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Introducing some of the new Image Effects

June 9, 2010 in Technology | 2 min. read
windmills with new image effects
windmills with new image effects
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Good day,

This is Ole from the (in)famous Unity Demo Team (tm). I would like to show you a preview of some of our new handcrafted and ready-to-use Image Effects we are planning to release with Unity 3.0.

Let's look at some examples.

windmills with new image effects

For this screenshot, i stacked together a total of three different Effects. The new Bloom effect (which will feature layer masks in addition to the traditional alpha channel based glow intensity), the Sun shafts effect and the new image based Lens flare Effect (here in all its horizontal glory).

Speaking of lens flares, we are finally able to create "New Star Trek" style scenes in Unity, as can be seen here:

startrek

Skybox based sun shafts are doing a nice job on many outdoor scenes while being a surprisingly cheap image effect. The new Skyboxes we will provide in the new 3.0 Standard Assets will all come with a predefined alpha channel to work nicely with sun shafts:

sunshafts

We also included a new Depth of field image effect:

dofCar

There will also be some not-so-obvious effects that might find some love: Crease shading, a more complex color correction using Unity's animation curves, unsharp mask for contrast enhancement, a new outline image effect and more.
Let's put those outlines on our Lightbulb scene. We will get this:

outlinesBulbs

The Outline effect is a also a nice base for creating more complex NPR (Non-photorealistic rendering) image effects, such as sketch/scribble shading, halftoning, etc.

Let's have a look at what we can achieve with our (old and dying) Island demo. We can e.g. turn this...

island_normal

into high art such as this...

island_scribble_2

or even this...

island_scribble_1

just by blurring the edges and using it as a foundation for an image based shading. You can supply different scribble textures (or just a dot texture if you like old printers a lot).

That's it from me. Demoteam out.

June 9, 2010 in Technology | 2 min. read

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