How can I achieve a wind efffect? - swift

How can I achieve a wind effect like this.(See link in comments).
Not the SKFieldNode, I'm looking to achieve the design.
How can I do it using PARTICLES?
I've tried playing with the SMOKE template in the PARTICLE EDITOR. I tried changing the different parameters/numbers in the editor yet couldn't achieve this effect.
I really need help, I've been trying to do this for weeks.
Thanks!
EDIT:
I'm looking to achieve 2 different effects in the video.
Adding 2 images to be more precise about what I'm looking for.
1) Straight/Wavy Wind - The straight/wavy wind(see in video in the place I drew because it has very low opacity)
2) Swirly/Hurricane Wind - The swirly/hurricane kind of wind that spins around in swirly motion.
I hope this edit will be the most helpful.

These are two different particle effects, which are best done with tens of thousands of very small particles, or even millions of them, in a post processing effects program like After Effects, using something like TrapCode's Particular, or similar. Then rendered out as low resolution image sequence animations, and composited where you need them, when you need them. You can get away with low resolution because they're wispy, additive and faint. This will be the most performant and common way to do this. Doing this with "real" particles on iOS will drain the battery and hog all the CPU and GPU to do the combination of physics and rendering required.

Related

Unity Shader Graph - Glow motion of an object with Shader Graph

I'm new to shaders and with the new Shader Graph from Unity I'm trying to experiment and archive some effects that I have in mind for my games.
I want to get something like this:
https://imgur.com/vqy9y3H
I want a glow effect to go arround my object. In my case it's a square neon light, so it's simple I think.
What I have so far, experimenting and unifying different tutorials, effects, etc.:
https://imgur.com/aPW95S0
This is the current Shader Graph, i know its a mess and maybe there are useless nodes, etc.:
https://imgur.com/J3jzGE6
This is the tutorial I think it's the most accurate to what I need:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJUlGJS3QpY
Thanks in advance for any tip that help me find the correct path to archive the effect.
EDIT:
To make it clear, the real problem for me is the motion effect. I already setup the glow effect with post-processing and bloom. My problem is how to do the effect arround the object. In my case it's a neon tube, so it's easiest I think, as the effect can be on all the object but from the start of the tube to the end. As the tube is closed, it will start again from the begining almost at the same point. Hope it make it clear.
you can use post processing to get the effect your after, specifically bloom and tone mapping effects.
With post processing applied you just need to increase the color into HDR levels in your shader.
Applying a blur outside of post processing is actually extremely expensive and isn't really recommended unless there is absolutely no other option.

Unity best practices for unloading unused areas of a map

I'm wondering about the best way of reducing my CPU and memory overhead for areas of the game world that do not need to be updated every frame.
I have just started to consider this issue as I'm currently implementing a shadow detection system using Raycasts.
My problem is this:
I can have about 100 lights in my level that on every frame send a Raycast to nearby characters to determine if these characters are in shadows.
My game is a low poly PC game, and I understand the overhead from Raycasting isn't that drastic. So its not a major concern. But I'm still not sure of the best approach to optimising this.
I have been thinking of a few soltions, but am unsure if there is "standard" per say.
1. exit update loop if player is too far away
void Update() {
if (Vector3.Distance(playerPos, transform.position) > someRadius) {
return
}
}
This is the most glaringly obvious solution, with even more obvious concerns.
This update loop will still be hogging CPU cycles , performing 2 calculations on every frame, for every light point.
2. Disable Light gameObjects when the player is too far away
This method is more efficient in terms of CPU overhead, as those will be negated. However I'm still hogging uneccesary memory.
In order to make this solution more scalable I would have to design some kind of "enabler" that keeps track of game objects that should be enabled/disabled based on the player position.
But at this point I know I'm re-inventing the wheel, and feel very sure that there is an industry standard for this.
Is there an alternative to enabling/disabling?
I see a lot of game developers talking about physically unloading areas of their game from memory and writing those areas to disk, when the player is not nearby.
I wonder is this achieved by simply destroying and re-instantiating the objects.
Question
Is Unity opionated about this?
The page here lists an example, similar to my first solution. But they are talking about 100s of thousands of updates per frame here.
Maybe I don't need to worry as much as I think
Thanks!
If you want not render objects, that are not in your camera area, Occlusion culling is what you exactly need. Watch this link:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/OcclusionCulling.html
If You want change how your object looks based on range between camera and your object, You have to use LOD(Level Of Detail). Here is documentation:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-LODGroup.html

Best Practice to Increase Frame Per Second for my daydream VR application [duplicate]

I have been building a game for VR using Unity3d. It has only low poly models and the file size is less then 40 mb still the game lags when played on mobile.. Please suggest how to improve the performance..
Thank you in advance..
In order to improve performance in VR for mobile you have to optimize everything as best as you can, you should keep some of these variables in mind:
Graphics Side
- Number of polygons in the scene
- How many source of lighting do you have
Programming Side
- How much work is taking your code, is doing it efficiently?
The programming part can include problems within the physics system, also some logic problems that can probably decrease the overall performance because of higher computation.
My advice is to learn about the Profiler that unity offers, actually you can observe how much work is taking your code and where exactly it is your bottle-neck. This video also can be useful.
Of course a solution could be implement your code following design standards, like design patterns and software architecture (depending on the size of the project).
I hope it can be useful for you!
What I found from developing and launching a vr game is some of the issues below
Number of polygons is usually your first to check even though your models are low poly. For example, I looked at Synty models in the unity store and some of them were over 1k for a bag and 7k for a character model. This seriously reduce the amount of objects you can if you want to target a max of 50000 per eyes.
With some models, you can use blender and the decimate tool to reduce the polygon count pretty easily. From there I would use LOD's to reduce their count further based on distance.
Use occlusion culling (pro version only)
Set your camera distance to maybe a 100 instead of the default
Use mobile shaders and careful using some of the standard shaders as they are expensive. Also transparent shaders will becomes expensive cause overdraw.
Batch your textures and make them static if possible
Don't use dynamic shadows on lighting but instead bake your lights
Try to avoid using physics as this becomes expensive and instead raycast to trigger events or shooting weapons.
Run profiler often and check for any bottlenecks (pro version only)
Reduce the count of Particles effects and their values
Character bones can also cause issue so remove as many as possible
There is also your code to look at as mentioned by Manujamming
Set quality setting to low in the inspector to gain best performance.
Could you provide a screenshot of your game scene?
I hope this makes sense.
Best of luck!

Sprites for iOS devices

I'm trying to do a little research for my next game that I'm planning to make and just wondering if anyone could give me a little direction.
I'd like to use sprites to show animation, characters walking and such so my question is this. What game engine handles sprites the best?
And how many sprites can be shown per second? Say i had a character walking and wanted it to look pretty fluid, might i be able to get 60fps? or is that way way to high?
Last question.. sorry! If a sprite has more colors and complexity, but is the same file size as something simpler would it take more processing power to display the complex one?
thanks!
James.
I would highly recommend cocos2d for sprite animations. It's very easy to pick up if you already know objective-c. And it's great for working with sprites. The animations are very fluid and when your testing your applications in an iOS simulator, it tells you the frames per second in the bottom left hand corner. The frames per second usually runs at about 60. And regarding the sprite file size, I believe if the file size is the same between two sprites then they require the same amount of processing power.
A good engine to use for it's simplicity is the Sparrow engine for sprites, sound and other things. There is no reason you can't get 60fps. As for your last question, it wouldn't make a difference.

Cool fired energy ball for a game. How to achieve?

I wanna to achieve an effect like a fired blue ball (ball with energy) before to shoot it on the sky. I thought to use some particle systems but a friend of mine said that it's very expensive for the memory to use particle system. Is there a different way to achieve this ? Where can I find some examples ?
Particle Systems are probably the best way and can achieve some really nice looking effects.
It depends how optimized your particle system is, but my game used a ton and it ran fast and smooth (this was with OpenGL ES).
Generally they're fine if you keep the max particles as low as possible (whilst still looking good).
Thanks to an open source engine (cocos2d iphone) I also got all my particle systems to render in the same OpenGL call.