So now that Unity has PBS shaders and will soon work with the OTOY renderer how easy is it to fake a UFO with Unity?
Generally UFO’s are Unidentified Flying Objects, so you could just add a light in the sky, but you could do that with any half decent video editing and photoshop/ms paint or video app.
So ideally we need to be able to add a space ship, with shadow and realistic lighting to a live video feed.
Bonus points for using mobile phone GPS to allow multiple people to view/record the same event via their mobile phone.
The winner is the person who gets the most viral hits with a video or multiple videos of an UFO/ship with the Unity logo on it!
For reference this is how the Pro’s do it…
You might want to factor in the most common locations for UFO sightings:
I am sure people could do it with Unity given enough time & effort they could produce a few seconds of recording of a UFO high in the sky yet able to see its shape etc perhaps have it passing over a farm about 1000 feet above the tree tops. As far as the shaders and other “how” I have no idea about that stuff.
Well the ideal would be to create a Unity App that could add a UFO to a live video feed, that way you could use the GPS features of a mobile device to create an AR UFO overlay with Unity.
The real challenge is how good is Unity at adding things to a live video feed in AR?
Oh man, I really want to try this. I’m kinda stumped about the motion tracking though too. With the rise of AR, someone should make it possible in Unity!
What, you’re going to fly an AR marker across the sky and replace it with UFO? Even if you do that, it almost certainly will look like a very obvious CG and not like a real thing.
I tinkered with vuforia couple of times, positioning of a 3d object over a marker is not very precise.
Then there’s matter of missing depth information.
UFO means "Unidentified Flying OBject’, not a “flying saucer with grey aliens in it”. So if you see something fly and don’t know what it is, it is an UFO.
What the acronym actually means and what people use/expect it to represent are two different things. For example there are a whole host of perfectly acceptable/descriptive english words with four letters than are considered expletive and derogatory.
That would be so cool a drone/balloon/rocket with an AR marker, could ensure your UFO flys realistically within camera frame/motion.
This is traditionally faked using offline renderers like Mental Ray, Maxwell, Lumion, Arnold, Renderman, etc. You would film high definition video as your “background plate”. This is the forest or highway or wherever you claim to see the flying object. Could be your backyard or even a public park. You would then go home and model and animate a realistic UFO object. Next would be to bring that 3d model into something like Syntheyes or Nuke and do motion tracking using points. You do the motion tracking so that your animated 3d object moves in sync with your filmed footage. You would then render it in several passes and then composite it all into something like After Effects or Nuke or Final Cut Pro or something. You could then take this footage into Unity and use it as a movie texture or something. I will say, doesn’t really add value or anything to bring footage into a realtime engine for this purpose…at least not to me.
Edit - I take that back. If your game was some kind of “found footage” type game where story is told by viewing full motion video, well that could work.
It might not be believable unless it’s poorly filmed, the video footage has to be all shaky and blurry, you have to suspect why the heck in this modern day nobody seems to be holding an HD video camera at the right moment, the object has to be far off in the distance and all fuzzy n stuff, and the camera person has to have no idea how to aim in the right direction or hold a camera still. Oh, and the UFO has to really just be a small dot of light, then you can tart it up with some significant link bait, lol. Then it’s be about on par with most of what I see out there, lol
@JamesArndt1 is right. The lengths some people go to fake this stuff - and the same length other people go to debunk is extraordinary. Pixel density is usually the dead giveaway of composites from ‘amateur’ fakers.
I’ve done some amateur debunking of black panther field camera photos. Its fun - and probably was fun to create also.
Seems like it would be much easier these days to just create an actual fake UFO. Rockets, drones, flashing lights, these are all available to the average citizen in the average hardware store.
Just make the thing, go out to some quiet backwater known for UFOs and low education. Fly it around. And watch the locals go nuts.
