Labs

Flowing water! We created this water simulator based on the Flow paper by Valve Software: http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2010/siggraph2010_vlachos_waterflow.pdf

Instructions

WASD/Arrows: Move around
Mouse: Look around
Left-Mouse: Splat blood into the water

Features

• Vector based water flow, authored inside the Unity Editor, vector fields can be changed at run time too(at a price).
• Surface debris that runs on the current.
• Reflection, refraction and water depth.
• Flowing water colour, comes in two flavours:
  Constant: continually pump sewage into the water plane, pump clean water into the system from a pipe, water washing through a pile of rubbish can pick up that tasty green hint.
  Dynamic: splat blood on the water surface when that zombie takes a hit, kick up silt as your characters run through shallow water and watch it dissipate.

The Future

• Rigidbodies float in the water and get caught in the current.
• Surface splashes
• Surface foam with density maps

Controls

• Mouse click / Drag – Paint on surface
• R – Reset

Features

• Any renderable object can act as a brush, by default particles are used.
• Paint effect based on particles, any way a a particle can be moved, the paint will spread.
• Approximated/Implicit paint physics, paint slides down walls, drips off roofs and pools on floors.
• Per surface control over paint color, paint fade time, paint resolution, camera dimensions.

Limitations

• Flat surfaces only, preferably Unity Planes or similar geometry (see example), Unity planes can be scaled to increase size.
• One paint colour per surface.

Flex shapes! Shape Keys, Morph targets, Blend Shapes… Take your pick! This lab introduces this feature to Unity in a method that is friendly, flexible and fast.

Features:

• Automatic generation of shape differences from meshes with similar vertex counts.
• Powerful base-line functionality, allows for programmers to choose how flex shapes are animated.
• Split symmetrical shapes into Left and Right asymmetrical shapes, with definable blend width (eg closeMouth_R, closeMouth_L).
• Small memory/storage footprint, only the differences between poses are saved.
• Flex data can be shared between multiple similar meshes.
• Difference shapes are recalculated at tool-time.
• Works cooperatively with Skinned meshes.
• No limit on number of concurrent flex shapes.

The future:

• Decay: points that move less, move slower.
• Flex vertex colours: useful for advanced normal map blending in shaders.

This feature will allow slightly more advanced ragdolls than are available in Unity.

Features:

• Fully integrated ragdoll: no switching between ragdoll and non-ragdoll rigs.
• Recovery from ragdolled pose to preset animation.
• Ragdoll freeze strength: ragdoll maintains a shape and doesn’t just collapse.

The future:

• Isolate ragdoll to specific bones/bone chains.
• Recover through preset recovery animation (stand up animation).
• Active ragdoll: Play animation while ragdolling.

This new feature allows the level designer to place ambient light probes into the scene, which create ambient lighting maps at run-time.

• Designers can choose frequency of probe updates: Once, Time Delta (useful in day/night cycles) or Position Delta (moving probes) with variable granularity.
• Ambient Receivers will choose the closest ambient probe to reference.
• Variable ambient map resolution, blur and saturation.
• Per-probe culling mask.
• The Super-global probe acts as a catch all if no nearby probes can be located, also creates global shader variables for it’s cubemap and power.
• Global probes are for more specific areas.
• Local probes allow ambient probes in rooms and other confined areas.
• Tool-time definable ambient maps (one per probe).
• Plays well with lightmapping, dynamic shadows and image-effects ( so far )
• Custom landscape shader adds landscape ambient sampling (from the super-global probe).
• Time based environment map transitioning
• Usable as ambient (diffuse) or reflective (specular) shaders.

The (possible) future:

• Sample the nearest 1, 2, 3 probes : should eliminate the snapping seen when changing probes.
• Hue and value shift environment maps : more artistic control over ambient maps.

More experiments coming soon!