Unity - Flowing Cloud Models?
polycounter lvl 17
And my inexperience rears its head.
The environments in my current project consist of floaty chunks of land. After looking at a bunch of stuff for reference, I found a picture that made me want to surround said chunks with a surface of flowing clouds, just so:
The only issue is that I have no idea how I'd accomplish this, especially in Unity. The only thing I could think of was displacement maps, but Unity can't do those, and even then it'd probably be way too system-intensive.
Sculpted clouds look decent, but they're static, so that's a no-go. I could have multiple layers on spheres or something that would rotate around via animation, but that seems like it'd be a lot of geometry to have on screen at one time.
Scrolling textures are all well and good, but without the model moving along with them, it just looks off.
I don't think I could get the effect with particles, as that would require a huge amount, which would also be quite intensive.
Anyone have any ideas?
The environments in my current project consist of floaty chunks of land. After looking at a bunch of stuff for reference, I found a picture that made me want to surround said chunks with a surface of flowing clouds, just so:
The only issue is that I have no idea how I'd accomplish this, especially in Unity. The only thing I could think of was displacement maps, but Unity can't do those, and even then it'd probably be way too system-intensive.
Sculpted clouds look decent, but they're static, so that's a no-go. I could have multiple layers on spheres or something that would rotate around via animation, but that seems like it'd be a lot of geometry to have on screen at one time.
Scrolling textures are all well and good, but without the model moving along with them, it just looks off.
I don't think I could get the effect with particles, as that would require a huge amount, which would also be quite intensive.
Anyone have any ideas?
Replies
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/169441-Cycle-through-3D-models
The only issue is that I can barely make a sprite sheet for a texture, let alone a sculpted model. We'll see, though.
[ame="
I'm not super familiar with Unity but soft particles will help with it intersecting with terrain. Here's a talk about it on the Wolfire Blog.
If this is for a setpiece scene, something like the concepts you posted, then you could probably get away some more demanding FX & trickery.
Truth be told, I was afraid to use particles/sprites because I thought it would be really system-intensive, but it doesn't seem to be the case; the game runs just fine even with, like, 500 particles on screen at once.
Though, unfortunately, it looks like soft particles are a Pro-only feature. But still:
Oooh myyyyy
[ame="
I remember Neox doing a test with this a long while ago and this is his result.
You could probably even have some panning textures for some more wispy cloud details to give it more life.