This blog post is written by Sándor Moldán (Nekharoth on forums) who has been working on Terrain Toolkit to help generate realistic terrains in Unity Editor. The project was one of the four selected projects that were selected for the Unity Summer of Code.
Terrain Toolkit
The Terrain Toolkit is an integrated set of tools for the Unity Editor which is designed to streamline and improve the workflow involved in creating realistic terrains for games. The toolkit enables the creation of large scale, realistic and playable game worlds within a very short time span.
During the summer, I’ve had the pleasure to mentor Michał Mandrysz, as he created an External Lightmapping Tool for Unity, as part of Unity’s Summer Of Code. As of today, you can download the tool from the resources section of our website.
What is it?
A tool that lets you use 3d Studio Max to make great looking lighting for your game.
I’ve been making lightmaps for ages already, why would I care?
Because with this tool, you can actually layout your scenes in Unity. Previously if you wanted to use lightmaps, you’d usually layout your scenes in 3d Studio Max or Maya or some other tool, and would have had a hard time moving things around in Unity later on.
Do you have some examples for this?
Take a look at this video tutorial from Michał, going over the example project included with the tool.
Great. Do I need to prepare my assets in any way to make this work?
You need to provide lightmap texturecoordinates for all meshes that you want to have lightmapped. However each object can have its own seperate lightmap sheet. The tool will take all lightmap sheets from all specified objects in the scene, put them all into one mega lightmap sheet, export your scene to fbx, have Max import the fbx, have Max generate a lightmap, and then that lightmap gets picked up by Unity automatically.
Take a look at this more detailed screencast, which goes trough this process, and shows how to go from an empty project to a lightmapped environment.
But I don’t use max! I use …..
There’s nothing in the tool that makes the technique inherently limited to 3d Studio Max. However the tool does provide some nice extensions to Max that make the lighting baking a one click process. With a bit of effort, one could take this project, and make it work for other authoring tools.
I still have some other question
Try out the new answers.unity3d.com and get it answered!
Many thanks and congratulations from the Unity team go out to Michał for being part of the Summer of Code program. You can find more indepth info on the tool on Michal’s website.
This blog post is written by Ben Throop who has been working on a Detonator framework to generate great-looking explosions in Unity games. The project was one of the four selected projects that were selected for the Unity Summer of Code and the first to be wrapped up and released.
Explosions are a really common element in games, but they can be difficult to create. Starting from scratch can be time consuming and requires expertise with particle systems, lighting, texturing, and animation. Tweaking existing effects to fit a game can also be a challenge because its difficult to change the size or color of a set of particle emitters in unison. Making explosions should be fun, fast, and rewarding instead. That’s why Detonator was created.
During the last six weeks, the selected participants for Unity’s first Summer of Code program have been working hard at making the ideas from their proposals come to life. It has been very exciting for us at Unity to see what people can do with our product with a good idea and six weeks of hard work.
The mentors at Unity will be doing a final review of their projects, and work with the participants to make sure it’s all nicely wrapped up and ready to be published on our website. We’ll put up another blog post when that happens.
It might take some time though, as some participants might be catching up on some sleep
This blog post is written by Ben Throop who is working on a Detonator framework to generate great-looking explosions in Unity games. The project is one of four selected projects that were selected for the Unity Summer of Code.
We’re just 9 days away from the August 31 deadline so it’s time for an update. I’ve been working on Detonator, which is a parametric explosion system. It’s supposed to make getting nice, scalable explosions into your game really easy while at the same time providing a framework for more complex effects.
This blog post is written by Michał Mandrysz who is working on support for External Lightmapping in Unity. The project is one of four selected projects that were selected for the Unity Summer of Code.
What’s lightmapping?
If you’re not familiar with the terms “baking” and “lightmapping” then let me introduce them to you a little. Baking is an operation of prerendering expensive details (in calculational sense) like illuminated lightning, highlights and shadows into a texture so that it doesn’t have to be renderered at realtime. It requires some additional effort from the game designers, but it benefits hugely in performance. This solution is pretty old, but according to words of John Carmack it’s still up-to-date and will be – even in high end games.
What is the Lightmapping Tool?
It’s a tool for lightmapping scenes in external applications (yeah, I know most of you would wish to see an integrated system, but it’s not that easy to write this kind of system; however there are several huge benefits from using an external one, especially as powerful one as VRay).
As you may have heard before, my job is to wire lightmapping process tightly with 3dsmax and VRay. The system automates the process of both external baking, and setting up the lightmaps in Unity.
Lightmapping tool manages up to 99 lightmap atlases (could be even more but the interface would have to be modded for such extreme jobs) which hold object information with resolution proportional to their size on the stage. It can start external applications (currently only 3dsmax), assign appropriate renderer or load a preset max scene which holds information about lightning and so on. I’m planning to make a short screencast video when the work is done, so you can be sure you understand everything clearly
This picture presents about 1/6 of a whole scene lightmapped with only one 2kx2k lightmap rendered with VRay on medium settings
