Fish Pond

Hi.

We just finished our third commercial project with Unity. :-D This time around we created a digital fish pond video-clip player for a Japanese Noodle bar by Hosoya Schaefer Architects.

The fish are based on the Red Snapper model posted in the flocking thread. Worked a lot on the joints to get them just right and soft enough to be believable. We also created a new goldfish model with better texture coordinates and bump+specular maps. On top of that we added flocking behaviour to make the fish behave more natural and react to eachother.

Depth of field (pretty much the same as this, although we added support for transparent materials) and vivid colors give the final touch on the visual experience. Dof color bleed (see dof thread) actually worked in our favour here giving a soft glow to everything

The fish pond is displayed on three seperate screens each with it's own application and syncronised through a socket server enabling the fish to seamlessly swim between screens.

see it here -> Fish Pond

Note on the web version: It doesn't like fullscreen (never got around to fixing the dof effect) and it doesn't like beeing partially visible by scrolling the page or resizing the browser window.



/Patrik + Jorgen

 

That is pretty fricken swank. Go you.

 

That is goregous, well done!

 

nice! great realistic action of the fish (the drift - small quick movement - drift is very well done ; )

 

OMG - this is SO *pro* looking. It looks so different from thing I'm used to seeing created in Unity that I thought it might have been some windows only web app or something.

How did you get the loading screen to be clean and basic like that?

What about the 'moods' menu - I've never seen text look so clear in unity before.

Great work!

 

Customizing the Unity Web Player loading screen (Pro-only feature)

 

I can't connect to shiftcontrol.dk, it just hangs.... Bandwidth problems ? Didn't think this forum was that big.

 

I cannot connect at the moment either... Wait for it Yoggy, it's worth seeing.

 

Wow that is quite cool looking. I have an issue though. it appears to be caused by a depth of field problem. here is what it looks like:

Edit: on reload it seems to be fixed. Wow all over again! I think the depth of field effect is a bit to strong however.

 

>>enabling the fish to seamlessly swim between screens.

well now that's pretty cool!

 

Very nice. I really like the overblown depth of field effect. Kind of weird to critique it if you haven't seen it in person at the installation.

Now what would be fun is some interactivity. A video camera pointed at the onlookers so when there's a bunch of motion in an area the fish can swim away from it or something. Or maybe a lone person sitting there a fish will come over and peck at them. lol.

The glitch comes when scrolling the page (at least in safari.) Seems like the blur effect is not catching up with the rest of the image when scrolling. Odd... and probably a bug, no?

Text being clear... As long as you are using exact 1:1 ratios with a GUITexture you'll get exact precision with any image you want.

 

There's only one thing I would prefer to be different if it were me. A bit of variation between the fish. If I am seeing it right it's all the same model.

Also I love the idea of having it react to the crowd.

 

Very nice work from the screens. I am on dial-up so I'll have to see it in action later. Very cool.

-Jeremy

 

My wife had the idea of coloring the fish. That would be sweet if it was interactive via hand motion. You could, for instance, paint across the surface of a fish and it would keep its "stripes." Anyway, not so easy to implement. lol.

 

Lovely.

If this were a screensaver the fish could be a tad more skittish, maybe. But for a sedate mood-setter in a public space it's great as-is.

 

Thanks everyone We had a lot of fun doing this. The inner workings of it is available here at the forum for everyone to play with. We did develop our own flocking behaviour, but it's based on the same theories as the boids code by Tom Higgins. Dof and physics driven animation is also here.

Thanks. We just set up three basic rules for the boids and then hit play! Love these behaviorally controlled systems that come to life when you start them.

Interactivity would be cool. We have some touchscreens here at the office so we talked about the possibility to interact with the water surface and have the fish react to that. Would have been nice, but budget+timeframe of the project didn't allow it. Think I'll revisit this subject when I have spare time, it's too cool to discard

One iteration we did had a Koi model and multiple textures. Think we had abt 5 different textures, same model though. In the end we went for the one model+one texture sollution. The goal was never to be overly realistic, but rather to convey a dreamlike image of goldfish.

Yup. If the webplayer finishes loading while the page is scrolled (and webplayer partly outside browser win) the sizes of rendertextures gets messed up. This is partly a Unity issue i think. Seems that Screen.height is measured from what is actually visible in the browser window and not the height of the object/embed tags (try scrolling any webplayer so it's partly outside the browser window and you'll see the effect). Probably could have handled it in the dof code, but the problem is not present in the fullscreen app at the restaurant.

/Patrik

 

This is nice !
freid

 

Absolutely gorgeous. I'd pay for it as a screensaver.

Something odd happens when I go to fullscreen though.

 

I gotta chime and say I love it too. I'll PM you later.

 

very nice, love the smeared effect at the edges, gives it a very soft and dreamlike feel to it. the only critique i can come with is the animation of the fish, it looks like it uses its head more then its tail and fins for control and movement.
and fish steering up or down, needs some animation at the moment it just rotates.
I love the use of colours and different moods, it would be cool if you could set it to automaticly cycle through them.
also very nice work on the specular map.

 

Yes, the dof effect doesn't work when screen resolution changes (Rendertexture size is set in Start).

Yes, that's exactly how it works actually. I'm moving the head bone around and then the rest of the bones are connected w. hingejoints, set up with springs to bend softly. So there's no animation on the fish. The main reason for doing it this way is to allow the fish to move more dynamically in all possible situations and not have a set of animations for different actions ( I.e. One turn is never the same as the next ). This has the limitations that you point out, but I'm sure they can be fixed by taking more control over the Joints (changing Springs/Damper/Target Position when needed, and maybe adding sine motion at times).

This is due to limitations of the Joints. Hingjoints only bend one way Character Joints don't have springs target angle so I couldn't use them. Did limit the up/down angle of the fish motion to compensate, but it's still not good. I've talked to Joe abt this and i think better joints are coming (Right Joe? ;-))

Moods are cycling in the restaurant version.

/Patrik

 

the fish movements are perfect, awesome stuff