I've actually been using a system based on vertex colours for highlighting and displaying pathfinding, but was just about to switch out for a projector based system until I encountered the issue with shader displacement. That said, I probably don't actually need any shader displacement in my project, I'm just playing around with it because it looks cool
You seem to have mastered shaders. Im trying to learn shaders and was wondering if you could recommend just one book or resource?
I wouldn't say I master shaders. But I do think able to combine my decent understanding of maths, aesthetics and shaders in a somewhat unique and interesting way.
I started with node based shader tools; you can find those in UDK, the Shaderforge plugin for Unity, and even Mayas hypershader. When I had some good intuitive understanding of shaders, I slowly moved on to the code side of if, initially by reading through other peoples shaders and trying to figure out what does what.
Being good at maths really help. Having a very visual relationship to maths (maybe through geometry or graphs) helps a lot. In my daily work, I plot graphs all the time, both in online graph-drawers and pen and paper.
Even with a pretty good understanding of shaders, getting into Unitys shader system still took me some time. There are a lot of magic features and syntax there that takes some time to figure out (and that I still don't know much about). Typically, I just copy a default shader that is somewhat similar to what I'm gonna do, and work from there.
I occasionally head over to shadertoy when I need some inspiration, or when I need to figure out how to do something complex and specific. My atmosphere shader in this project was heavily influenced by this shader (though I ended up going for a simpler, more naive solution).
Shader Toy looks very helpful. Im trying to decipher some of those.
Im guessing you studied maths. Im trying to improve it. My background is art. I went though khan academy and the math is fun web site. Guess I need to go more advanced.
Really nice work. Could you elaborate on the "projected cubemap" stuff for the outlines? I've not come across that technique before, sounds interesting.
Wow - that is absolutely amazing! I've got to ask - would you mind sharing the geodesic sphere code? I'm banging my head against the wall trying to nut it out!
Really nice work. Could you elaborate on the "projected cubemap" stuff for the outlines? I've not come across that technique before, sounds interesting.
This part gets a little convoluted..
The highlighted area is defined in a radial gradient in a low res texture. The planet isn't flat, so this texture has to be a cube map. I sample the cubemap using the direction from the world position to the planets center. To create the texture, I use Unitys built in cubemap render and render my geodesic sphere from the inside, with one of the vertices colored white, and the rest colored black. The crisp outline of the highlighted area is done with some fwidth magic in the shader.
I hope that sheds at least a little light on the subject
Wow - that is absolutely amazing! I've got to ask - would you mind sharing the geodesic sphere code? I'm banging my head against the wall trying to nut it out!
Thanks so much for sharing, so inspirational!
Oh I don't have any code for the geodesic sphere. I just make one in Maya and analyze the mesh in Unity
Oh I don't have any code for the geodesic sphere. I just make one in Maya and analyze the mesh in Unity
I swear I'm close to just doing that myself - thanks for the reply! My project is almost identical, honestly I died a little inside when I saw how good this was - again, fantastic work!!!
Just saw it for the first time and it's amazing. It forces me to reconsider from using flat hexagonal map to the spherical one. All your projects are amazing, but this one is the best! As I understand - you use pseudo-truncated-icosahedron, not dodecahedron, is it correct? And one more question - do you have some more information regarding your tileset blending technique?
Replies
I've actually been using a system based on vertex colours for highlighting and displaying pathfinding, but was just about to switch out for a projector based system until I encountered the issue with shader displacement.
That said, I probably don't actually need any shader displacement in my project, I'm just playing around with it because it looks cool
You seem to have mastered shaders. Im trying to learn shaders and was wondering if you could recommend just one book or resource?
Cant wait to see what you make next.
Thanks,
J
I started with node based shader tools; you can find those in UDK, the Shaderforge plugin for Unity, and even Mayas hypershader. When I had some good intuitive understanding of shaders, I slowly moved on to the code side of if, initially by reading through other peoples shaders and trying to figure out what does what.
Being good at maths really help. Having a very visual relationship to maths (maybe through geometry or graphs) helps a lot. In my daily work, I plot graphs all the time, both in online graph-drawers and pen and paper.
Even with a pretty good understanding of shaders, getting into Unitys shader system still took me some time. There are a lot of magic features and syntax there that takes some time to figure out (and that I still don't know much about). Typically, I just copy a default shader that is somewhat similar to what I'm gonna do, and work from there.
I occasionally head over to shadertoy when I need some inspiration, or when I need to figure out how to do something complex and specific. My atmosphere shader in this project was heavily influenced by this shader (though I ended up going for a simpler, more naive solution).
I've got to ask - would you mind sharing the geodesic sphere code? I'm banging my head against the wall trying to nut it out!
Thanks so much for sharing, so inspirational!
The highlighted area is defined in a radial gradient in a low res texture. The planet isn't flat, so this texture has to be a cube map. I sample the cubemap using the direction from the world position to the planets center. To create the texture, I use Unitys built in cubemap render and render my geodesic sphere from the inside, with one of the vertices colored white, and the rest colored black. The crisp outline of the highlighted area is done with some fwidth magic in the shader.
I hope that sheds at least a little light on the subject
My project is almost identical, honestly I died a little inside when I saw how good this was - again, fantastic work!!!
Thank you for your work!