Making the Player & Laser Look a Little Nicer

Objective: Giving The Player & Laser A Nicer Look

First off we will start simply with giving the player a nicer look. To give the player a nicer look, you will either need to create your own player model or download one. A couple good resources to check for asset models would be Unity Asset Store, Turbo Squid, or GameDevHQ Filebase. Alternatively you can always make your own, on programs such as Blender or Maya.

Once you have the 3D model you want to use, make a dedicated folder in Unity for your Models, then drag and drop your 3D model into the folder. If the model you are using is a Unity Package and not an actual 3D model it could create its own folder in your project like it did here creating the GameDevHQ folder.

Once you have the 3D model in your project, drag and drop it onto your current Player object in the scene and adjust the transform as needed to make it fit your current Player object cube as this cube will act as the players hit box later. You also must make sure your 3D model is a child of the Player object, that way when you move the Player object, the model will move with it.

Then we don’t want that blue cube to show anymore because we now have a new model to use for the Player. Just go to the Player object and you can now remove the Mesh Filter and Mesh Renderer from the object.

Now we can go into Play mode and see that we can now fly around with our little ship we made.

Now that we have a little ship moving around we can add some simple particle effects to the ship and the laser to make them look a little nicer. Particle effects can get a little complicated depending on what you are making, so let’s just make something simple for now. Let’s start with a static thruster effect on your ship. Right click on your ship in your hierarchy and select Effects — Particle System.

You can see it just shoots out the side, which is not what we want, so first adjust the rotation properly, by changing the y value in your transform.rotation to 90.

Next let’s zoom into our ship to work on it a little closer and adjust the Start Lifetime and Start Speed to make it closer to how far your thruster will be coming out of your ship. It’s now closer to the ship, but it’s really spread out and not really behind the ship by the thrusters.

To fix this, let’s start with the shape of the Particle System by selecting the Shape option in the particle system. In the Shape options let’s change the Radius to be a point that spreads outward, to do this simply type 0 into the radius and it will default to its smallest size. Then also adjust the position of the Particle System on your ship so it’s closer to the thrusters.

Once you have the basic shape made, then you can go into the Renderer settings and change the Renderer Mode to Stretched Billboard.

Since my ship has 2 thrusters, I will position the effect behind just one of the thrusters, and also make some adjustments to Start Size, Simulation Speed, Size over Lifetime, and Color over Lifetime.

I also increased the Rate over Time in the Emission option to give it a more dense look to it,

Now that it looks good on one thruster, I can simply Duplicate the effect in the hierarchy by selecting it and pressing Ctrl D, then reposition it for the 2nd thruster.

Now that the player looks a little nicer, we can make the Laser look a little nicer as well. For now, we can just do something simple, like leave a trail effect behind the laser when you shoot. To do this drop your laser prefab into your scene and add a particle effect to it. For this effect, because I want it to trail behind the laser projectile, I want to set the Start Speed to 0, remove the Shape option, and change the Start Size to better match the Laser Projectile.

Next because this is a trail based on the movement of the Laser, there are 2 important settings that need to be adjusted. The first is Simulation Space, which needs to be changed to World.

The second is in the Emission setting, where you first need to set Rate over Time to 0 and change Rate over Distance to desired amount instead. Then if you move the Particle System around you will see it spawns a trail behind where you are moving it.

The next step is to adjust the Start Lifetime of the Particle because you don’t want the trail to last forever like it does above. After some fine tuning of the Size over Lifetime, Color over Lifetime, and Emission settings, it begins to look more like a trail that you can follow your laser.

Then position the effect toward the bottom of your laser object and update the prefab. Make sure to remove your prefab from your hierarchy after done as well.

One last effect I’d like to add to the Laser, is when it spawns I want to add a little burst effect. For this I will edit the prefab again and add another particle effect to it. The important thing to note for this effect, is I don’t want it to loop, so I need to make sure to turn off Looping.

Then on the Emission settings set Rate over Time to 0 and under Bursts, click the + icon to add a new burst emission.

Just as a note, for creating this effect, it’s usually good to leave looping on while making it so you can see the effect, then just remember to turn looping off once finished. After making some adjustments to the effect I’m left with this effect.