I hope I’m posting this in the right place. I think it’s a shader issue.
I had an idea to make a side-scrolling game out of spheres, but spheres have too many polygons in them. I thought that if I used a flat plane with a sphere looking normal map, it would look identical to an actual sphere. So I did some tests and came up with this.
For the trick to work, I’d need the planes to always face the camera. Particles would ideal for this, since they face the camera and I can have lots of them with only 1 draw call.
The last image is an example of something I’d like to make. The problem is, the normal map doesn’t seem to work on particles. I am using a transparent cut-out shader in the images above.
I sort of understand what the problem is. Particles don’t have enough information for the normal map to work correctly. It looks like it disregards the direction of the light source and puts the specular highlight right in the middle of the particle. This might be hopeless, but is there a shader out there that can put correct looking normals maps on particles? Thanks.
Particles are useful because they lack a lot of information, and thus thousands of them can be drawn when images and objects of greater amounts of information would be far more limited by processing power.
If I understand what you are attempting to do correctly, you might think about writing a custom particle generator instead of a shader that works on particles. It’s a tough call as I’m new to Unity and I generally underestimate processing capabilities…
Have you considered using LOD models with several levels?
Have you tried simply using image planes as objects rather than particles?
Depending on just how much you really need to be going on at one time, one of those options may be simpler to implement.
That said, I hate when people suggest to me doing something completely different than what I actually asked, so, while I don’t have the answer, I hope someone can help you further.
use a script that makes the planes always face the camera, this would let you use normal maps.
using a single material and a single plane mesh would not be expensive, in terms of draw calls. Not to mention you would have far more control over the arrangement and animation of your sudo-spheres.
Does anyone know if Unity supports something like this? The guy who posted this video says these are not spheres but billboard particles. Could be very useful.
