Background:
I’m sort of a beginner in unity. I have experience in cinema 4d and have realized that the texture import settings are a bit… complicated. But I’ve definitely noticed that the textures/materials in unity have a large set of possibilites. Even though I have no coding experience, I’m able to bake shadows on to objects in cinema 4d, and load them in to unity as textures.
Question:
Is it possible to easily create a shader or material which gives objects Planetary Annihilation’s “look”. I’ve tried making the textures in cinema 4d (a 3d program), and then moving them to unity, but only the color channel is transfered and it looks unfinished. Is there any easy way to mimmic the simple and minimal look of Planetary Annihilation without the flat default materials in unity? Also, it’d be best if the method is compatible with ios (and the free version of unity).
I don’t doubt they used some kind of shader, but their “look” seems to be mainly the result of their subtle texturing. I see many flat colors with slight wear on the edges. Add that to models that are sort of blocky and walla.
Also, I’m assuming they chamfered/rounded the edges of the models when making them.
I’d be curious to see what results you come up with.
They are using a custom rendering engine, so much of it could be procedural and/or handled by the renderer. But I think you are right, you could probably get pretty close to that with subtle texturing, lighting and design choices. I love the look of that game. The smoke/explosions are really cool.
But I have no idea what the response* means. Could you put it in simple terms or provide a solution that you think would work best?
“You’ll probably want to use an edge-detection base shader that compares normals instead of depth and just change the output based on the coloring style you want. That way you can specify how much of a difference in normal angle represents an edge to highlight!”
The normal of a face is the direction the polygon is facing. It’s a line directly perpendicular to the face. What that comment says is pretty much “determine the angle between two polygons to see if the angle is enough for the edge of the polygon to have a highlight.”
Edit: It should be mentioned that edge detection is a post-processing effect, so Pro only
The models are probably unwrapped in the 3D app, then Ambient Occlusion gets baked. Then they open the texture in Photoshop and paint simple colours on top and make the edges a little bit white.
If you use Blender I could show you an example.
The blur looks like a Depth of Field shader on the camera.
Just an FYI: those screenshots you posted are from the pre-rendered concept trailer. The game is currently in alpha and looks pretty similar, and it’s almost certainly going to improve, but the actual gameplay looks more like this:
