Now I’m not sure if this thread’s already been made before , or if this is the right place to put it but, Here’s how it went Me and the Rest of the TacPlay Team sent an Email to Unity Support to recommend some features for 3.2 , just to realize that it was thrown into a queue of Questions and Problems. So I’m gonna put it here, and tell me if you agree with these, and leave comments of your own suggestions, And let’s hope the Unity Team sees this thread and takes notice.
The Email "Hi Unity, While you’re still making 3.2 The TacPlay Team Has some suggestions we would like to give out. Firstly I Wanna talk about Shadows. -Often people have bad looking shadows because the resolution of the shadows is very bad, To solve this people have to Scale their Objects to get a good-looking shadow, So it would be appreciated by the Users of Unity (Including myself) If you could give the shadows higher resolution, That’s why most games on Leadwerks, CryENGINE etc. look smashing in that area. -Also (I Haven’t seen any engine do this so far so Unity would standout with this.) The Soft Shadows and Hard Shadows option I’ve seen is pretty nice, But what would really excite users is if there was an Option of Distance Blur, This would Revolutionize Unity’s Shadow System’s Power. If it would be for an Object to be close, His Shadow would be Hard and as it get’s further away from the ground, the shadow get’s smoother, blurred and fades, Maybe a function from the DepthOfField Effect? I’ve attached an image of what I mean.(shadowblurfade.jpg) Secondly I would like to talk about the Layout. -I Imagine that you might have used Maya before, well in the latest one it has so many choices on it’s layout like Fire and Ocean and Grass etc. but in which Unity’s case it could be Prefabs or Models, any Transform! Just imagine if people had a customizable bar at the top of the screen with Boxes of Prefabs placed which you get to change, So instead of diving into their Heep of assets looking for their object, whenever needed they can just drag and drop what they need their chosen array of assets from the menu on the top, Like a Player Prefab or perhaps a Controller, This would be a great help to the Unity world.I’ve attached an image example of what I mean.(draganddropselection.jpg) Thirdly I wanna talk about the Terrain System -This didn’t happen in the 2.xx series of Unity but the Terrain Brush system now has some sort of grid-like pixel block when you put the scale really low, Fix that, Not much enjoy it bieng hard. -Add a Ramp Feature like being able to do the "Set Terrain Height Feature But with an Angle option too. -A Pathway system would be nice, similar to what you can do in FarCry 2 Map Editor. Fourthly I wanna talk about Lighting -I know you’ve already put out a Sun Shafts Script, But I’m talking about Light Rays/Beams coming from a small window that stays in the same place, You’ve already made it and put it in the Unity Bootcamp WebPlayer, I’m asking for it to be put in a unity package that comes with 3.2, like Standard Assets or something similar. It would be a GREAT help if you would seek these things out, If you were to do all of these things, I’d probably choose this over CryENGINE 2 if i had a choice. Thanks -The TacPlay Team"
Scaling objects isn’t the way to adjust shadow quality; you adjust shadow resolution, cascades, and distance in the quality settings (also can adjust resolution in the individual light settings). Shadow resolution also depends on the VRAM of the graphics card; cards which have at least 512MB (I believe) get higher resolution because of having more VRAM available.
I don’t think the toolbar idea is particularly useful…you don’t need to dive into a lot of assets, just type in the name or part of the name in the search bar and the assets are instantly filtered. That’s a lot more flexible/simpler than a toolbar.
The shadow blur idea is nice.
The ramp/pathways are already done by third parties. Look in the Asset Store, and also around in the forums.
If you like the Boot Camp light beams, just take them from the Boot Camp project. Feel free to make them into a package if it’s more convenient for you.
Unity 3.2 (very soon) will have some more options on how directional light’s shadow “blur” behaves over distance - you’ll be able to adjust maximum softness (width of the blur) and how fast it decreases with distance.
Also, you’ll be able to override the shader that does shadow blurring itself - just drop in Shadow-ScreenBlur.shader from built-in resources into Resources folder of your project and Unity will use that. The built-in shader performs blur by doing variable width 8-tap Poisson filter. You can implement higher tap version if you want to.
EDIT: Also, What about Easy-to-do Realtime Reflection’s? Everyone Loves Reflections! Maybe a new Shader or a script that replaces the cubemap slot with real reflections? Something nice and easy to work with that ends up looking as good as CubeMap reflections do. I attached a picture of how AWESOME Reflections look, It was taken from my RealTime Reflections Package…Which i haven’t released yet…I feel bad…
I’m kind of curious as to the algorithm used for the shadow maps, and was thinking that if the guys at unity were capable of doing it, they should be having the shadowing algorithm be done with Perspective shadow maps, which alone would probably increase the quality of the shadows greatly.
To to try to prevent misunderstandings: I think JetSoap was talking about blurring the shadow based on the distance between the surface casting the shadow and the surface the shadow falls on - similar to how shadows behave in reality.
What Unity 3.2 brings, as far as I can see, is a variable blurring based on the distance between the camera and the surface the shadow is cast on, so not really related.
