Blacksmith demo?

Yeah and exciting times really, by the time the PS5 comes out or whatever. Mobile GPU tech and mini GPU tech has caught up exponentially, to the point where it becomes a little concerning how much of a lack of difference laptops are compared to their large tower brothers.

It's all about money at this point, I'm spec'ing up a new work laptop to finally replace my desktop so I can be mobile. Even though the 980M is slightly more powerful than a 770 and on par with a Radeon R9 290X. It costs "wait for it" $1250.00.. Like c'mon..

 

Major problem : power needed and batteries to run big games.

 

It's pretty rare I've wanted to game on a laptop without an available power plug, though. When I care about portability away from electricity it's almost always for work rather than entertainment. If I'm gaming on the go it's typically at someone's house or other venue where power plugs are readily available. So, for me at least, high-end graphical power doesn't so much need long battery life.

 

Exactly the laptop I have now (780m / I7 4810MQ) will last 4 hours without battery source, it's more about having the option to pick it up and work at different offices or at home quickly. If I'm working with a different studio, it's not exactly great to pick up a base unit and travel with it and they might not have a spare development spec machine to plug a HDD into anyway.

Also I can work on the train etc. I'm sure ZenGarden gets the picture. I'm rarely away from somewhere I can plug it in..

I rarely "game" on laptops, but I suppose I could do.

 

I just want the model of the alien viking thingy... I don't care if there are no textures or materials, it just looks awesome.

 

I think it is just a question of priority.
Unity did not pay much attention to skin / hair / plants shaders.
We Unity users have been trying out many assets and perhaps also tried alot on our own to get it right.
It would just be great if Unity could pay more attention to skin / hair / plants shaders so that we won't have to struggle anymore.
I have read that Unity is currently doing an upgrade for SpeedTree shaders (I hope it supports AO and SSS!), but I have not read anything about hair and skin shaders. For skin I am using "Preintegrated skin shader" (unfortunately not updated frequently, but I still like it a lot more than the skin shader from the Unity Labs demo), and for hair I am currently completely lost.
I think Unity should really release a hair demo to demonstrate how we should ideally deal with hair cuts (long and short, and I am not talking about helmet hair but something like the challenger hair in the blacksmith demo).

Thank you.

ps: I am really thankful that Unity listens, but on the other hand I am also disappointed as many other people that so much custom stuff was used while it should be standard. But I think that was already to be heard from my reply. I would like to have this custom stuff integrated as a standard for all users out of the box.

 

@SimoneDunzendorfer
Many platforms with different specs makes an impossible target for one fitting all solution. Having a consistent set of feats among all platforms, with extra feats for ones with higher specs e.g desktop, makes sense.

"Custom" solutions make sense too, if someone needs to raise the bar to filmic levels.

"I would like to have this custom stuff integrated as a standard for all users out of the box."

The source for Blacksmith demo is available for free on the asset store.

 

@Ippokratis Don't you think that the Volund shaders should sooner or later be integrated into the standard packages? If not, why?

 

I downloaded it all for the atmospheric scattering stuff and hair and skin shaders to deconstruct. Seems I could pull all the sliders on the short haired character's demo head and the hair's look did not change at all that i could discern. I had a good anisotropic shader in 3.x and 4.x that did a better job on fur and hair and skin but don't yet know how to get anisotropy working with the new PBR shaders.

 

Is anyone else finding a bunch of errors after importing the package? I imported both the characters and environment package, and there was a duplicate shader which of course caused compile errors. Then there are missing prefabs and missing scripts too?

 

I can confirm missing scripts which resulted in warnings, but no critical errors.

 

A question about your sentence "The light in the smithy interior was intended to look like it was coming from holes in the walls and roof. This effect is achieved by a cookie with an appropriate pattern.":

Why was it necessary to introduce a cookie? Why wouldn't this look occur naturally without the cookie?

 

It might not look right going from indoors to outdoors. It's the same for films and games. You often need to fake it because the patterning of light desired from concept art might not actually be possible without changing the time of day so much that outdoors looks bad.

So most games mess about with lighting quite a bit. Games you probably own

Being good at faking it is probably the first law of AAA games.

 

I would like to ask why the shaders are named "Volund". Is this the name of the author, or a term that I am not aware of?

 

Like in GTAV inside Michael house isn't?

 

You can see the fakery everywhere in blockbuster games, nobody is immune to it. Films do it

It's actually really tough and an artform to get photography to look composed *and* well lit. Nature just won't play ball, and it's no different in game development.

 

Fakery (or as we call it, "solutions") is the life-blood of shipping a game. Simulation is silly and expensive and often looks boring.

 

@zombiegorilla By "simulation" you mean real-life? If not, I don't understand it.

 

Are you using custom SpeedTree plants in the Blacksmith demo? If not, why?
As far as I have read, SpeedTree is closely integrated into Unity.

 

No, I was reiterating what Hippo said. Lights and effects/fx don't need to behave like they do in the real world, in fact that is usually too expensive. You just need it to look like it does, and cheap tricks do the job fantastically. Heck, we don't even use lights in our game, but everything has cast/self shadows and the appearance of GI on the playfield that goes so far as allowing pretty nice day/night shifts. All done with some clever, inexpensive shaders.

That is the trick, define what exactly you want/need and find the cheapest/best way to do it. Traveling at lightspeed for example, doesn't require motion.

 

I agree with you at the current state of game development. However, it would be so cool if we could just add lights as they would appear in real life, and Unity would do everything else. I am so sick of having reflection / light probes hanging around everywhere in my scene. I think an algorithm would be able to to place them more properly than I can, and I wouldn't be bothered by them being in my scene.

 

An algorithm already exists. We call them raytracers. They are not realtime though.

Edit: Apparently I missed the word "place" and simply assumed you meant rendering.

 

Yeah I'd like unicorns and moons and stuff too but game development is seldom as easy or fun as playing them.

 

I think you might be mixing the Special Theory of Relativity by Einstein with the theory of hire a lazy person to do will find an easy way to do it theory by Bill Gates here.

 

Heh. I was using light speed as an example in terms of vfx. The upcoming release of my last game has light speed travel between planets that required a crazy amount of trickery to pull off to hit the visual target and stay in budget (memory and resources). It's mobile so things were tight.

 

Hey everyong, I've also posted my question on another thread but I would like to know where I can find the models and textures of the glowing stones and the metal mask.
If anybody knows, I'll be glad to know too.

Thank you very much.