I wanted to know which kind of blood/decal system people are using.
Is anyone interested in telling about their decal system of choice?
As far as I know, there’s Free decal system on AssetStore, a command buffer decal example (for deferred rendering) and a few alternative paid solutions. None of them really stood out for me, though.
Hi! I suggest use UVPaint, it can applying decals at runtime to Character and bake into the Texture map. Also works as Detail and Customizator:
I saw this asset, but I’d really prefer polygonal blood instead of texture painting. Any suggestions in this case?
Why polygonal? It is really slow, if you add this to skinned mesh
Because texture painted blood does not fit desired aesthetic.
Also, while skinned mesh decals would be nice, the minimum I’m looking for is environmental decals.
Result is good enought for blood details, im use it for Unreal Fighter
For environmental decals I suggest looking into deferred decals, simply because they usually look the best and can conform to underlying geometry. I saw someone mention that Unity’s G-buffer works in a way that hides parts of decals that are shadowed, but surely there’s a way to work around this.
You’ll most likely have to create your own adaptation of deferred decals in case you want to use them. There are lots of useful articles/posts online that pretty much cover the entire process. For example, this and this.
If it’s assets you’re after, Easy Decal looks quite promising.
You could also make a shader that uses vertex colors to blend between textures. It may not be what you’re looking for, but it’s a pretty nice and simple way to get some variation to your materials. Too bad Unity doesn’t allow for layered materials à la Unreal Engine.
So, custom solution, after all. Hmm.
Well, should’ve seen this coming. Then again, I had fairly specific look in mind, and it is not exactly the most popular approach to decals these days.
Do you have an image of a game that used the ‘look’ before?
Sure. Blade of Darkness aka “Severance”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdLX6Ibdnyc
Skip to 1:58.
They had polygonal blood, pretty much.
Im assuming your talking about the blood on the character just before he dies - which is rather unique looking, rather than the blood on the ground which looks like a very common effect.
Wondering if a noise displaced / duplicated mesh of the character mesh with a special blood shader, at the time of death would work for that look.
Thanks for the reference. Ive never seen that game before. The character controls and weapon switching are impressive for its time.
No, I meant environmental decals. Character blood is bunch of predefined textures, as far as I remember. However in this game blood splatters could land on walls and trickle down a bit forming a bloodstain, which was done by moving bottom vertices of the wall decal. The video I linked does not demonstrate this part, unfortunately. I’m looking for similar effect, which is why I want polygonal decals and not texture painting. Texture painting will not be crisp enough plus when applied to environment it will waste a lot of memory. Of course it has benefits too (for example, decals could be made persistent).
Oh, and the game is definitely worth playing. It is quite close to being dark souls of 2000s.
Thanks for clarifying.
Several years ago (holy crap - time is passing) I remember reading or listened to vlog / blog from wolfire games about the game overgrowth having a similar flowing blood effect.
I vaguely remember not understanding the concept (maybe I juat wasnt too interested) because he was talking deeply about code bits, rather than simple terms as you explained - stretching the bottom verts of the polygon decal.
If I can find the reference again Ill post it up here. Otherwise – it was either on the wolffire blog or on there youtube channel. I remember watching ALL there weekly youtube updates, interested in the animation system they created before realizing they had been working on the game nearly 3 years before I started watching and still had not released the game, as far as I know - they still havent released, but seem able to attend most all game related conferences every year.
Odd choice of time commitments imo.