Best way to make an abyss effect?

Ozz14

Hello everyone,
I'm currently finishing the block out phase of recreating this painting by Zdzisław Beksiński,


I'm not sure how to make the bottom of the scene look black to give that "abyss" look,

I have the ambient color set to black but it still looks grey. Also, how do I make a thin but dense layer of fog about halfway through the towers to make them look like they are much higher in the air? I want the bottom half of the towers to all slowly fade into black.

MikeF

I'd start with just the built in fog settings found in the lighting tab, then add some particle effects to make it more lively. 
If you want to have a specific area with increased density, one trick that still works pretty good is to have multiple planes stacked on top of eachother with varying degrees of opacity.

Also get a proper skybox in there, it'l go a long way

Eric Chadwick

Unity has height fog. 

To get the darker fog on the close towers, you might be able to use an inverse black fog, that starts behind the camera and fades out in front of it. Here's an example I made in another custom 3d engine. Not sure if Unity supports this but it's a really cool effect in action. The blue fog is a 2nd fog layer.

WaunMan

You can try doing it with unlit textures. A plane at the button with the color of the abyss and the peaks with a textures tha is fading into the abyss color. 


However  that would not support any lighting that is not baked into the textures of the pillars.

McDev

Earlier versions of Unity had a fog script which could be adjusted to work like ground fog, so it was based on Y world position of the pixel. You might find similar things on the asset store or take a look at Unity 4 or 5 ImageEffect Bundles.

Prot

Hi,
You can use a shader who looks the depth texture from the camera with a simple plane :


Or a volumetric fog like this one : https://github.com/SlightlyMad/VolumetricLights
It cans come from the ground, sun etc. but a bit heavier to use! (they are some example scene, not my work)