Powerful, Low Draw Call Volume Light Light Effect Solutions (New low price!)

Well they're really aren't texture out there like this because I looked myself and couldn't find any so I just made some myself. It may not be that hard to make them but isn't that what a profession is? People could probably make some models and textures but sometimes it's just easier to buy it. It isn't as easy as you think though

No everything I used in the demo had nothing to do with Unity's tools or scripts. I made everything and used my own techniques. Using real lights would just waste performance, I just used a light texture that gives the illusion of a light being there. It's just like Oblivion's technique they used to create their light pillars. There's no line renders it's just my billboarding script

 

I have worked in the "industry" 5 years and I know what IK Animation implemented.
It is, as he says, a very inexpensive effect that gives great enhancement to scenes with fake "light" sources.
Also in the company where I worked, supposed to be "professionals", some of them couldn't understand the power and simplicity of this system.
It is also used by Valve at least in TF2 and it works great.

The thing is not about a always camera facing billboard, I downloaded that script months ago, the thing is about textures.
Try to make a couple of them and you'll see that it's not all that quick and easy to produce.
Now, he's selling 33 of them for 10$. Is it a high price? I really don't think so: if you make 33 of these kind of textures it will take you probably not less than a day. So, if you are from India or Pakistan then yes, it's a high price to pay, but if you are from USA or EU or Australia it's probably a very good price.

This said, I didn't buy the package yet, I don't need it at the moment, but I'll take it immediately if I need to make a couple of lights like these.
So, I don't know what is included in there but for what I've read, you can enhance even more the package with this feature:
the more the camera position is aligned with the axis of the light, the more the directional billboard will fade out
add another billboard always facing the camera on all axis
this second billboard will work opposite than the other: the more the camera position is aligned with the axis of the light, the less transparent it will become.
This will give a great fade effect when passing throught these lights and cut off the inesthetic feeling when you go through the plane with you camera.
It will also make your product totally complete.
My suggestion is also to produce a video to show the effect in a very clear manner, so nobody would think it's useless and everybody will understand very clearly what you are selling and why it's well worth 10$ or even 15$.

 

LOL what are you trying to impose here, people who live there still got money, heck you dont know how it is down there unless you been there... lol just found it funny that you would say that.

 

Thanks megmaltese you pretty much summed it up. I will make a new video to show off the effect better too.

 

Well I don't know if you know me, where I live and where I lived (I lived in the poor east Europe, now I'm in Italy) but I think this your post is really much more funny than mine.
Do you know how much time an indian needs to earn 10$?
And do you know how much time an american needs to earn 10$?
I think you just better accept what I wrote as truth and open your eyes wide to better know how the world's economics works.

 

More 5 star ratings! That's got to show for something right?

8, 5 Star Ratings

 

Looks pretty neat - I don't really have a use for it right now, but will probably grab it for a future project.

I would look into megmaltese's suggestion of a dual billboard system. Also, a clipsafe shader can help a lot as well.

Nice job! =)

 

For anyone wanting to understand this effect, and create it yourself:

- open up a graphics program, use the gradient tool to draw your light beam (linear gradient), or glow (spherical); just use white because you can tint the color inside unity to match your lighting
- apply texture to a plane, with transparency settings (shader > particles > additive)
- add one line of code (check unity script doc) to make the plane look at the camera, on whichever axis you need and voila! You have just faked volumetric lighting!

to improve it you could:
- add an animated texture so dust particles glimmer in the light (can use a particle effect, but thats wasted drawcalls)
- add a small code, so if the camera is too close or looks at the beams source, it fades the texture out.. so as to not ruin the illusion
- or you can just remove the billboard code, and place a few at angles like in the game Amnesia.. which i think looks best

I'm pretty new to JavaScript and unity, but thats my take on it. Hope it helps.

 

@Thinksquirrel Cool thanks.

@Greg-Anims First of all no you can't create this yourself there's nothing out there like this and there's no materials to do so, that's why I've sold this over 100x. Second I don't appreciate you posting your opinion of how to do this on my forum product page.

 

hahaha, just trying to level against the amount of bullshit in this thread.

This effect takes about 10mins to replicate. As for your fx pack, 33 textures of the 36 are redundant by your own admission in your video tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wnf4VeDT7yY

(where you can simply tint the color of the texture, which is faster anyway)

The remaining 3 are quick gradients done in any graphics application. All i'm doing by posting the "how to" to this effect is to help the community, all you're trying to do is cash in on people who don't know better.

 

Greg your video really looks crappy... the fact is that you can't discern quality stuff from a semitransparent plane put in there... it's not even facing the camera so it will look totally S*** when you go on the side of the beam or through it...

 

its IK Animations video..

 

that hurts

 

Doh... wasn't it supposed to face the camera?

 

It's times like this I wish we could give people rep points on this forum

 

Hey haters,
that video was just showing an example of the texture itself because I had soooo many people writing me asking how I did the light effect from one of my projects. That video was made before I developed the light effect package that came with the face camera script. So guys stop the crap talk and be professional.

I've sold the package soo many times and have had all 5 star ratings. I think what people don't get is that if they just gave it a chance they'd see how essential something like this is for a game. Yet everyone here is just judgmental, you can't say anything about it unless you've bought it. I think that's fair to say and considering it's only $10 who the hell can argue with that.

 

Be careful of Godwin´s law guys To sum it up: the light effects ARE great, work fine and HAVE a good price. Thx for that.

 

Nice, but here's a suggestion (That will fix your z-clipping woes when you look up a light shaft):

The closer you are to any given lightshaft, the more transparent the lightshaft becomes. Additionally, the higher the amount of bloom/screen glare you recieve - Screen glare reduces to near zero when looking down, away from the light shaft, and nearly blinds the player when looking straight up.

 

The Light Effect Pack is now available on the Asset Store and still only $10!

 

look great

 

Everything works with the table scene but when I copy the flame into my project and go to game view the frame rate drops way down and this is what I see:

 

Very strange.

What version of Unity are you using? Did you copy a prefab? If you did the prefab may be trying to use the coordinates of the prefabed object. Select the light effect GameObject and go to GameObject at the top of Unity and go to break prefab instance and see if it fixes the problem.

We will see if we can recreate the problem and find a fix for it.

 

I'm using Unity 4 Pro

It's a prefab I made from the table scene, but even after breaking the prefab it's still the same. I also tried copying the prefab into the table scene itself to see what happened, and it looked totally fine.

To add to the confusion, when I transfer my project from my laptop to my desktop everything is working fine.

 

Just bought this asset package... I thought the price was bit high, which is why I hesitated to get it (I think $15 would be a much more reasonable price, and I wouldn't have hesitated at that price point); the reason I ended up buying it is because I had use for a few of the models and textures included (like the bowls and bread); mostly I got it for the candle effects (rather than spend my time tweaking my own flickering flames)

In that department, I'm disappointed, because I can't for the life of me figure out how to get a candle set up and used in my OWN scene, and the documentation doesn't really help...

They look nice in the demo scenes (although I do see the weird "ghosting" effect at instantiation, but then they are fine after everything gets started -- is a script or something moving them from a different starting point?), but:

(a) I don't want to use these candles, I have my own -- these are too stark and "realistic" in a way; I have some good meshes/models, but want the flickering flame
(b) I tried to take the CandleLight child from a candle in the demo scene and use that for my own candle, but it doesn't work (shows faint glow, but no particle effects/flame)
(c) So I then tried to just take the entire candle prefab and use it, and it ALSO doesn't work... because it has to be scaled.

The scales of things in this asset package are somewhat wacky, and anybody who wants to use assets in their own work know they have to either be standardized or easily scalable. (I know the scene candles are standardized to a "realistic" level of a fraction of a meter, but they had to be scaled down to 0.00119 to do that...)

There are no pefabs for candles (which is exactly what I wanted); instead, you have to pull them out of the demo scenes. While I sort of get this (they have different effects applied), the demo scene scaling is pretty strange... I simply don't get it. CandleLight child is scaled up to 637, yet parts of the emitter are scaled way down (ellipsoid at 0.009); the worst part is, the documentation says nothing about how to use these candle flames with rescaling -- I sort of feel like you have to be pro just to get the effects working right; but if I was a pro at flame effects, I wouldn't have spent money to download this asset...

I know the basics, so I was able to get the particle size right, at least (but I still had to whip out the calculator in order to get it to scale the right amount)... it would be very helpful to either document a little more in the documentation, or (even better) would be an included script that would automatically scale the appropriate particle settings based on scale of the object itself...

Not a BAD asset, but I expected better for the price (considering I just downloaded some AMAZING asset packages at the price of $10 -- for well-organized and custom-scripted particle effects; $8.50 -- for a large package of well-made cartoon-style, lo-poly dungeon prefabs (this is what i am using the candles from); and $47.50 (for an enormous, 600 mb+ set of world-building models and terrain)

EDIT: I got it working okay, but still can't entirely figure out what all of the variables control or cause to happen... in any case, it's good enough for now, and I am also using the apple and bread models (so, all in all, if this asset were $15, I'd give 4 stars. Will probably have to dock 1 star because the price is a little much for what you get)

 

Very strange, we will look into this. We plan on updating the pack.

I'm sorry you had some issues. We will work on updating the pack to real world scale as well as supply prefabs for the candle effects.

The problem with scaling is Unity's particle effects. You have to scale them using variables within the particle system. We have a new technique for the new update that should allow scaling of the candle effects.

 

Yes, I figured it out... maybe just a little extra information in the documentation would help.

But an even better asset would be:

Include a candle prefab, and with the candle flame/glow you can create a script (on Start) that automatically sets the particle emitter vars/dimensions to be proportional to whatever size the candle flame's parent has been scaled to... this would allow the candle to be very easily used, and even if we wanted to use the flame for other candles, we could scale your candle to the correct size, and then just swap your candle mesh out for a different mesh

 

@BHS

I have been reading trough this topic and I must say that how you treat / handle (potential) customers is outrageous.
Also as you describe your 'volumetric' I must say it is not true, at least mention it is a "mimic" of volumetric lighting, light other packages do. I tried the script on the wiki and it DOES work. I do not know what you did to not make it work, but clearly you did something wrong.

Also calling people haters is no way for a developer to talk, you are trying to get customers right? Always be the bigger man and polite. If people have complaints I am happy to investigate and improve/update. But being stubborn and starting to big mouth back to people with complaints is just not how developer to customer communication should work. Instead you should doeither of these things:

-Or you make a more true and clearer discription so people actualy know what they are buying.

-Or you update your package to what the desciption promisses.

Also the fact that you had to lower the price twice to even keep selling it proves that there is something wrong, if people know your asset is great it would sell by its own, without the price lowering.

If I where you I would have a deeper thought in how you present your asset.

Not trying to be hateful here, just giving my two cents on your thread.

And keep in mind one happy customers can bring two happy potential customers .
One very unhappy customer can lose you 10 potential customers. Bad news spreads faster than good news.

 

I must agree with MarkD. I'm not going to make any comments as to whether or not it's worth the $10, but reading through the thread, I must say the way you reply to the "hate" is inappropriate and very unprofessional. I don't want to be offensive, but it's true that a good asset sells on its own. You likely won't need to be constantly defending its value and talking about how good it is. Change your attitude, and I'm sure you'll get more buyers.

 

Rule:

Moved.