Frozen Aircraft Explosion - DX11 Competition
polycounter lvl 18
I wanted to share my entry for the Unity DX11 competion.
http://www.3dwasabi.com/projects/UnityDX11/UnityComp.html
Being an VFX artist I wanted to do an Epic explosion with the ability to rotate around the effect. I went into this project with little knowledge of Unity shaders, I've been using the strumpy shader for some things in the past, but never coded my own shader before. It was an intense 2 weeks of learning the shaderlab with help from my friend Ryan. Reading tutorials on the Unity site, looking on the forums. I at least now have a beginner understanding what things do.
The explosion cloud was modeled in Zbrush. I watched the butterfly effect video on how Unity created the explostion cloud, but with my limited knowledge on shaders, I needed a way to create something similar using a displacement texture.
I had to make 2 versions of each cloud, 1 lower poly and one super high poly so I could get a good normal map using render to texture.
With the normal map, I then brought it into Crazybump to create a displacement map. In the tessellation shader portions of the displacement map which were black were set to be emissive so I could give the illusion of heat inside the explosion.
For the aircraft destruction, I used a combination of Rayfire & Nvidia's Physx tools in 3dsmax. Baked out the simulation and then took a snapshot of the model. I had to make sure the model was 1 object when exporting to FBX,
To reduce the polycount of the scene, some of the debris were rendered and placed on billboards and additive meshes with vertex colors were used for the debris trails.
Fortunately, I had an older laptop with a Geforce 9800GT so I was able to test the scene on a non-dx11 computer.
This was a really fun project, it definitely took me in a new direction in Unity4. Making Shaders!!!
http://www.3dwasabi.com/projects/UnityDX11/UnityComp.html
Being an VFX artist I wanted to do an Epic explosion with the ability to rotate around the effect. I went into this project with little knowledge of Unity shaders, I've been using the strumpy shader for some things in the past, but never coded my own shader before. It was an intense 2 weeks of learning the shaderlab with help from my friend Ryan. Reading tutorials on the Unity site, looking on the forums. I at least now have a beginner understanding what things do.
The explosion cloud was modeled in Zbrush. I watched the butterfly effect video on how Unity created the explostion cloud, but with my limited knowledge on shaders, I needed a way to create something similar using a displacement texture.
I had to make 2 versions of each cloud, 1 lower poly and one super high poly so I could get a good normal map using render to texture.
With the normal map, I then brought it into Crazybump to create a displacement map. In the tessellation shader portions of the displacement map which were black were set to be emissive so I could give the illusion of heat inside the explosion.
For the aircraft destruction, I used a combination of Rayfire & Nvidia's Physx tools in 3dsmax. Baked out the simulation and then took a snapshot of the model. I had to make sure the model was 1 object when exporting to FBX,
To reduce the polycount of the scene, some of the debris were rendered and placed on billboards and additive meshes with vertex colors were used for the debris trails.
Fortunately, I had an older laptop with a Geforce 9800GT so I was able to test the scene on a non-dx11 computer.
This was a really fun project, it definitely took me in a new direction in Unity4. Making Shaders!!!
Replies
Keep up the good work.