Author: Mikhail Mata

Video Playthrough/Documentation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrqRy2-W71s&ab_channel=Mikhail

Final Project
For my final project I decided to incorporate the knowledge I’ve learned about shaders in this class in this low poly game I’m working on. The shader’s I used in the game are using unity’s shader graph.

Project Summary
Titled “Tomi and Ash”, the game is a low poly maze exploration game based on unity. In this game, the player plays as a very shy and fearful rabbit named Tomi, he finds out that his childhood friend that he’s secretly in love with, Ash, will be leaving to move to another far away land. Realizing that it’s now or never, fearful Tomi must gain courage and face his fears to navigate and escape a maze and try to reach Ash to tell her how he feels before it’s too late! Inspired by the aesthetics of Kanye West’s  “Good morning” music video directed by Takashi Murakami, the game tomotoru and children’s stuffed animals. This game is very stylized and surreal in nature as this was the type of design I was going for.

Shaders
In making the shaders I used the tutorials made by Gabriel Aguiar Prod. as a starting point. For the wall shaders (Moving Shaders) I edited a “Toxic Waterfall shader” into a holographic shader by changing the values of the voronoi shader’s tiling and transparency to create the effect. By stretching out the voronoi noise on the X axis and setting the Y value low. I was able to emulate scan lines. I also increased the power node’s intensity to give it a higher contrast. In terms of making the shader’s for the character model’s I followed Gabriel’s crystal glow shader. This shader mostly uses the fresnel effect as its base which is then multiplied then added to get the final effect. I then bumped up the emission on all of the shaders to give it a glowing effect.

For this homework, I decided to explore both shape and materials. For the shape I decided to explore something that would look great in a tile pattern. I mostly used transform to do this. Colour wise I chose something muted so that It would work with the material I had in mind. As for the material/texture I combined two noise nodes in order to simulate the texture of rock/concrete that has seen some wear (chipped, eroded, worn). The idea I had going into this was to make something that would be used as a texture for things used in architecture such as pillars or the walls of a room.

 

For this scene, I decided to bring in one of my 3D models to compose a scene that seemed outerwordly. Inspired by different depictions of planets and space and the surreal I decided to compose this scene. For the background and skybox I downloaded the asset from the unity store and decided to with something that produced warm tones, so that the light that reflects off the materials are much more noticeable. So for this I went with something that showed the “golden hour” of a day.
In addition to this, I also put in spheres with its metallic properties set very high to reflect the surroundings and give off a surreal feeling. The rabbits used here in this scene is using a dented PBR material while the plane is using a worn bumpy rock material.

Here are the assets and PBR materials I used in composing the scene.
https://assetstore.unity[.]com/packages/2d/textures-materials/sky/skybox-series-free-103633
https://freepbr[.]com/materials/dented-metal-pbr/
https://freepbr[.]com/materials/worn-bumpy-rock/

 

For this homework I decided to play around with the ideas of layers and composition. at first I decided to make a pattern but found that idea to be a too static so I then introduced some movements through cos and sin. I then also added a gradient inside the circle which switches from colour to colour to make it more interesting.

Still new to learning the language, little by little I learned more about the tools and structure used in making shaders by following the exercises. For this exercise, I made a gradient based on the RGB_Gradient example. In this gradient the amount of how much colour is in the gradient is controlled by the X coordinates of the mouse.