I have found this huge city model on Sharecg.com and I though “ok, can I display a 1.8 Millions poly in Unity 3D and have a smooth result”. The answer is yes and even better, I got +200 FPS so I added as much full screen effects as possible (flares, blur, vignetting, cease etc..). And still here is the result. Capped at 30 FPS for the video. It is for free download at http://www.unity3dx.com.
The idea is to make something that looks with a lot of details without having to have a lot of polygons.
Some would say, use displacement map or another technic. But I am lazy. I want to use this shader with any kind of stock textures without having to make a hi-poly model, get the normals from it and then generate a low poly version: boring!
I came with this little secret weapon. It mixes 2 textures and 2 normal maps so that the model is looking very very detailed. Actually I can achieve photorealism with 1000 polygons, and it looks like if it is a 100,000 poly model.
Check the video and the shader is for sale at http://www.unity3dx.com.
Rocks are everywhere, in most 3d games. But there is a problem, they take a lot of polygons. Typically it is very hard to have a big realistic rock with less than 20,000 polys. I am been looking for solutions to get the same result with only 600-700 polys.
… and I came up with some very advanced shading algorithms using the normals to simulate the relief. Better than bump mapping or displacement maps, these shaders are doing the job using low resources in only one pass.
Then I have created 12 low poly rocks, and worked the UV mapping so that these rocks can work with rectangular regular textures. I mixed atlas and spherical UV mapping to get rocks that would almost look good with any kind of seemless texture.
Finally I created 20 hi-resolution textures (2048×2048). They are not photos, but algorithmic simulations so that you get a level of detail that cannot be matched with a photo.
It is here: http://www.unity3dx.com
Features in this pack
* 3x shaders: details, wet and transparent. All shaders supports 2 textures (one main and one detail) and 2 normal maps.
* 20 unique and exclusive textures, ice, magma, stone, gems you name it.
* 12 low poly rocks (from 600 to 1400 polys)
* 22 preset materials using the textures and the shaders so that you can drag and drop them immediately.
* One working project that demonstrates all these materials.
Video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03phJ3Sv5wY
Here is a video made from the cinematic and pictures from this game I made in 1995 for DOS…
Here is what I’ve done in tweaking the island demo!
