I have a work-in-progress spaceship interior built with Unity (utilizing pre-built assets). It won't move much. The space around it will, similar to how I made an HTML/Three.js version of this concept (although linked example does move ship around space scene while scales are also animated).
With the three.js version, I was constantly fighting with "space" entering the ship; warp beams and planets colliding with the front info screen or passing through the chair (destroying the illusion of massive scale). I was able to resolve most issues, but it was a challenge when everything was in the same scene.
In Unity, is there a way to keep the ship scene separate from the surrounding space "scene", whether it is part of the same scene or in a separate one on another layer, or the same scene with masks that prevent overlap? I don't need a very literal answer, but any guidance that leads to a solution will be promptly accepted.
Yes, it's a very basic and useful aspect of Unity - the layers system.
As you guess you can find endless doco about it at Unity, cheers
Note too - Unity of course has superb occlusion culling built-in. Almost always this will "just work" for you.
Note that (if I read you right) you're doing a scene with a tremendous difference in scales (like "10 cm" objects AND "1000 km" objects at the same time). As you probably know you basically can't do this in a game engine, it's tricky to pull off.
Just BTW this is more a question for gamedev.com
Related
I am currently working on a 3d game in Unity, and I am working on the level design using ProBuilder. I basically created a huge cube which I "flipped normal", and a second one way smaller
which, as the other one, I flipped normal, but as soon as I crossed it while turning backward I could weirdly see through the small cube, which makes it feel unfinished. How could I fix this issue?
Normally in 3d games triangles can only be seen from one side. Usually this is not a problem because walls have some thickness. Since you clearly have paper thin walls made of only one layer of triangles this is exactly the result you should expect.
In short add the other side to your walls. The simples way is to duplicate the existing triangles and flipping them. Walls will still be paper thin of course. Later you should probably make them thicker.
I'm having trouble figuring out how to light up large area(s) of sprites in Unity 2D. My previous knowledge on Unity's lighting is zero.
I first tried using a large amount of point lights and using the "Sprites/Diffuse" material, but about only five would actually render at a time, so I guess there's a limit on that.
Then I tried putting in an area light. That didn't do anything, so that's when I started doing research about baked lighting on sprites (and baked lighting in general). I found stuff like this but I couldn't get it to work either because it's outdated or because I don't know what I'm doing. Other answers I've come across seem to assume that the reader knows anything about lighting in Unity in the first place which, to be honest, I don't. Unity's documentation website had some information on it, but no tutorials that go into how to set up baked lighting.
I've tried a bunch of different combinations of materials (like using the "Standard" shader for the sprites instead of "Sprites/Diffuse", emission, ect.) and I enabled "Baked Global Illumination" in Lighting>Settings.
If baked lighting isn't possible on sprites (or isn't worth the trouble), what are the alternatives?
Edit: I made sure not to have the lights pointing the wrong direction, and I do realise that Unity2D is just like painting onto a piece of paper in Unity3D. I was able to get point lights to work, but only a few at a time. I don't need to do the entire screen at once, I need to do a large specific area at once.
some tips...
working with sprites your in 2d... when you add a light, switch to 3d mode, and rotate to make sure your light is pointed at your objects, and oriented so as not to be on the same plane, or level with them, as this will cast all the light behind them.
if your trying to light up everything on the screen(in camera) attach an area light to the camera at the cameras position, point it where the camera points, and then in the inspector on the right, you can change its variables. intensity, range, width, height etc.
Emissive Texture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa6kW5HhRd4
For some reason, I never even thought about going into the asset store. I found this for free, and it looks like it will work: Light2D.
Imagine a large free-roam game in Unity,
The yellow size indicates about the largest you can make a typical Terrain in Unity.
Art dept. will completely build, meter by meter, the entire scene.
Please note, this has absolutely no connection to repeating scenery (as in runners) or procedural scenery (as in say some race games).
Really, what is the correct and good way to do this in Unity?
use say 50 or so terrains, each perhaps 100m x 100m ?
can you even have or use that many terrains?
or what?
For anyone googling here.
The correct solution is indeed
Terrain stitching
that's it.
In practice you must use one of the tools available to do this (eg, TerrainFormer) or, your team will write from scratch a terrain stitcher.
Yes, you just use "many terrains".
The best approach to the exact problem posed,
is in fact to just:
"use lots of Terrains".
It seems to be perfectly viable in Unity to have many (dozens) of Terrain units, basically "sitting next to each other".
In practice, you'll need TerrainFormer
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/terrain/terrain-former-20052
or one of the similar tools.
(Or, I suppose, from scratch write your own tool to stitch terrains, and allow you manipulate them all at once, join the edge-heights perfectly, etc etc.)
It's not realistically possible to just perfectly sit many Terrains together (by hand), matching all the edges, etc etc. So you're going to need a "stitcher" package for putting many Terrain squares together.
So, this huge area ..
has about 12 Terrain.
So that's the answer, you can indeed have "many, many" Terrain in a Unity project, you do indeed essentially just "sit them next to each other". In practice it's not achievable unless you use one of the editor tools such as TerrainFormer.
The proper way to do this would have been with procedural mesh generation with MeshFilter and Mesh API but you mentioned that this not at all random or generative so that one is eliminated.
It's just simply a very long, thin, hand-made environment
The best way in this case would be a Modular Level Design. You need to create Modular Assets. With this you can have a long road in pieces which can be tileable. A good modeling artist should be able to create and texture modular assets with 3D modeling packages like Blender, Maya or 3ds Max.
All the programmer has to do is make each asset a prefab then use the Instantiate function to instantiate them to create any distance of environment. You can also create a static environment in the scene from the Editor. Almost anything can be made into a modular Asset especially buildings and roads.
After assembling them in Unity, you can do static batch on all the instantiated modular parts with Unity's StaticBatchingUtility.Combine to improve performance of the game since they are not being moved.
Below is an example of a modular road asset that can be used to create almost any amount of road:
You already answered your question
in this case would it be better to not bother with Unity's otherwise excellent Terrain, and the modellers would just outright build the long course/scenery? (Obviously you'd have to chunk it so it all occludes fine)
I think it's the way to go. If the performance is an issue, try putting each chunk in different scenes and then have a master scene to load them async and additively. And of course you want to unload each scene as it becomes invisible in the camera.
I personally go with your own solution which is letting the Unity Occlusion Culling system to take care of the hiding and showing chunks. I only go with the separate scenes approach if I'm not getting enough performance this way.
I recently had the same problem. We build a tilebased infinite runner with road crossings. The camera was positioned behind and over the car looking down on the street and the player car. So the setup is quite comparable.
We used Curvy from the Asset store to create paths for moving the player and also for creating the geometry of the streets and the surroundings among the streets.
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/level-design/curvy-splines-7038
It is also easy to spawn tiles with curvy paths and combine them at runtime. So you can separate long distances into smaller segments and spawn them randomly.
We also used QuickBrush from ProCore to quickly paint environment detail to the geometry like trees, bushes or stones. I think procore tools are now implemented in the new Unity 2018 version.
Worked quite well.
In unity 5 I am having an issue with certain collisions. I made a basic maze-like game where the player controls a cube across platforms (made from other cubes). In certain areas, two or more of the platforms touch so the player can get to different areas of the level. The problem with my collision happens at these intersections. The player will seem to get stuck for no reason and they would have to back up and get a running start in order to get to the other platform. I went through everything and made sure they are lined up perfectly in the unity editor but nothing seems to fix this.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated .
EDIT: all of my objects are using box colliders
A common (and good) practice is to use a Circle collider on the bottom of your character object in conjunction with a Box collider.
For Example:
While this will likely fix your issue, the source of the problem is probably using many small tiled cubes each with their own colliders. A large amount of tiled objects with colliders most likely cause performance and collision issues.
How can I make a big island (open world style) with water surrounding it?
I don't think that adding a big water prefab (standard asset) to the center of the island with big scales is a good idea, because it would be always rendered to the user which uses high amount of resources.
Should I add more, different sized water prefabs to the shore?
Which one is a better practice?
A large water object placed under land won't be frustrum culled because some part of it exists in the camera frustrum (unless you look straight up). Because of this it will be part of the back-to-front drawing pipeline and thus is not efficient. This is the danger of using over-sized polygons and/or extremely large childless objects.
If the water consisted of a individual objects; each with its prefab and mesh; then objects "off screen" could be trivially culled. Therefore you should use multiple prefabs of sufficient size so as to cullable at times via the frustrum.
Use the water asset that comes with standard assets, make it large and just create your island ontop of it. Unity also only renders what the player can see in the frustum camera, so it wont render all the water (it used to as it was a bug but its been fixed now i think). You can also look into occlusion culling