Right now it works with unity’s standard surface shader, and supports all of the texture maps.
I am posting this in the WIP section to get feedback, and see if there is an interest for something like this on the asset store, so please leave your thoughts and suggestions
Launch Features:
*Heat damage affect as shown in progress video.
*Fade in damage texture for damaged areas.
*Adjust normal’s based on damage, to add depth.
Saw your tweet, I must say this is something I have asked myself again and again how to do.
Your prototype looks sweet, but I would like to see it work with advanced geometry. Then you got something you could use as a shield impact effect.
Would be cool if we could use seamless impact textures, for example an hexagon pattern or something to give the shields more personality (like this: http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/BubbleShield.jpg)
Keep up the good work! This is something that I think alot of games (including mine) could benefit from.
Thanks Zakkon, yes It could definitely work with advanced geometry. I should have showed the affect on something more complex then a stretched box; It is actually a volumetric affect; if you were to look behind the box in the demo video, you would see the heat spreading through.
It could be used for a shield, (of any shape too!) but since its simulating an entire volumetric space, it would be rather inefficient…though…hmm actually that might work well too.
The hexagon pattern looks really cool, would love to create an affect like that, might be possible too, I have some ideas that might work utilizing current code.
Updated the original post with a progress video.
The affect can now modify the normals, giving a liquid metal appearance on the plain cube and sphere.
Actually had to go into the code generated from the surface shader to make this work; but only had to make a few small changes
The next step is to add some distortion, make half of the affect persistent, and the other half fade out. So the heat would fade out, but the normals might stay perturbed for example. Which affects are persistent would be able to be changed.
I have no use for this - but I had to comment on how cool it is to see an advanced ‘thing’ like this being worked on in Unity.
It makes me want to - create something that could use this for visual wow-ness.
Nearly finished the initial release; all that’s left is the ui (it uses a custom inspector to make things easier) and the shader variants. I plan to have it in the asset store this week, if all goes well
I posted a new video showing the UI progress and some improvements. The affect can now dynamically change the vertices positions to help with the indented affect.
There is also now a pre-optimize toggle. What this does is cause only the voxels near a surface to be updated, and can significantly speed up computation for objects with a lot of empty space in the bounding box.
Some notes:
If you look in the video you can see the custom inspector and the shader properties. I plan on adding some more properties, but I would like to hear suggestions for any specific properties that you would like to see that are not already there.
There are still things I can do to improve the performance, for example; currently there is no multi-threading.
I plan to add a transparent version of the shader; this would allow a shield affect and other cool affects; I hope to include this in the initial version.
I would like to make that possible; currently its not; unless the “skin” doesn’t stretch or deform at all. That is one of the limitations: its best used on solid, non deforming meshes. So for example, it would work on a handheld shield; but it is unlikely to work well on skin. I have some ideas for making it work; but they are complex, may/may not work and would take time to implement, but its not out of the question
I decided to have a go at implementing shields using the same infrastructure; its not quite like what @Zakkon posted, but I like it, and at release it should be customizeable enough to produce the affect in the pic zakkon posted.
Screenshot:
Keep in mind that this is using the same infrastructure as the demo videos, so that means you can do all the same affects.
At the current rate of development, it should (hopefully) be ready on monday; then just have to wait for unity to review it and then it will be on the asset store : )
