Materials and Shaders
The video covers: intro to materials and shaders.
Download the package with all the shaders and models.
Some useful “look-and-feel” shaders
I recommend to stick to the default aka pre-built render pipeline unless you know what you are doing.
Various retro shaders
https://github.com/dsoft20/psx_retroshader
https://github.com/keijiro/KinoBinary
https://alexanderameye.github.io/pixelation.html
https://github.com/Cyanilux/URP_RetroCRTShader
https://github.com/Kodrin/URP-PSX
https://github.com/oxysoft/RetroSuite3D
Outline shader
https://github.com/IronWarrior/UnityOutlineShader
Multi step toon shader
https://github.com/IronWarrior/UnityToonShader
Single step toon shader
https://www.ronja-tutorials.com/post/031-single-step-toon/
JPG compression effect
https://github.com/JanMalitschek/JPEG-MP4-Compression-PostProcessing-Effect-for-Unity3D
Painterly effect, neon, silouhette shader
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/fullscreen-camera-effects/snapshot-shader-collection-146666
Lighting
The light game objects are quite straighforward components to use.
However in a 3D engine the lighting depends on a variety of other factors such as:
- Materials: they contain information like color, texture, and how they reflect light (or better, simulate light reflection). The logic that govern light reflection (and more) in a material is defined by scripts called shaders. Shader programming is hard but you can use and tweak existing shaders.
- Textures: texture images are properties of the materials but their mapping, or how they wrap around meshes, depends on the model. Texture mapping is a complex process that can’t be done in Unity so we won’t talk about it. If a model comes with a texture properly mapped, you can try to modify the image in photoshop, but creating your own textures is beyond the scope of this class.
- Ambient light and other global settings: they are a lot, and they are in the “lighting” panel. You should always keep it open next to the inspector (menu window > rendering > lighting settings). We’ll just look at the skybox and the fog. We will not get into baking lights and other rendering pipelines.
- Post-processing effects – they are a bit like instagram filters applied to the image after it’s being rendered. Activating post-processing effects is a bit tricky but the template I’m giving you should have them already set up. Just add the effects on the “Post Processing effects” object, activate each singleOne of the many tutorials covering lights
Intro to lighting, skyboxes, fog, Post-processing effects, and other general settings:
Lighting in 2D
Unity supports normal maps in 2D too!
3D modeling
The video covers a couple of non realistic styles and their relationship with materials.
Free or cheap 3D tools
Blender – the leading 3d creation suite
https://www.blender.org/
Sprytile – 3d tiles in blender
https://jeiel.itch.io/sprytile
Magikavoxel – easy voxel modeling
https://ephtracy.github.io/
Makehuman – realistic human generator
http://www.makehumancommunity.org/
AwesomeBump – generates normal, height, etc maps from a single image
https://github.com/kmkolasinski/AwesomeBump
Meshmixer – mash up 3d models (warning: models may be too high poly)
https://www.meshmixer.com/
Meshlab – Remeshing tool, especially to simplify and clean up photogrammetry models
https://www.meshlab.net/
Instant Meshes – Create a clean mesh from a high poly model
https://github.com/wjakob/instant-meshes
Terrain Party – height maps from real world terrain
http://terrain.party/
Snappy Tree – Procedurally generate trees (not optimized)
http://www.snappytree.com/
Check out studio Oleomingus’ work
2D
Piskel – pixel art drawing and animation
https://www.piskelapp.com/
Pixelator – images to pixel art
https://ronenness.itch.io/pixelator
Paint of Persia – pixel rotoscoping
https://dunin.itch.io/ptop
TileSetter – tile set creator
https://www.tilesetter.org/
Tiled – map editor
https://www.mapeditor.org/
Ogmo – 2D level editor
https://ogmo-editor-3.github.io/