[RELEASED] World Portals

Greetings,

World Portals by Zen Fulcrum is now available!

Demo link

This package allows you to create portals that players can see and walk through as if space itself has been warped.



Features:

• Step through portals seamlessly using Unity's First Person Controller.
• Stand inside portals without camera/clipping glitches. (Not all portal packages can do this!)
• Physics objects flying through portals continue flying out the other side as expected.
• Simple objects traveling through portals automatically get a seamless appearance.
• Recursive rending supports portals inside portals (inside portals). The only limit is your render texture memory + rendering budget.
• Adjustable portal resolution.
• Live previews of portals appear in edit mode.

Demo: http://zenfulcrum.com/portals
Asset Store : https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/45383

 

Has this been tested in VR?

 

woot? The portal shows and lead to a different unity scene or does everything needs to be on the same scene?

 

I tested it a little bit the other day. The first portal works fairly well, with some small (probably IPD-related) misalignments. Recursive portals seem very much not to work ATM, however. X-D

Everything needs to be loaded and in the world. It shows two places in the same world and lets you see and step between them.

 

So I could fake a door entry to a room (room is somewhere in the world) ? awesome! I need that

 

Can you show how this would look using a third person camera?

 

It wouldn't work very well without some additional scripts to handle it. Out of the box, a third person camera doesn't understand concepts like "duck down and follow this person through the portal". It would likely see the player teleport and go flying across the scene to catch up.

I'll keep that in mind for future features to add though!

 

Do you have online documentation for this? I bought a similar asset a while back and the implementation was incredibly complicated and forced the use of the Unity 4 fps character controller. I just want to make sure I don't make the same mistake, especially if I'm purchasing a portal package that costs more than the portal game itself.

 

I haven't taken the time to put it online yet, but feel free to email me and I'll send you the documentation included with the package.

Basic usage is very easy - drop one of the included prefabs in the scene and make sure there's some empty space behind the portal.

The controller included with the demo should work wonderfully. Unfortunately the current version doesn't yet support the Unity 5 FPS controller, but is on my list of things address in upcoming releases.

The best of luck to you with selling your game!

 

This asset seem very nice, great work! However I have not had any luck getting this to work with the Google Cardboard SDK. And Ideas how to do a basic portal with VR?

 

I just got this asset and wow, it's a lot of fun! Bravo! Works really well...

What would make this SUPER incredible is if global fog rendered through the portals. Any chance you can get that to work?

 

Is it using one render texture per portal or some other method ?

 

Google Cardboard isn't officially supported as of yet. They seem to be doing some things in their SDK that trip up the usual OnWillRenderObject callbacks. I've been told of a couple workarounds that gets it sort-of working, but nothing I'm satisfied with yet. :-(

If you turn off "Use Oblique" fog will work, though this can cause other issues (as described in the readme). It's a tricky, situation as the global fog makes assumptions about the view frustum (in particular, the resulting Z value) that aren't correct for portal cameras.

If turning off oblique rending won't work for your layout, try using a different fog method for your scenes (billboard, volumetric, etc.).

Yes, it uses one render texture per portal render a la GetTemporary. In the early render steps it pre-renders the portals' contents, then applies them as the "texture" for each portal during the main pass.

 

Does this support the Unity 5 first-person character controller? Any info on that would be great.

 

Currently, everything works except the camera doesn't rotate when you step through. The current trunk build fixes this for both the RB and non-RB controllers.

If you'd like to try an early copy, message me your invoice number and I'll send it over to you!

 

First, let me say that this is some profound work you have done, and it really brings an entirely new layer of interactivity to Unity that has been missing for some time. However, what is your current plan to make this asset VR compatible?

 

Thanks a bunch!

It's tough. Unity has my hands tied on this one. The current iteration of their VR API is woefully feature incomplete for getting portal rendering to work right. There's a lot of specific work we need to do for every camera, but Unity doesn't give us access to implied VR cameras so we can do that work, among other things.

I just posted a feature request outlining what's needed, feel free to vote on it, then get all your friends to vote on it too!

 

By the way, VR support is by far the most common feature request I get for this plugin. I'd love to support it, but Unity's API for VR rendering is too incomplete to allow me to properly render stereoscopic, seamless portals.

Please take a moment to vote on this feature request if this is something you'd like to see happen in the future! Tell your friends and co-workers too!

 

It works at some level with Vive or CV1? Basic portal feature or something like that?

 

I haven't tried it with those systems. As a rule of thumb, if the scene has one camera per eye there's a decent chance it will work, but if it's a single Unity VR camera it probably won't.

 

Thanks for the answer. About Vive and Oculus, since the 5.4 they are native supported so they use Unity VR camera so .. :-( I already voted for the feature request, if you need some tester with the asset i volunteer for both headsets.

 

Is there anywhere I can see how to setup portals? I'm looking for an easy solution

 

I don't know if it was added between when your post was made or not, but I just tested with HTC Vive and it seems to work.

 

I believe if you use an older version of SteamVR (before they added native Unity integration) it will work. Newer versions of SteamVR use the OpenVR built into Unity and ask Unity to do the VR rendering.

Aside:
Using the API from OpenVR and a small mound of workarounds, I actually have a wip version that almost works with Unity's VR rendering. Portals "wobble" however, because of the way tracking is handled late on the render thread well after and scripts I write stop executing.

 

Is this still alive? I purchased this in hopes it would work with UFPS but it does not. Curious if there's any support for this. I sent to an email as well.

 

It is! You caught me over the weekend. UFPS isn't directly supported, but I have a prototype that may help. Check your email for details!

 

Is there a way to render Unity's vanilla fog over the portals? In a foggy scene, the portal are being rendered without the fog and look a bit bizarre.

The asset works great except for this fog issue.