an original version posted on Unity Connect as a part of Unity’s Neon Challenge.
Unity version: 2017.2
