Unity Web Player - For showing off assets - How easy is it?

Ace-Angel

Hey to all,

I was wondering if anyone knew how easy it would be setup Unity Web Player for showing off assets, and what are the limitations on it.

From what I gathered is that I need a basic license, and also that in terms of 'looks' (post process, shaders, reflections, etc) it's pretty limited and will just use the default 'settings' from it? Also, apparently it doesn't play nice with Firefox and IE?

Can anyone confirm? Anyone have insight? I did some Google but am coming up pretty dry with the above questions.

Cheers!

SlyRipper

As far as I know the Unity Web Player works just fine (using FF) and never had issues with that.

Here are some Pro's and Con's

+ it's pretty easy to setup (just some code to rotate your model, or some more work to rotate it via mouse drag)
+ import model, tweak some shaders, place light, etc. all basic stuff and pretty easy
+ totally free (if you don't want shadows and other cool stuff)

- you would need pro version for around 500-700 € to get shadows, real-time water/reflections, camera effects (like color correction, blur, etc)
- Could be that people don't want to download the webplayer to view it (or even get errors with it)
- more work to get good results (graphics are ok, but if you want something like UDK or CE than you won't get it as good as their engines, but you can get similar effects, but it also takes time to set up those shaders and lights and stuff like that)

Well it has some pro's and con's that are equal in my opinion. it just depends on how much detail and reality you want to show with your assets. You can easily create a basic scene and just load a new model in it and you don't have to do anymore to show it, so pretty easy workflow. But you need to setup custom shaders to get cool results and some other stuff you only can get with Pro Version.. On the other hand there might be people blocking all addons and such things for their browsers and therefore can't view it.

The best thing would be, choose the software you're familiar with and get some great looking assets in there and then just simply render some gif's out of it, nearly everyone is able to view gif's And you can embbed it in many sites without the need to download additional stuff like a webplayer.

Farfarer

Yeah, it's pretty decent but there'll be drawbacks.

As mentioned, you can't have dynamic shadows or any other effects that require render textures (including deferred rendering) without purchasing the Pro version, which is $1500.

Aside from that, you can do pretty much anything you like. The shaders are fun to play with - all of the images in my folio (except for the environment) are screengrabs straight from Unity's viewport, using custom-built shaders.

Obviously, there are streaming issues if you're going to be using massive textures (potentially uncompressed?) for folio rather than in-game purposes. Not sure everyone would be arsed to wait that long for them to load up.

As for playing nice with browsers... it works fine for me on everything I've tried it on (IE, Chrome, Opera, Firefox). WebGL is probably a better option in that it's "native"... but then it's only really Chrome that properly supports it at the moment.

kio

pros & cons are shown already.

it think its an awesome way to showcase work - but most of the time, people will not take the time looking at it i guess ( im no exception to this )

as for the player, its pretty easy if you know some c# and unity3d basicss.

i built the airborn studios webplayer - neox did all the model&shader setup stuff - took around 2-3 days only got few spare hours every day

monster

I know you are probably talking about models. But I've decided to use Unity in my portfolio to show animations. This was put together in about 2 hours. The only technical part was hooking up the UI to change models/animations. You'll need to learn a little scripting to pull this off.

http://portfolio.juantwo.com/monster-crew.html

SlyRipper

It might also be good to have an alternate version. So people that can't watch the Unity Webplayer or don't want to wait till it's fully loaded should get the possibility to view an alternate version of it. Let's say a .gif, a simple image of it to just give the visitor an idea of what he missed :P

Farfarer

Yeah, I've always been tempted to stick up a Webplayer option on my folio... but then I think (and I'm probably correct) no one would be arsed to wait for it to load.

Xoliul

monster wrote: »

I know you are probably talking about models. But I've decided to use Unity in my portfolio to show animations. This was put together in about 2 hours. The only technical part was hooking up the UI to change models/animations. You'll need to learn a little scripting to pull this off.

http://portfolio.juantwo.com/monster-crew.html

Is that the Pro version? looks like you have shadows? Regardless, I really like the shading and lighting on those guys.

Oh and just wondering, you had to stick to some pretty low bone limits, right? Since the skeleton doesn't have feet bones.

SlyRipper

@Xoliul

looks like the free version. The shadow on the ground is the only "tricked" shadow that's possible on the free version. You can use a projector to project an black blob as shadow under your model. There's also the option to change the alpha (or texture) of this blob projection, so you can for example display a better shadow, but this should only be used for non animated stuff as the blob has no animation at all and would look bad if the model above changes it's positions :P

monster

I used the pro version, but I didn't use any pro features, except no Unity splash screen. My shadow is just a black disc with an alpha blend. The other materials are set to cutout soft edge. The background is light mapped which you can do in the free version.

The bone counts were extremely low, not for perf, but because they are so small in game.

Setes

if you're showing a static scene you can always fake the shadows by baking them in your chosen 3D Application and then setting it as a texture.

I've played around with the idea about using Unity to make an interactive portfolio before, but i've been stopped by the loading times