Pontificating on a Different Kind of Particle...

I have a tendency to write overly-long youtube comments. This one was on a video of someone showing off a high powered laser popping balloons...

Quick Point-Lit Particle Update

I have an upcoming video I'm working on going over a bunch of utility scripts I've made just to speed up my workflow in unity, and I've finally solved (well enough for the moment anyway) one of the most persistent problems I've had: point-lit particles.

It's a true pain in the butt and no one has really solved it (lots of pretty good attempt though) due to the particle vertices being located in camera space and not world space (where the lights are). Farfarer has made strong progress in solving this translation problem, but his solution did not work the way I wanted it to, so I made a simpler -- if less robust -- approximation to be used here.

Anyway, look forward to more soon! The other scripts I'll be showing off are also running in this scene, but I'll get more into that next time.

---Edit from 2 months in the future---

You are so wrong. This is not the right way to solve this, and your idea won't work :P

Physically Based Shader v0.12

More progress on the Physically Based Shader for the free version of Unity. I've improved the math for the ambient diffuse contribution. It should now behave very similarly to hemispherical ambient light solutions you might see elsewhere. Next I'll probably re-tackle the math for how the ambient light setting is combined with the RSRM. The one I'm using still ends up a little too saturated in extreme lighting conditions -- though it's really not noticeable in most scenes now.

This scene is wearing out its usefulness in demonstrating new features, so this may be the last time you see the bunny, the rocks, and the kyles like this. I actually broke this scene in the latest version of the shader and had to reset the material settings, lights, and camera by eye. :/ The shader can cast and receive shadows now and I've fixed a bug that couldn't be seen in this scene where objects that were lit by multiple point lights would double accumulate fog.

In the new scene, I'll also be showing off new tools for wrangling scene render settings, skybox tint, key light settings, distance fade-able flares, ambient light-skybox calibration, and a fog light scattering approximation. So stick around for that!

Hit the jump for a couple more pictures including just the ambient contribution and some different lighting conditions.

Face Contouring Makeup

I was taking some notes on basic makeup layout for "contouring" which, for those uninitiated, is using makeup to emphasize attractive contours of the face by highlighting or shading. I only made them as part of my personal note-taking, so it's all way overdone and not very subtle, but I thought I'd share them here as they are broadly applicable to painting, modelling, and texturing of faces:

Other than the red, the colors are not meant to be taken literally, but as broadly representative of either darker shading makeup or lighter highlighting makeup. Hope it helps somebody to have this laid out for them clearly :).