Fragmentation Appearance and Disappearance of Environments

Hi there,

We are trying to figure out how we could create the effect of the fragmented appearance and disappearance of an environment in Unity, as you see in BBC's Easter Rising VR project. The specific effect we are going for can be seen at 0:50, 3:10 and 5:43 in

. We don't think it is an effect built into an .fbx file or original animation done in Cinema 4d or something similar because for elements to appear and disappear (with a modifier like xpresso, this data doesn't show up in Unity) because it is done with PLA animations which are lost in Unity.

Another effect that is similar to this (in that the animation items appear and disappear in fragments) is the one done in this example:

where objects appear and fold out from nothing as seen in moment 0:40.

If anyone has an idea how these were made either with scripts, plugins and/or importing from a 3d software we would be very grateful for some tips!

 

Because everything seems to break apart into triangles in the first video, my first guess is that it's done with the vertex shader, adding an offset to the verts in each triangle when drawing it.

In the second video my first guess would be animated transforms.

 

1st video is using shader like Fragmentum probably.

 

Nah. That won't work on models that are not flat-shaded.

@alicrank , uinless ALL your geometry has sharp edges and flat shading, this is done by writing a geometry shader. Calculate face offset within geometry shader, and apply it to vertices passed into geometry shader.

 

dear ikazrima,
thank you for your input
this plug in is the right one to make the animation. Unfortunately was implemented for unity 4.6.
Not yet available for unity 2017.
any other suggestions to do something exactly like that?

 

Fragmentum has been tested on Unity 2017.1, it even says so on the asset store page.

 

thank you!

 

This effect isn't super hard to write - geom shader, just offset the verts.

I used it for a music visualization toy I made: