The Journey Day 13
“You are traveling through another dimension…”
“You are traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. Your next stop, the Twilight Zone!”. I still remember watching those old black and white episodes with my great grandmother. This was one of her favorite shows. Today I took a step into another dimension, the third dimension using Unity engine to take me there.
I had the idea of wanting to have a short cinematic opening for my space shooter game. Yesterday I wrote about how Unity is utilized to make some of our greatest film projects become even more fantastic. So today, I wanted to try it out firsthand. I had noticed that the lesson plan had a portal to a Stealth Game and cinematics section during my daily check-ins but hadn’t really paid it much mind until being put on this path of movie making and animation.
I downloaded and imported the assets package that came with the project and got to work going through the setup. The first section, Environments & Lighting, walked through the process of using the albedo channel to texture map objects. We quickly went through setting mesh and sub mesh materials, using transparencies to make glass panels and light mapping. Each section building the layers needed to be able to create layered scenes and sequences.
Putting in the six paneled skybox was really cool today. it gave my game the feel of actually being somewhere for the first time. But, it was when we got to the light probes section that I got to see for the first time how deep game creation goes. Clicking into my light probes pulled up every one in the scene. For those who are unfamiliar with the term, Light Probes provide a way to capture and use information about light that is passing through the empty space in your scene.
Similar to lightmaps, light probes store “baked” information about lighting in your scene. The difference is that while lightmaps store lighting information about light hitting the surfaces in your scene, light probes store information about light passing through empty space in your scene.
Light Probes are positions in the scene where the light is measured (probed) during the bake. At runtime, the indirect light that hits dynamic GameObjects is approximated using the values from the nearest Light Probes to that object.
While this may all sound like the ramblings of a random word generator it was all made clear to me seeing just how many light probes go into making a scene triple-A level. Walking through a wonderland of probes and strings, all of the little connection points showing the layout of light reading in the scene. It was kind of breathtaking to see the amount of detail that went into it.
This was where today’s journey would end. Hitting pause, on the screen I reflected on the day’s learnings. Sub meshes, occulsion mapping, light sourcing, and many more topics ran through my mind. Working their way into a picture of a scene. Like a self-replicating nanite, beginning to form a picture out of the steady stream of thought. We have indeed entered a new dimension.
