I’ve only been playing with Unity for a week or so. I completed the Lerpz tutorial which I’ve been using as a base to play around.
I have a timeline thats basically a PNG image thats really wide. My idea is to display it like a futuristic hologram. The user will be able to drag the hologram left or right to reveal more of the timeline.
So far, I’ve used Neil Carter’s Depthmask to mask off either end using cuboid shapes which turns that part of the timeline invisible. (I’m not sure if this was the easiest way to do it or not). I can also drag the timeline left or right.
I’m struggling to make it visually look like a hologram. I had the idea to bring in Lerpz’ respawn base particles, and try to make it look like a spotlight projecting out the timeline, hovering in the air… but it’s not working so well.
Can anyone give me any ideas/help to make this look more realistic?
That shader shouldn’t be necessary if I understand correctly what you’re talking about. The way I see it, you should be able to just have a quad, floating in space. Map the UVs onto the amount of the texture you’d want to see at any given point. Then, you have a few options, but this might be the easiest and fastest:
I’m not sure what else you want, exactly, but maybe you could place a frustum shape in front of the quad, if the idea is that some device is projecting it out into a point in space. Then, use something as simple as a partially transparent solid color as the shader for that frustum mesh. (You would probably want to stop things from getting in the way of that “light beam” though, as it would look broken when the texture didn’t disappear.
An alternative would be to use a projector, onto a plane that otherwise doesn’t render, and then the texture could be projected from the “device” onto whatever was in front of it.
