I’m going to be buying a solution from the asset store if possible, but not being a graphics person I want to find out what the best approach is to what I need so I can make an informed decision.
The game is a tech demo for a massive pvp mmo that has a lot of ground based aoe. I basically want transparent layers I can put anywhere in the scene to show where the aoe is. I’m also looking for a look where multiple effects that cover the same area have a blending or additive effect. It’s ok if you can’t tell exactly what effects are there if there are a lot of them, but you should be able to tell there are a lot.
I played around with the particle system a bit, and while I’ll probably use that for some additional effect in certain cases, but it doesn’t really look like what I need for the core aoe effect.
Any advice on the right approach to this would be great. And pointers to existing assets that can do this would be awsome.
The standard way to do this is projected texturing - give Unity’s projectors a try, then maybe some glowy additive particles on top.
But beware that large numbers of projectors (or projectors on highly-detailed environment meshes) could get expensive fairly quickly, as they work by re-rendering all meshes within the projector with the texture projection shader.
Which platform(s) are you targeting? For desktop & consoles, you could implement the aoe as a fullscreen shader, for a constant rendering cost. Use objects or a dynamically generated mesh with a cheap material that only renders to, say, the stencil buffer to mark the areas on the screen that should receive the effect; have the fullscreen shader render the aoe based off the stencil values.
On mobile, you probably want to avoid fullscreen passes. Perhaps you could dynamically generate a mesh based on the current aoe locations.