This marks the first week of the last semester of my college years. Time flies by so fast when I’m stressing over core classes and even faster when I’m not…
My previous team’s game got dropped so I moved to the production team producing Necromanager. I’m handling graphics programming on the Necromanager team. This will mostly entail writing custom shaders for Unity and working with tuning animation timings. I think that the esthetic could be improved upon by removing the tiled grass texture and instead using world space coordinates for texturing the ground.
It would be nice if we could use Unity 5 since it has physically based shading which looks far better in most lighting conditions. I’d like to implement by own physically based shader, but it’s really a question of if there’s a point on burning a chunk of time to get a nice PBS model when Unity 5 already has one. I’d rather just pay the $70 for 4 months and work on some post process effects and populating the level with procedurally placed foliage. Failing using Unity 5, I would at least implement a SSAO shader with bent normals since ambient occlusion would look good with the art direction of Necromanager.
During this past week I have implemented some test animations for the character that Shain has made. If I can get and idle animation then everything will be easier since Unity’s mechanim system is pretty dumb to work with and won’t allow you to pause an individual animation. I also looked at some documentation for writing shaders in Unity. The shaders seem fairly straightforward for common tasks, but the way that they abstract away the lighting calculations using surface shaders is both a blessing and a curse. Because of how Unity handles the lighting I’m not sure how or if it’s even plausible to change the lighting model to use a physically based BRDF if I wanted to. I know it’s probably possible to an extent since there are some plugins on the Unity store that do this, but they are not quite to the point where I would recommend using them. Additionally the Unity workflow could become a problem since until Unity 5 the workflow was designed for a blinn-phong BRDF.
I miss using UE4 since while it has a steeper learning curve, it provides a lot more features for graphics out of the box than Unity for far cheaper.