What is the best way to create this in Unity?

News & General Discussion
1

This is a audio visualizer from GTA, and I would love to recreate it in Unity. I tried a few approaches by now, but none looked…right. My knowledge in visual creation in unity isnt big either, sadly.

So before I keep test around in whatever ways, is there a way to create this effect (in the best case 1:1 copy lol) in Unity? and if so, how? With Visual Graphs, Shader Editor, something else?

If someone would even be willing to help me over Discord etc., that be even better. But Id also love to know if this is achieveable in Unity.
I have something to grab real time audio with their frequencies btw. I just need to know how to create this wavey circle stuff. I had something similiar in a Visual Effect Graph, but like I said…it didnt look right

2

“Each frame is slightly faded previous frame + semi-transparent polygon that rapidly moves in circle and grows along with audio volume that was painted on top of it”.

Thils is pretty much it.

Basically you’d need two render targets and then keep blitting between them (From A to B and then from B to A), while slightly darkening the visual and adding a semitransparent polygon.

Lots of audio visualizzation effects can be achieved by reuse of previous frame buffer with some sort of transformation applied on top.

3

check these for inspiration:

but could try even with linerenderer, or particles or custom mesh where vertices get moved by audio…
with added post processing bloom and motion blur etc.

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4

You described the first area in quotations, did you got this answer from somewhere? This sounds like its written by the person that actually made this.

I feel like it is a little more than blending between 2 frames (or what exactly is ment with render targets?). It looks a bit more complex than that…but I may be wrong lol

5

It is written by me, after looking at the effect and thinking how it is done. I put it in quotes because it describes an algorithm.

RenderTexture.

It may look comlex, but I believe it is very simple. In addition to darkening there might be slight blur, but that’s pretty much it.

The key of making it look cool is that color gradient used on the circle.

Pretty much all the winamp/visualization plugins are done this way: “Draw some stuff, blur/move it, keep previous frame, repeat”

6

Like I said, I already have something to grab real time audio. The 2 projects you linked as nice (especially the second one), but they run off a audio file within Unity. I need it to grab the PC real time sound, not a precreated audio file. If the second project could run with real time audio, it would be amazing to use. I tried to make it work, but failed.

7

Wait, just so I get this right, the Visualizer shown in the video, in GTA, is made by you?

8

No, it is not made by me. The text in quotes was written by me, not the visualizer, I don’t work for Rockstar.

But if I were doing something like that, that’s how I’d go about making it.

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9

Ah. That answer was very missleading then haha. Im gonna try it out. Not sure if im gonna have a good time with it…but we will see.
Taken from your profile info about being open to hire etc., I doubt you would be open to chat somewhere, in case I need some help? You seem pretty experienced within Unity

10

Oh, cool. I never would have guessed there was already a built-in method for getting the frequency spectrum. And the docs already include an example of how to make your own visualization.