Room Bigger on the Inside

Hello! I just had a thought. Yes I did. Thought: Can any of you Unity guru's create a room that is noticeably bigger on the inside (without clever doors and loading screens)? Not that this has any practical use, I just wanted to see if it could be done (clever trickery is allowed).

 

If you could create the game Portal you could do this... which raises the question, how would you do such a thing in Unity? I am also curious, having tried before (and failed miserably).

 

The closest i could come too was a door that would trigger a loading screen and pop you off to another cell. but thats cheating. Portal is really more like cameras and teleporting, not actual "bigger on the inside" stuffs. (Think TARDIS)

 

Yea, I was gonna say, you could just use cameras & teleporting. Either that, or alter the world as the player steps through the door (either allowing them to see things change in a freaky way, or through blinding the player using fog/light/confusion/misdirection.)

You could also do optical illusions, or some kind of camera effect which creates optical illusions for the player. Make it APPEAR as though it is smaller than it is when entering.

Like how freaky it is that they claim the moon, when it's huge, is actually the same size as always- but your mind is like "NO WAY YOU SO CRAZY!!!111"

 

scale the player down smoothly as enters room, and up when leaving??
uuhh....


the little lines are the visible sides of the planes.. the side with "normals" facing outwards..

upon entering the room, the red square scales up.. or moves outward, (and, maybe the black square gets smaller?)
the black square becomes invisible,

or no.. the red square is invisible until inside it (to the observer of such), and the black square is invisible when inside red(to the observer of such)..?

 

Can someone explain these camera tricks and teleporting? I will eventually satisfy my curiosity by looking into it, but the portal trick still blows my mind.

 

well the cameras show a rendertexture (or whatever its called) .. a camera shows its view on a flat texture..
and i guess teleporting to another location in the game world... or like a different scene... so if the house is at 0,0 , the interior is at like... 500,500 or something but like the windows and doors from exterior would show render textures of the cameras in the house, and vice versa

... lol, thanks to playing around with mapping in wolfenstien enemy territory i know these things

 

You could do it with the stencil buffer and cameras rendering at different times.

http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/590800/how-to-cullrender-to-through-a-window.html

 

Yeah, the Portal approach would be most practical I think, if you can manage it.
The inside would actually be located somewhere else entirely.

 

Thanks... I read about halfway until I hit the shader section, haven't even gotten to shaders yet. I bookmarked it for future reference though. I figured it was tricky.

 

Wow, didn't think of that. What a great idea.

 

Two cameras + layers. (+ collider swap)

 

Any way I can read up on this some more? I did the two cameras thing with different culling layers, but I got confused.

What is meant by collider swap?

 

As said before, make the exterior of the room on one layer and the interior on another, basically.

Here's a portal type store asset that leverages that idea: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/released-dimensions-and-portals.226832/

 

Scale the building when you enter it but to avoid it clipping with everything else, you must disable the meshrenders on the objects around the building. So when you are about to open the door, scale the sides of the room.

That might be the closest thing to what's possible idk

 

Take a look at this:
http://algoholic.eu/unity3d-indie-free-portal-effect-project-sources/
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/released-portalizer-package.109772/

 

Physics. Cameras can handle the visual aspect, but if you are using colliders to handle movement boundaries, you could swap (or toggle them) to accommodate the differences.

 

Though, on second thought, I would still use cameras, but with a position offset and not have the inside/outside occupy the same space. Do a position swap at the threshold.

 

Okay, so when I swap positions of the this camera, I would also probably have to switch the rendering order right? So the room is now rendered after the "outside"?

 

Let camera A render the inside first
Let camera B clear the depth, render a depth mask in the door, then render the rest.
It doesn't work well in some situations (SSAO filter, flare) but it's easy to do, no scripting and no pro required

 

Use this free asset?

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/59185

 

Necro spam. The worst of both worlds.

 

It's not my asset