[RELEASED] Marvelous Techniques

Could you send that house/roof model to me and I'll take a look what's wrong with it.

-Arto

 

Alright, never mind it had something to do with my model. Sorry for the inconvenience! Anther thing though: I'm not able to open any of the scenes that come with your plugin. Here's the steps I take:
1. Create a new project
2. Open Asset Store and import all of your plugins contents
3. Open one of your scenes.
4. All scenes are empty.

 

Here is another point of view for the Cave scene ! I have added some lowpoly Platforms made with a modified cylinder created with Prototype and some tiles from the scene.

Tip : Don't hesitate to look at this incredible scene made by Arto before creating your scenes. They are 1000 things to learn, to discover, to modify... not only in the shaders but on the camera scripts, and so on...
Change values in the shaders for example to see what happens and to understand how he did all of this !

Each Unity user should have THIS scene to see how we can do fantastic or marvelous things with almost nothing !

Arto, you simply are a Genius !!!



6R

 

Do you mean there is no GameObjects in the Project tab and you can't see anything when viewing the Game view?
The Editor view settings are not saved to the scene as far as I know.

-Arto

 

I'm still quite unclear on what this asset actually does. P6r has provided examples, some pretty great.. some not so, that show that it can create an interesting stylized look but has also suggested using hardened normals, which need to be done while modelling or with one of two systems i know for unity that do this, do you provide a similar tool?

I'm intrigued by the look, it looks very cool, but there have been several caveats and misleading examples given so far so i'm still interested in what this asset actually does. The video given so far shows how to arrange cubes in Unity.. that's not very useful if i'd wish so base an entire look to a product

 

Where someone suggests to use hardened normals? What are they anyway?

The video is about the workflow when using this asset package. I will make a other videos about the shaders included in the package.

This asset package is about techniques you like and want to learn.
When you see the the demo scenes or images I have posted and wonder how that is done this package is for you.

Maybe the most important thing in this package is the custom lighting shaders. They use a special technique to make the lighting in the scene. No real lights are used but virtual 3 directional lights which points from different directions (top,front,right).
Shaders enable you to modify baked lightmaps by changing the lightmap intensity and color.
Shaders also support realtime shadows, emission , height fog, distance fog, distance lights with ramp texture. Some of these features come soon in the v1.1 release.

There are also other special shaders to make for example waving flags, waving ocean with shore line, water boxes, water pool. Screen texture blend and colored bloom image effects are also included. I'll add more shaders in the future releases.

There are also many helpful scripts including 'Combine Meshes'-script which will remove overlapping faces and combine all meshes which share the same material in one big mesh. UVLayoutGenerator script generates layout texture UVs for combined meshes so you can for example give a building brick texture easily. The building demo scene use this technique and the building and the bottom ground are textured with concrete and rock textures.

Good example of current games with similar techniques are Monument Valley and Lara Croft Go. Which both are mobile games with very beautiful graphics.

You can focus only on the examples I have posted so you won't be misled.

I hope this helped,
-Arto

 

Sorry for being so harsh i'might just trying to figure it out because I'm interested in buying it just to see what it's all about, and probably will

Hardened normals is a term I stole from Xnormal but it means splitting the vertices of a 3d object so every tripoly has no shared vertices - therefore that face can be given a single vertex color that will not blend, giving an angular look that suits this kind of look very well

 

I gave in and grabbed it. These are really nice, good work. Hard to describe them but i guess the lara croft go game sums up the look nicely

 

Thanks for the purchase
If you want to test the upcoming 1.1 release candidate please send me mail.

 

Yes, there are no GameObjects in the Project tab or in the Game view.

 

I just updated to Unity 5.2.0 and now it works. I used 5.0.0 before.

 

Hi Arto,

Do your shaders work with vertex color mesh? It's mean that if I have a mesh with color, shader will make it show color data in mesh! Or I need pick color with your shader options?

Thank you!

 

They didn't but they do now You can blend the vertex color with the custom lighting.
It will be included in the v1.1 release.

-Arto

 

Answome! Your fog shader really amazing. Does fog shader work with vertex color in next version?

Thank you!

 

Yes it does.

 

I take my misgivings back, this is lovely esp at the price, nice work

 

The new parameters for the Fog shader are great !



6R

 

@Kirnu Interactive your private message are disabled, is it possible to test the next version too ?

 

It should be enabled now.
Yes it's possible to test the v1.1 release beforehand.

-Arto

 

Added CameraOverlay to v.1.1 package

 

Really enjoying the 1.1 testing, again i eat my words - one request is, however, would you be able to look into being able to supply our own lightmaps (Using UV2) as an option in the shader? I'm currently looking into visual styles for prebuilt locations that are placed procedurally, so they could be lit from one of 4 sides, so i'd have to bake the lightmaps externally in vray & max and switch the most suitable lightmap in at runtime when the level is generated

As the asset does work strongly with light maps this would be a nice feature

 

Can you give me an example of how the procedure of using external lightmaps would work in Unity 5.
And perhaps send me an example scene for testing.

-Arto

 

Alright, well firstly it's worth mentioning that up till now I've always used vray and max to bake lightmaps and now in unity 5 the lightmapping is compromised in favor of the GI system, vray definitely produces higher quality maps more quickly than unity. It's also harder to get your own lightmaps into the system directly too, here's a thread outlining the trouble created and someone provides a shader that can take a custom lightmaps and apply it appropriately to a mesh http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/lightmapping-nightmare.317008/

Today i'll try create a simple scene and vray-baked lightmaps for it and try to outline why I prefer this although the above thread explains a few possible examples. It would be faster to have the lightmaps applied via a texture input in the shader rather than try and work with unity 5's new system for now unless you're feeling motivated as it seems a bit of a pain

For a quick motivation to add the functionality I can just say it would help a great deal with procedurally placed content where you need prebaked lightmaps but can't be sure of the orientation of the object in relation to the lightsource until it's generated, but do know it's one of a set number of permutations

 

The CustomLightning and CustomLightningSimple shaders should be mobile optimized, right? On my iPad all objects with these shaders are simply painted black (iPad mini 2, iOS 8.1.2)

 

That's strange. Do you use any image effects?
Is there any errors/warnings in the console when building the iOS project?
Does the project work if you build for Web Player?

-Arto

 

Oh yeah after rebuilding a few times I got this error:

 

Oh. Which version you are using? Have you moved the shaders out of the package?
You can contact me and I'll send you the 1.1 version.

-Arto

 

1.0 - I'll reach out to you

 

Hello.
I bought this asset for testing in new my game.
Can i request new beta version(if you want i can give you my order number)?

 

Yes you can. Just send me an email and I'll get back to you.

-Arto

 

New artistic image made with shaders in the package and few new shaders including additive and background gradient.

Lava

 

Another one featuring new shaders coming in future releases: background gradient and additive.

Volcano

 

Cool! Really amazing. Can't wait for next update

 

Thanks man!

 

Happy to see you add more and more features...
Hope all these wonderful scenes are included to learn how to do that.
Can't wait too.

6R

 

Any estimate on when you will update to 1.1?

 

Well the package was uploaded 6 days ago and is still pending for review.
I would estimate the v1.1 would be available tomorrow or Wednesday.

-Arto

 

Thanks! I can't wait to check out some of those scenes.

 

Bought! Great asset! I was really curious on how games like Monument Valley handled their lighting and this gives me a very good insight. I know it's a long shot but what would be the likelihood of having these shaders ported over to Shader Forge? I'm using Skyshop and ShaderForge and have a pretty established setup already but I would love to have some of the controls and functions that your shaders provide without losing the ibl lighting.

Also for some reason I'm not able to correctly view any of the scenes that have shader animations, all the scenes render fine but are all static.

 

Thanks for your kind words!
As far as I know Shader Forge only support shaders doing their calculations in fragment section. Marvelous Techniques custom lighting shaders do the main calculations in the vertex section.
I would have to study Shader Forge more to be sure though. It would be nice if SF would have support for vertex section modules and fragment section modules and then you could connect them together.


Could you be more specific about which demo scenes do not work correctly and I'll take a look at them.

-Arto

 

v.1.1 is now available. Yay!

-Arto

 

I haven't bought the assets yet but I have a quick question.

I would like to put the lowpoly waves effect from the first picture to the second one :


Is it possible? I would like to have both the waves from the first picture combined with the "blocky" cut-through effect from the second.

Thanks!

 

Hi,
Do you mean the blue water in pic 2 to have the low poly waves on the top face?
It's not currently possible but I might add special water box shader to the package.

-Arto

 

That's what I meant, yeah
Ok, thanks for the answer, I'll probably end up buying it anyway, but it would be awesome to have that feature!

 

Thanks for looking into ShaderForge Arto. To be more specific on my issue, when I load up scenes like the island scene and hit play, the scene renders correctly but I don't see any vertex animation so the water, fx, and flag are static. If I create an ocean in a separate scene it works fine. On the top left corner it says pause so it looks like the scene is maybe paused for some reason? The editor itself is not paused though.

 

Version 1.11 uploaded to Asset Store.

Changes
- Fixed ScreenTextureBlend vignette intensity
- Added UVs to all models to prevent Unity to crash

-Arto

 

Hi Kirnu,

Can I create larger ocean with specific width and length without affect performance?

Thank you!

 

To change the size of the ocean to be created you have to change code directly.
There is no custom editor for this.

Go to line 74 in OceanCreator and change the CreateOcean method parameters.
The first two parameters mean how many quads are created in x,y direction.
The next two parameters tell how large the ocean will be.
So if the params are 5,5,50,50 then the ocean will be 50,50 in size and the quads are all 5,5 in size.

The performance will be the better when there are less quads to be processed.

-Arto

 

Thank for your answer! I'll check it now

 

Here is a simple test mixing my 2D graphics and 3D models using Marvelous shaders for the background :
(I have tried to use the fog shader on a 2D graphic but I couldn't use the Order in Layer option anymore !?!)


6R