"Cool camera effect" - how was it done

This is from an obscure game I found called "Subway Surfer"



My assumption is that they used a wide FOV, perhaps some fish eye shader, and also that the track itself is bent and not straight

 

Looks like fish eye effect.

 

One way would be to use render to texture then apply that texture to a curved surface.

 

It's a pretty good game.

I wonder if in their shaders when they pull in the Z coord, maybe they do some kind of math on the coordinate before passing it on to the fragment shader, that causes the Z location to be squeezed?

 

You can find some of the wonderful assets in this thread as well as a tiny line about how they made the bend
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1595445

 

You'd need a reasonable amount of tesselation too. It doesn't matter what maths you do in your vertex shader, triangle edges will always be straight lines on-screen. So if you want your train tracks to be curved, you need lots of triangles on them.

 

so would that be a camera shader or is it a special shader that actually bends the objects and must be applied to all geometry?

 

Every shader of every object would need a custom vertex program that performs the bending.

 

you know what these guys/devs are supecool and helpful human beings why don't you just send a polite email asking the same exact questions. I'm sure they might be able to help and/or guide you in the right directions. Worth a try for sure

Also another thread over at polycount discussing the same issue, I believe. Often unity related even !
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=95951

 

Someone produced a tutorial detailing Deathspank's rolling world effect a while back, it was for XNA but as the actual effect is shader based it should be easy to do in Unity. After spending a while searching for it, through numerous dead links and closed sites, I found it:

http://www.madgamedev.com/2010/09/article-rolling-world-tutorial/4/

It looks like there could be some horizontal distortion in that subway surfer game too, I would assume the effect could be altered to handle that too.

 

Anyone know where I can find such a shader? That tutorial link seems to be dead.

 

Kinda late, I know, but if it still comes in handy for you, here's one found in Unity Answers.

http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/288835/how-to-make-plane-look-curved.html

 

This thread might Be relevant too : http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/198568-Epic-Radial-Blur-Effect-for-Unity-Indie.

 

I described how we implemented this effect in our game: http://grrava.blogspot.be/2015/05/bending-world-with-unity.html