Official Slime critter

hi! i would be interested in doing the rig and anim aspect for the slime critter. not too confident of my modelling/texturing skills.
i dont think a model is available yet. i can wait or i can do a rough proxy mesh for this guy. let me know.

just learnt of this proj this morning. excited to be onboard!

 

Hi @cirocontinisio and @ahblock,

I will try to model something and UV tonight, that will match what is available in the concept art.

@ahblock, this part will be handled through your rigging and animation, right? Here I feel a bit intimidated by the expectations

 

Hi @ahblock,

I have opened a PR with the initial version of what could be the Slime Critter 3D model:
https://github.com/UnityTechnologies/open-project-1/pull/200
Feel free to comment on it and to checkout my PR branch to look at the rigging and animation parts.

Here is the geometry:


Here is the result in Unity:


@cirocontinisio, to provide something close to what the concept art is defining, I am also proposing in the PR a new Toon Shader, Toon_Fresnel, where you can add a Stepped Fresnel effect like visible in the screenshot above.

Here is the Shader graph:

 

sry i cant believe i missed the replies on this thread. i will take a look through and get back if i have any issues.

yup definitely, thanks.

 

hi @treivize , i need some help with using github, first time using it. i am familiar with sourcetree and svn tortoise, but only on the pulling and pushing commits stuff. im a little confuse with the branches. want to check if im doing it correctly.

1. i clicked ur PR branch link and click 'Open in Desktop'. my GitHub Desktop pops up but i dont see any difference.


2. i think i was on the main branch and i changed to pr/200 branch, which i believe is your Slime critter branch, because i saw a #200 in the header in your PR branch.


3. after changing the branch, i saw my fetch orgin tab change to this
, so i am guessing im doing something correctly??? lol

4. my unity updated and i see the fbx of the slime critter. you mentioned abt the rigging parts but i dont see it. seem to be a mesh only. am i doing it correctly?


i can do the rigging and anims for the slime critter. i just wanna check with you the workflow on getting commits from others and what i should be doing if i want to submit/commit my stuff after i finish the anims my this creature.

im aware of dapper dino's video and the doc guidelines on how to contribute stuff. might need to reread and rewatch a couple of times to really understand.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PwBF4yQl69RxvVHZ2m2iiy5pYjd9QO-VcuXWDjB7QwA/edit#

thanks

 

Hi @ahblock,

what you did is right. You can use the prefab directly in Unity under Prefabs/Characters/SlimeCritter to have both model and materials applied.
Indeed, I have worked only on Model/UV and shaders. I understood from your first post, that you could do rigging in addition to the animation.

@cirocontinisio, good question from ahblock, what is the preferable to share work on the same source code? Should we wait for the merge of SlimeCritter in art-assets branch (it seems to be a slow process) or he can create now branch from mine to add rigging and animations? It assumes at least that my mesh is fine enough, I guess to start rigging it.

 

@cirocontinisio, it makes sense for sure Still for art delivery, I have the feeling that it is safer to start rigging and animating when mesh is somehow close to a final version.

So here is the question, is the model aligned enough with what is expected from concept art?

 

Hey @treivize ! Nice work!

I tried to experiment a little with your shader. I animated the fresnel effect and moved the effect so it was done before the outline and shadow steps.

Here's the result:



It works fine for the sphere. But it can improve for a more complex geometry like the slime.

Also, I really tried to make the specular highlights work, but I couldn't. I'm not sure if the specular highlights are working in the toon shader. I think that some highlights could give the slime a more liquid appearance.

What do you think?

 

Hey @erizzoalbuquerque!

It is looking much better like this! Having the Fresnel effect applied before the outline seems really obvious now you have proposed it!

I do not know how you think about adding it to the existing shader modular system. But maybe it could be interesting to create some hooks in the Main ToonShading graph to be able to inject some custom function along the Color path, Something like this:

Setting default value (color: black and contribution: 0) it does nothing. So no need to update all the shaders using ToonShading and all the existing materials.

About the liquid effect, I am wondering if we could do something similar to my initial approach for the glass of the lantern with a big refraction effect:

 

I'm not sure if this is the best way, but I duplicated the ToonShading subgraph, and modified this new one like you did. I think it's better to create a new subgraph since I think very few creatures will use this new shading.


(sorry for the hardcoded values. WIP)

I'll share the shader here in a zip file, if you wanna have a look. (easier than opening a PR to your branch)

About the liquid effect, I think I was not very specific. The highlight I'm missing is this one (and I couldn't make it appear even if the shader seems to have a specular component):



Looking at the concept art, I imagine this creature having a "transparent" shiny exterior. Like jello (so the highlight is important.) Inside he has a semi-liquid core moving. Maybe a Volcano Lamp. The moving Fresnel effect is faking it.



This was the effect I was trying to achieve. Do you imagine the same thing?

 

wow, u guys made so much progress on the shader. i will test it out on the animated slimecritter in unity after im done with all the anims needed.

managed to do idle and move anim + added an "alert" anim in case we want a quick anim feedback (a quick flash of exclaimation mark works too) when slimecritter spot main player.

anim requirements - https://open.codecks.io/unity-open-project-1/decks/16-3d-shading/card/18a-animations

slimecritter_idle_01 :

slimecritter_move_01 :

slimecritter_alert_01 :

<-- not required but was quick to anim so i just went ahead lol

let me know of any feedback. im wondering if it should breath even slower and more exaggerated in the idle state. my initial idea is to make him more sleepy and lethargic (trying to squeeze some personality in) since he kind of look like that in the concept. but i didnt really push all the way since i do not know how exaggerated/cartoony the motion can be yet still acceptable within the general art direction of the game.


oh btw i changed my nickname so ahblock = lpchow, incase anyone is confuse.

 

@lpchow, wow! It is really good! I love the alert one!

For the idle, indeed I like the lethargic, maybe I would add a small eyelid movement in the idle, like a small lid twitch and in the move anim more periodic move.
Also I do not know if it is possible to anim the spikes on its back, like being quite retracted in idle and move anim and they are expanded during the alert and after during the attack anim. What do you think?

So glad that a good animator has joined the project!

BTW: I thought that I had already put a prefab for the slime in my first commit, but it was not the case. Now it is done!

BTW2: If you want to open a PR to merge in mine, do not hesitate, I can do the Animator controller once I have some animations available.

@erizzoalbuquerque, I have updated my PR with an updated version of the shader based on your comment. The Shader Graph is a bit different but I liked the animation of the Fresnel effect.



For the specular, today, it reacts only to additional lights, not the main one, so that is why you have the impression it does not work since there is only the directional light in the scene. Still here it should be good to have this white spot displayed all the time. I am trying to figure out how to create a fake.

 

@erizzoalbuquerque , what about this result?

 

Hi there!

An updated version of the shader applied to the different color variant of the critter (as shown in the concept art):


The shader graph:


The fake specular is computed based on an inverted fresnel + step and where the view direction of the Fresnel node is based on the main light direction.

 

@cirocontinisio, sure I can have a look at adding specular for main light to all Toon shaders.
First we are talking about hard specular, right, like here where you have a spot of the direct light color.

Due to how the composition is made along ToonShading sub graph, multiply between Lights & Shadows and Albedo, it will be difficult to output a hard spot with the light color by changing the subgraph of the main light model, am I wrong?

 

@cirocontinisio, Indeed it is clearly over complicated for what it does. I will simplify the graph and the inputs.
For hard specular of the main light, I have a better understanding of how custom functions are doing in the sub graphs and I found how to do proper specular computation here. Still I am not clear how to over pass the multiply function in ToonShading. If we consider a perfectly black albedo, I think whatever the strength of the specular contribution, it will be nullified by the albedo color.

 

Here is what I have been able to build for Direct Specular:

I am using the custom function DirectSpecular already defined in HLSL program. I think the source of these custom functions are coming from here: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/07/31/custom-lighting-in-shader-graph-expanding-your-graphs-in-2019/

Based on this paper, I have built the direct specular contribution to the lightning model. To be able to output a value that will overpass the albedo multiplication, I have added an exponential function to the step node control by a factor in input.

It works well now with a high specular hardness (~5):


But I foresee a problem when we will activate the Bloom post processing, since to have this white spot, the value here is much higher than 1...


Even if it can be almost considered as a feature, I guess we want to be able to control the glowing effect independently to the specular spot color.

 

But won't the slime critter be a little translucent showing its innards as well if any? Maybe translucency would help with toning down the specular as well.

The last two examples @treivize showed, the first one is close and can be tweaked further.
The second one feels metallic.

https://cro.itch.io/slimes
I found this while searching for shader tutorials, hoping it will give us some direction on improving our own.

 

I may have found a good option to not influence the emission from the light/specular/albedo section of the ToonShading: Just add a Clamp node just before the outline part. It means that for emission support, the update of the pipeline has to be done between this clamp and the outline.

@aby_gamemaker, this shader looks really great, but it is not really toon style, it is not easy to make shader unlit and ceil shading looking that good. I tried to add refraction effect, but I struggled to make it looking fine with our graphic style.
The color of the slime vanished too much with the background color.

For this game, I thinkwe are more targeting a Ragnarok's like slime and not an horror slime style.


@cirocontinisio, I have also updated the PR to simplify the Toon_Fresnel graph and inputs. Only 2 to control Fresnel effect (color and tickness) and 2 for the inner movement (noise scale and speed). Prefabs are fixed and Direct specular moved to Lightning model sub graph. I hope the PR will be more acceptable with these updates.

 

Why unlit? It wont be able to cast or receive shadows. Here's a tutorial, they have made it available on git as well.

We will have to tweak it though as it also doesn't have the outline as well.

I did find a tutorial using amplify plugin but it used normal maps.

All in all we need a custom node to build a switchboard of sorts where we can check uncheck boxes to vary the shader behavior as per character needs.

 

We do not need a new toon shading made fron scratch for slime. Actually all of this is already done in the custom Toon Shading made at the beginning of this project, here the idea is just add direct specular to all Toon shaders. And for slime, to rely on a variant of the main Toon shading to have a cool Fresnel effect.

 

Wow! A lot of comments hehe I was away from the computer during the weekend.

Hey, @lpchow I'm really liking the animations. Really good idea of giving him some personality by making him a little sleepy (and grumpy hehe). I really like the eye movement you gave him. It makes him much more belivable.
I think the Idle movement could improve if the character would blink from time to time. Also, in the Alert State, I feel the spikes could squash a little then stretch a lot on the pose extreme. Maybe the eyes could also completely open before resting again in the "sleepy position"
Really nice work!

 

Wow @treivize ! The result is amazing!! So close to the concept art! I love it! Really wanna squish this creature hehehe

The inverted fresnel effect was a great idea. I experimented a little with it but I was having a hard time because of the slime's eye. But I see that you gave the eye another material and now this isn't a problem anymore. Nice work!

It's an art direction choice but I noticed that when we move the camera the liquid effect "animates a lot". I think this effect is a bit distracting because when I was moving around the slime interior would "drastically change", shifting my focus from other game elements.



I propose changing the position node in the Time UV Offset from "View mode" to "Object Mode"



I think the result is a bit cleaner since the liquid interior animation doesn't get faster when the object moves in relation to us. What do you think?

About the specular effect. The result is great! Didn't know they only worked with additional lights. Creating the "fake specular" was nice. And I agree with you when you said we should be able to control the glowing effect independently of the specular spot color.

Very nice work! I don't think I'll be able to work on the project today but I'll see what I can contribute during the week!

 

@erizzoalbuquerque, thanks a lot to test the shader, indeed this UV based on View was not a good idea! I fixed it.
About the direct specular, it is not fake anymore. It is now computed as it should be, I guess, in the lighting model shader.

 

Ah! Got it. Though what I was contemplating was coding a custom lighting master tool to do most of the stylized work we might need.
When I wrote switchboard earlier I meant that a single console that can improve the efficacy or toggle complexity of our base toon shader on the fly as needed.
For example we could have fresnel as an option and just switch it on for the slime critter.
This way you speed up the pipeline and this could help on all future open projects down the line.

 

I meant exclusive plug-ins with the view of streamlining the open projects as a whole.
If custom shaders and keywords can do the tricks then that is certainly faster.

 

@treivize, how do i push my stuff to your repo? i encountered this error (tried signing in and out, but to no avail)

or what should i be doing instead to add my stuff on top of yours?

i did not have time to address the feedbacks so what i did for now was to push my rig and anim fbx files, set up a rough animcontroller with all required states which you can edit or whoever supposed to code his character controller script.

---

as for the anim feedbacks ->

thank you guys for the anim feedbacks. so my plan is :
- to make idle more sleepy (looking at the idle now, i realise it might be better to make it look like he is falling asleep)
- perhaps add an idlebreaker for eye blinks and small lid twitches to break the idle (well i can also add it in the idle state itself, but i prefer separating idling since this way we have the flexibility to play with how repetitive we want the idlebreaker to be.)
- will add a single bone to control all the spikes so that i can do the spikes retract and expand stuff like suggested. its a great idea

---

i have a qn regarding the attack anim -> Attack: The slime prepares to launch (deflates a bit), then propels itself forward. not sure who to address it to? the question is:
- for the propelling forward motion, will it be code or anim controlled? i saw in RockCritter_Attack, it is anim controlled and he seemed to jump forward 1m metric. should i follow that or?

---

hopefully i can squeeze out some free time in the next 2 weeks to get these done. they are not hard to do, i just need to free up a couple of hours.

 

@lpchow so glad to hear you again! The slime critter is now available in the main repository, so no need to start from my PR which has been merged already. Just open a PR between your fork and the main repo.

I feel that what you plan to do for idle will be cool

About your last question regarding the attack I think @cirocontinisio will be your man

 

Actually I would expect some snail like gliding as the slime critters normal movement when not attacking. Beside jumping it might attack by gliding up the character, probing the food (the character) with it's spikes. Possibly it's spikes are poisonous. When hit by the character the slime critter might pull in it's spikes in like some snails do with their eye stalks.

The character could be found unconcious with red spots after unsuccessfully warding off a slime critter (the character will sporting the red dots only in the cutscene once he resumes playing his texture is back to normal).

The gliding can also be easily done with in place animation. With walking or jumping there is always the challenge to match the displacement with the step length/distance jumped in the animation.

 

@lpchow, just if you are planning to deliver all the expected animations for the slime critter, it is not specified in the card, but I think it makes sense to have a dedicated animation when the creature is getting hit by the player.

 

hi guys, thanks for the replies. will get back onto anim asap after i sort out this.

i am running into issues trying to get my fork updated with the latest stuff from main repo. please bear with me, im not very familiar with github and fork/branches.

i followed similar steps in this vid to set up my fork

it was set up a couple of wks ago. my impression is that if i press the fetch origin button in github desktop, it will auto update with fork with whatever latest from the main repo. however, i dont see any slime critters in my unity.

i did notice im a few hundreds of commits behind the main on my github site. is there something i need to do to get my fork updated with the latest from main?

 

yup sure, i can add that.

 

I am something facing this sync issue, what you can do, is to force the merge of the upstream main branch into your fork:

Then, look for upstream/main branch.

Finally for the delivery of Slime Critter animation, what is expected is to work from art-assets branch and not from main. If you have also sync issue with art-assets branch you can do the same as above forcing a merge from upstream/art-assets.

When the merge is completed, do not forget to push the merge commit to your remote fork

 

@treivize , thanks for your help! i was able to sync my fork with the latest stuff. also manage to get all anims done and set up properly in unity.

@cirocontinisio , i just submitted my stuff and create a pull request for art asset branch. hopefully i did it correctly, i was following the youtube vid on Part 2: Making a Pull Request | Contributing to Open Projects

heres a video capture of my anim updates, feel free to let me know of any changes, thanks.

EDIT: hmm, i think i should have done a sync latest before creating a pull request. just realise i have 87 commits instead of 1 in my pull request. sry :|

 

@lpchow, that is super cool!

Next, I am afraid that you have merged main in your art-assets branch that is why you have hundreds of files changed.

So to repair that, I would suggest you is to do the following:
- Open a git bash command.
- Run this command: git reset --hard upstream/art-assets (it will set back your art-assets local branch in sync with the official art-assets branch)
- Run git cherry-pick a730c5051026a5ad24cffa4b78c4adc86bf55387 (it will add back your updates)
- Run git push -f (it will send the new commit history to your remote branch)

Finally I would also include the update of the SlimeCritter_Base prefab in Prefabs folder. You should create a new prefab variant from your SlimeCritter_Rig,
- Drag&Drop SlimeCritter_Rig in the Scene
- Attach the animation controller to the animator of the SlimeCritter_Rig object
- Drag&Drop it in /Prefabs/Characters folder as a prefab variant
- Delete the existing one
- Rename your new prefab like the one deleted: SlimeCritter_Base
- Reset the transform position of the Prefab to 0,0,0
- Commit this change and push it

Let me know if you feel ok / you have time to do it, otherwise I can open a new PR with your animations on your behalf.

 

Ahhh ok got it. I will work on it fixing this wkend/early next wk. If I can't get it to work, I will check in with you. Thanks for all the help/detailed steps.

 

@cirocontinisio @treivize
hope that i followed the steps laid out by treivize properly. i think the commits should be correct now. i also updated the SlimeCritter_Base prefab too. there are two commits in total. one for the anim fbx and controller stuff that was messed up previously and second for the right updated base prefab.


i think i know why i messed up the first time. i didnt changed this branch to art-assets. it was on main.


to clarify, once i open one pull request on a branch, i do not need to open any more pull request right? whatever new commits i have, will be consolidate together with the first pull request? hopefully i got the submission done properly this time round!

thanks for all e help~

 

@lpchow, you managed to correct your PR very well!

Indeed, when you push new commit it will be reflected to your current PR if it is performed on the same branch as the one used to open the PR. Here you have used directly your art-assets branch to commit your contribution, usually it is preferable to create a new branch from the reference one (here art-assets) to isolate your changes from the reference branch. Like that you can check the official content at any time and also work on multiple contributions in parallel each one under a specific branch.

 

Came here to post my specular answer and see it's already been covered lol
Either way great shader, love it.

 

This looks good! Love the jiggle on the startled animation. I was wondering if this character has an eye aim control that could snap onto the character just before it gets startled? I'm new to unity so I'm not sure how complicated that would be, but I think it would sell the surprise with that massive eye. I'm excited to play around with this fella once the rig is up!

 

we can use the anim rigging package aim ik solutions for the eye aim control -> https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/c....2/manual/constraints/MultiAimConstraint.html

there is an eye bone for the slime in its fbx rig, so you can use that bone for the ik eye aim control. hmm but will still need add some code/logic to move the ik target to "snap" to character or anything else.

welcome to the proj btw!