Would there be any way to make refractive heat particles in Indie?
It’s been mentioned before, I know, but is there some camera trick or something you could use to make it work with an Indie license?
That would be really awesome…
I guess render to texture is the one and only way to use refractions?
Somehow in the Portals demo, they made the portals render as some sort of “blank” (I’m assuming their custom shader did that) and rendered the view through the portal behind that view which now had a hole in it. It might be possible to do a cheap imitation of heat refraction using a similar method, if you place a camera just below the main camera and make the particles render this “blank” material. I don’t have high hopes that it would turn out well, however. I suspect it would end up looking more like metal gear solid’s cloaking effect.
Could you add a mild normal map to the refraction and animate the UVs? Possible, idk.
You could yes, but refraction requires render textures → Pro only
Well it stinks. I think that at least some of the features that were Pro-only in 2.x should at least be available in Indie for 3.x. They’d still have Umbra, Fmod, Beast, and god knows what else in Pro 3.x…
Just cause its a new version does not make $0 pay large efforts in maintenance and creation you know, independent of individual hopes of not paying $1500 for a top grade software. But this discussion is as old as the $0 free usage invitation from Unity 2.6
I did say “some”, as opposed to “all”
Yes but then someone else will come along and declare your “some” not as the “some” he needs and we are back on step 1.
But the actual reason is that your some involves one thing upon which the whole rest bases, even though you might not realize it.
Reason is that to do haze (head refraction) you need GrabPass, but its exactly these which can be used to do all the other currently not indie available visual effects.
I personally take it as granted that grabpass and potentially RTs will not be available in indie without at least postfx and replacement shaders, likely also non-soft realtime shadows being enabled at the same time for Indie …
Chances are higher that you get dynamic shadows or replacement shaders or a RT limited to “camera renders into RT so you can use it in UI and alike” will happen first on their own without getting GrabPass and the PostFX
Your logic in the first paragraph is clever, chap. As for the rest, I have yet to learn Shaderlab, as I assume that is what GrabPass is part of. It is difficult to find good tutorials on Shaderlab. I know Jessy has some, but they are iOS focused, and I have no idea what the technical differences are…
Right, GrabPass is Shaderlab, Unity Pro only, and the base of reflection and refraction (and haze).
Jessys tutorials, although iOS focused, are still a reptty good start and so is the reference documentation which with unity 3 got quite a bit enhanced on the shader end.
Yes, I saw that it showed many functions, and it actually started to make sense. But then things have come up in recent months (graduation project, college application [Art Institute 
]), and I just havent had time to go through any reference…