Just a little something I cooked up while working on a fish population visualization. This was pretty quick, about a half hour’s work – perhaps with some more love a visualization like this using real data will make it into TerraViz. We could certainly add a lot more to this, for instance playing with the particle system transparency (instead of just having points be on/off). It’s easy to adjust color, size, etc. on a per-particle basis to do multidimensional analysis. As an example: we could use...
read moreThe video below explains the major changes in the editor between Unity 3 and Unity 4. More specifically, it goes over changes between Unity 3.5 (the latest version when Unity 4 was released) and Unity 4.0. It doesn’t include an introduction to Mecanim. That’s a large enough topic that it needs its own video (or videos), and when I post that I’ll add a link here. Property Drawers Unity 4 also includes an upgrade called Property Drawers. These are a way to make working with scripts in the inspector a lot more powerful,...
read moreAs I posted previously, this semester I’m teaching a new course in video game design and production at the University of Colorado. We have a great group of students, and they’ve just finished putting together their first game, of two that they’ll make in the course. These games were developed by students of CSCI 4830-008, working in teams of two. This is the first of two games they’ll be making this semester in the Unity game engine. They were asked to create a 3-5 minute adventure / scavenger hunt game, where the...
read moreThis last week Julien was kind enough to allow me to teach a class in his new Introduction to Video Game Design at the University of Colorado. I covered using World Machine to generate realistic terrains for the Unity environment. I’ve shared the lecture slides and example file in an effort to beautify our virtual worlds. If you would like to try it out for yourself, grab the free version of World Machine (non-commercial use only) and feel free to try out my World Machine Sample Terrain. I’m not sure if Julien plans on releasing...
read moreWe’ve been working for a while on a planetary shader for rendering the Earth. I’ve posted our solution (in two parts: a planet shader and a clouds shader) below; the planet shader is also posted to the Unify Community Wiki. You can download an asset bundle with the shaders and textures here. Shaders Planet Shader Cloud Shader Planet Shader Description Version 1 of this shader was created using the Strumpy Shader Editor. The original tutorial for creating the earth (minus night...
read moreA showcase of screen captures from some of our past and current projects. You’ll find a variety of projects here: games, simulations and data visualizations. Our older projects were all in Second Life – our newer work is mainly with the Unity game engine. A number of these screenshots were taken during the making of the game, so they may lack polish, especially in the on-screen UI elements. Click an image preview to view it full-size. TerraViz An experiment: Can we use a game engine to visualize scientific data? TerraViz is...
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