I'm starting to use Maya to do some bone animations of a 2D character, which is composed of several different parts (legs, body, head, weapon, etc.). I have each part in a separate .PNG image file. Right now I have a polygon for each part, with its own material and texture:
I was wondering if there's a way to automatically combine the textures into an atlas, make all the polygons use the same material with the atlas, and correct their UV maps so they still point to the right part of the atlas. Right now, I can do it manually in reverse: I can make the atlas outside Maya with other tools, then use the atlas on a material and manually correct the UV maps of each polygon. But it's a very long process and if I need to change a texture, I have to do it all over again. So I was wondering if there's a way to automate it.
The reason why I'm trying to do this is to save draw calls in Unity. From what I understand, Unity can batch objects as long as they share the same material. So instead of having a draw call for each polygon in the character, I'd like to have a single draw call for the whole character. I'm pretty new to Maya, so any help would be greatly appreciated!
If you want to do the atlassing in Maya, you can do it by duplicating your mesh and using the Transfer Maps tool to bake all of the different meshes onto the duplicate as a single model. The steps would be:
1) Duplicate the mesh
2) Use UV layout to make sure that the duplicated mesh has no overlapping UVs (or only has them where appropriate, like mirrored pieces.
3) Use the Transfer Maps... tool to project the original mesh onto the new one, using the "Use topology" option to ensure that the projection is clean.
The end result should be that the new model has the same geometry and appearance as the original, but with all of it's textures combined onto a single sheet attached to a single material.
The limitation of this method is that some kinds of mesh (particularly meshes that self-intersect) may not project properly, leaving you to manually touch up the atlassed texture. As with any atlassing solution you will probably see some softening in the textures, since the atlas texture is not a pixel for pixel copy but rather a a projection, and thus a resampling.
You may find it more flexible to reprocess the character in Unity with a script or assetPostprocessor. Unity has a native texture atlassing function, documented here. Unity comes with a script for combining static meshes, but you'd need to implement your own; theres'a an example on the unity wiki that probably does what you want : http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php?title=SkinnedMeshCombiner (Caveat: we do something similar to this at work, but I can't share it; I have not used the one in this link). FWIW Unity's native atlassing works only in rectangles, so it's not as memory efficient as something you could do for yourself.
Related
I am messing with Unity's cameras for a school project, my plan was to change the way that coordinates are projected onto the projection plane to a projection onto a sphere using sphere coordinates. But, getting to the actual math behind the cameras has been a bit of a pain.
My first method involved messing with render textures but, theoretically, that won't work because the camera has already rendered a texture which I am modifying.
Next I tried to get into the code for the base camera, maybe make a copy of the camera to modify without messing the original, but then I ran into this, the code that sets all of the camera's parameters for the editor, I saw the reference to a few .h files.
Where can I access these files? I found files with the same names but not related to Unity. They were also different from each-other, making me think that the file above isn't referring to some sort of industry standard, but it might be.
Unity is generally considered to be made up of two parts; the managed front end, and the unmanaged back end. The front end code (written in C#) can be studied on GitHub here. The unmanaged code (written in C++) is proprietary and isn't freely available.
Unity is fairly modifiable, but there are a number of rules you have to follow.
A camera workaround might be to work with the Scriptable Render Pipeline (e.g. URP). But I'm not sure this actually addresses what you're trying to achieve.
I've decided to use Minecraft like characters in my small game since I do not know how to make 3d models (nor I want to learn how to do such thing in the near future).
However the task now seem a little harder than expected:
I've tried looking in the asset store for prefabs to use but without success.
So, I've decided to try and make a model on blender(by not knowing a thing about non parametric 3d modeling, my knowledge of blender is extremely limited) and import it into my unity game.
And surprisingly, I managed to create the model using McPrep, export it and import it into unity maintaining objects that drive the bones (the output is a bit messy but I think I can manage to clean it up a little).
However the imported version does not have any skin and appears in a gray shade.
Turns out that the output does not keep materials/textures with it!
I've tried getting the texture used by blender and it returns the same skin I fed into mcprep so, by using the same skin, I've tried creating a material with it by getting the .png and using it as texture in a unlit texture material.
However, the result is a bit messy as shown here (left is Blender, right is Unity):
How may I make the texture on unity3d be better and right? (I've heard there is a way using a C# script but I really don't know what it is nor how to do it)
EDIT:
Thanks for the answers before, I did set the filter to point obtaining the texture to be a bit better. However the part that should be transparent is displayed in black on top of the other part (I think).
The image on the right is only filter point and the one on the left is point + alpha is transparency and the transparent shader using unlit transparent
ANSWER FOUND:
As Bart said, make sure the textures' Filter Mode is set to Point, but additionally:
Minecraft player characters are made of 2 layers, the second layer usually has lots of transparency and is used for clothing or other relief detail. So you need to use a transparency-capable shader on your material in Unity.
You're running into a filtering issue. In your case you want no filtering to happen. So select your texture, and in the inspector change the import settings so that your "Filter Mode" is set to "Point". In this case it will do no filtering of the input and your large pixels should appear sharp as you want.
I am working on a Projection Mapping Project and I am prototyping in Unity 3D. I have a cube like object with a 3D terrain and characters in it.
To recreate the 3D perspective and feel I am using two projectors which will project in a real world object which is exactly like the Unity Object. In order to do this I need to extract 2D views from the shape in Unity.
Is there an easy way to achieve this ?
Interesting project. It sounds like you would need multiple displays, one for each projector, each using a separate virtual camera in Unity, like documented there.
Not sure if I understood your concept correctly from the description above. If the spectator should be able to walk around the cube, onto which the rendered virtual scene should be projected, it would also be necessary to track a spectator's head/eyes to realize a convincing 3D effect. The virtual scene would need to be rendered from the matching point of view in virtual space (works for only one spectator). Otherwise the perspective would only be "right" from one single point in real space.
The effect would also only be convincing with stereo view, either by using shutter glasses or something similar. Shadows are another problem, when projecting onto the cube from outside the scene. By using only two projectors, you would also need to correct the perspective distortion, when projecting onto multiple sides of cube at the same time.
As an inspiration: There's also this fantastic experiment by Johnny Chung Lee demonstrating a head tracking technique using the Wii Remote, that might be useful in a projection mapping project like yours.
(In order to really solve this problem, it might be best to use AR glasses instead of conventional projectors, which have the projector built in, and use special projection surfaces that allow for multiple spectators at the same time (like CastAR). But I have no idea, if these devices are already on the market... - However, I see the appeal of a simple projection mapping without using special equipment. In that case it might be possible to get away from a realistic 3D scene, and use more experimental/abstract graphics, projected onto the cube...)
I produced a hightmap from a digital land model and placed it as a terrain into unity. How can I put an arial photograph on it?
Any hints are welcome!
Andreas
You can do this by using the terrain splatmap, in Unity i think it is called alphamap.
Doc available here: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/TerrainData.html
Please note that one splatmap can only store 4 textures, so if your arial photograph contains more then 4 different texture types you will need to think in arrays of splatmaps.
If this method does not fit your needs then you need a projector or decal method, read about them.
Alternative way:
If you dont need any runtime magic, you can just add a texture, to your terrain, this texture will be your arial map, and basically fit this onto your terrain. But one texture on large terrains would produce quite bad results imo.
You can do this by generating a mesh procedurally, and setting the UVs according to the size of the image file.
Look up "procedural mesh UV unity"
When implementing a large hexagonal grid (256x256) of tiles in a Unity game, the game becomes very slow and hardly able to function. The hexagons are in a prefab. A script controls the size of the grid and the spacing between each hexagon. How does one go about rendering a 1024x1024 grid of Unity objects?
When the game is built on Win64 it is also still quite slow.
This is an image of hexagons rendered:
http://i.imgur.com/UbA6USt.png
Try making the grid elements static and make sure static batching is turned ON in player settings. This will optimize their rendering significantly. You probably should even go as far as combining them all into a single mesh (see tools like this one for that purpose).
If you can show us the actual scene hierarchy and the actual structure of your grid nodes then we can help even more.
Because of how Unity works, non-static objects have a tendency to get heavy - they each end up with their own transforms and end up getting drawn even when they're not on screen.
It's the reason more minecraft clones aren't seen coming out of Unity.
If you can't set the hexagons to static for some reason (i.e.: creating procedural levels etc), you'll have to perhaps simulate the hexagons through creative shader manipulation (like saving each mesh into a single array of vertices with a second that tracks a corresponding mesh id) or by writing a script that creates/adds vertices and faces to a single mesh on a single game object.
You may also speed up the scene by creating smaller levels and loading/unloading them as the player moves towards them. See: Application.LoadLevelAdditive