I’m sure our engine has the capability, but does anyone here have the artistic skills?
http://www.quest3d.com/download/movies/Quest3D_Azure_Temple.wmv
Neat!
From what I observed, all of that is possible in Unity right now (with a good 3D package of course) except for the following things that would need to be implemented:
- Their glow effect is different… it has a different style blur. I saw the paper how to do it, it’s perfectly possible to do in Unity.
- The “God Rays” (light rays) underwater. Not sure how they accomplished them.
- The underwater distortion effect. This wouldn’t be too bad of an image effect to write, I think.
It’d be interesting to know the poly count of the scene, if there is any optimization beyond frustrum culling, what gfx hardware it requires, and well a whole lot of other things. 
Interesting things to notice:
- Nothing moves except some fish and a bird or two. That kinda suggests all the lighting is baked. The skybox is static, the lighting is static, the leaves are static. The ambient sound fx tries to make up for it, I think.
- There isn’t any interaction at the water boundaries that I could see. This jumped out to me because of the roaring waves sound.
- The camera operator really likes showing off that sun flare.
Anyone else see something interesting? Did I miss anything that needs to be implemented in Unity?
-Jon
Yes it is amazing piece of 3d work. The sound fx seem to let it down a bit i think… needed to be a bit more subtle.
But I thought the skybox was animated… at the start there was some parallax movement of the clouds… I guess that could be achieved with a textured skydome…
this would make a nice community effort to try and create something of that quality to show off unity.
cheers.
We’d definately help with making shaders effects, if someone wants to do it.
Wow!
Quite some art and modelling skills needed to get this done!
Although as always with these movies a lot of things look amazing as long as they are scaled this small…
Regards,
taumel
PS: They don’t have real waves in their water…but i also couldn’t see two textures… ;O)
A unity version could be played in Real time on the web, not some screen capture. That would be sweet :p. Jeff
Outcast, these are definitely real-time web applications. The downloadable versions will be available soon, although I believe they’re Windows only.
If you have access to a Windows machine, check out the demos page and download Alexander Kulagin’s other demo Celestial City (I believe that’s the name). It’s really amazing as well, though far less sophisticated than this latest work.
Pretty nice looking. It seems the Relflective-Refractive Water gets you at least started on the looking down through the water effect. However, how would you go about doing after you went underwater and looked up? Would you flip the normals of the water?
You might want a second watter plain with a slightly different shader that faces down. So that you have more control over the underwater look. Man I wish I had pro to play with some of that watter, thats like the one thing I would use in every project, if only indy had it… :(, 
Jeff
The guy who did this has produced quite a few spectacular demos using Quest|3D, it may even be his job – and yes they’re all real-time (indeed, I believe you can download most of them as players).
I don’t think he works for Act-3D. I think he lives in Russia, based on the email address listed with his Celestial City demo, but they don’t have any more information about him on their website.
I’d love to see this guy produce a master course explaining how he achieves his effects. I’m sure most of his techniques would be applicable to other real-time engines.
I own Quest 3D and there’s nothing “off-the-shelf” in the engine that automatically produces these types of results. The new high-end version includes HDR and a new water or ocean shader, but it’s not clear to me whether Alexander would have had the time to incorporate these into his final demo.
I find the blowing leaves on the trees to be one of his more subtle, but impressive effects. I also like the rays of light and bubbles floating under the water.
As i said, if someone is interested in doing a graphical demo of that kind of quality, we will help out with shaders and FX.
All of the effects shown in the demo are either available out of the box in Unity or achievable through writing a custom shader.
It’s mainly about that you need to be rather skillfull with modelling and texturing to pull it off. If someone has the skills and time, we will write all the shaders and FX code for you to get it off the ground. So who is up for it?
The modeling and texturing don’t seem so difficult to me. It’s all those leaves that have me baffled.
Wow, what an artist. Aren’t those leaves just a bunch of planes put at different angles useing an alpha shader. I tried doing this for vegitation, but my textures seem to pop through each other. Other alpha planes look like they are in front of the plane when they are really behind the plane. Is this a problem with the way I’m doing things or with the shaders and the order they are are drawn on screen. If it’s the shader, then I would love to have a double sided alpha shader that doesn’t pop.
It’s difficult to tell due to the resolution of the movie file, but the leaves seem to have more volume to me than mere projections onto 2d planes. Maybe it’s my mind playing tricks, but they seem to be mapped onto a surface that has volume or curvature…It could just be the camera.
And if they are indeed just textures on top of 2d planes, how do you propagate them so that they’re so dense and naturally (seemingly randomly) spaced?
Joachim
Could you pull the required strings so that the vertex wind shaders could be finished up, along with the rest of the tutorial on it, that would be usefull for a “stun project” which would be good to have for your demos page. Jeff
Apps like Maya have several free Mel scripts that do that sort of thing. I’ve just installed a nice L-system Mel script for Maya which allows you (amongst others) to make nice natural trees with leaves.
Also apps like Xfrog eat that sort of thing for breakfast.
Cheers.
I’m probably giving him too much credit. For all I know, he built the entire environment and trees in Vue or something.
Making something that nice is never easy, and Vue is not a pice of cake to use. Also you can’t do half of what he has there in Vue alone. He deserves credit, but I sure wish I could know how he douse some things. Jeff
I bet if someone posted a pretty scene with a tree it’d come post haste.
-Jon