(Now my plan is to use a third person controller in a nude human’s shape to go through this place. I haven’t made it and I’m just using the default one at the moment.)
This post is about the architectures or artefacts – not really sure what I should call them – that I have done so far.
The working process is I create everyone in Blender, export UV, paint in Photoshop according to how they look in the painting (not edit the painting to fit the UVs), and make a suitable material in Unity. Sometimes it would need to go back to Photoshop, change the patterns and reapply them again and again to reach the satisfactory effect.
There are always times that I hope I can write my own shaders when I find it difficult to get the effect I want, especially for the cutout/reflective things. Actually I don’t know well about those so many kinds of maps in the shader’s parameters so the learning process has been numerous experiments (well I think I should find some tutorials to go through these systematically). But so far things turn out not bad.
I didn’t want to bother with the plant branches and vines so I used cutout/fade shaders on some planes rotated to all angles to make sure they can be seen from everywhere. I hope they can wave like grass, but terrain grass waves like the whole thing moves (the root should be fixed) so I gave it up. The planes don’t seem as good as the real models though.
The glass ball has some cracks. But I didn’t find a proper setting for both the semitransparent and the solid crack, so I duplicated the ball and allocated them two different shaders to compose like a single object.
And the orange stele, with the ball on it, has 400 pearls placed manually… A single texture would not have different materials, and the cutout texture would not look solid and reflective even with height map. I think there must be a better professional way to do it, and it’s like I just forced it very stupidly. It’s like a manually made luxury, isn’t it..