I wanted to showcase some tech art tools for my game Weavemarch. I'm not great at art and really didn't want to do AI assets. I went through many versions of environment design and hated all of it, so I stripped it back to a minimalist, flat environment, aiming for a sort of woven medieval tapestry look.

I can handle very basic 3D but I've always been terrible at texturing. All the 3D models have single-colour materials on each mesh and shaders add the weaving and stitching details on top.

All the variables plug into one scriptable object so i can tweak everything from the same place.

A friend made the flower background texture, everything else is shaders.

I’d love to hear your honest feedback on the water and underwater visuals.
Sorry for a bad video quality, i'm rendering that on a pretty poor PC: Radeon RX 570, i5-10400F.

Here are the techniques i used to create this water and underwater scene:

Gerstner-style wave displacement
Multi-scale wave blending
Scrolling normal maps
Flow-map distortion
Depth-based water color and shallow-water scattering
Subsurface scattering
Fresnel-based reflections
Reflection probes and cubemaps
Planar reflections
Screen-space reflections
Refraction and scene distortion
Depth-based underwater absorption and fog
Animated caustics
Procedural sun and moon glitter
Short-lived microfacet flashes on wave crests
Foam and shoreline foam
Lit foam normals and bubbles
Surface and underwater shadowing
Specular and ambient occlusion
Screen-space occlusion of underwater light shafts
Volumetric underwater god rays
Animated light-shaft patterns
Height fog and volumetric lighting
Depth-based clipping around terrain and shorelines

What techniques am i missing? Thanks!

Working on a dark sci-fi FPS. The first clip is my reference. In my version the spider sits on the zombie's back and plugs hoses into its spine. When the zombie dies, the spider jumps off.

I’ve been exploring how far I can take Unity UI without relying on imported art assets :D
I used React through a framework asset, building the interface with code and styling.

Changing shapes, colors and motion in code makes it easy to try different looks. I’m curious how far this approach can go as a game’s visual style becomes more complex.

Have you tried creating game UI with code instead of art assets? How did it work for you?

Alpha 0.11 of my farming & economy sim, running on URP. Each truck follows the road down from the pass and parks on the meadow where the farm starts.

I've been working on the aiming system for my game, and I'd love to hear what you guys think about the current visual effect.

The game is still in the early stages of development, so there are definitely bugs, unfinished elements, and typos that still need fixing. For now, I'm mainly focused on getting the core gameplay and visuals feeling right.

What do you think of the aiming effect? Does it feel clear and satisfying, or does it need more visual feedback? Would you prefer a different color, a more visible targeting line, a reticle, or something completely different?

Any suggestions or constructive criticism are welcome! I'd love to hear how you'd improve it.

Full Mario 64 in Mixed Reality! Running in real 3D (no stereoscopic crap) natively at 90FPS and also running on my desk! 😋
Again, Opus 5.5 + Unity CLI + PICO CLI combo made it quite straightforward.

Such a bliss to play an oldie at 90 FPS in 3D.

Disclaimer: I own an original physical copy of Mario 64. This project is not associated with Nintendo or PICO.

I’ve been rebuilding PS1 rendering in URP from the hardware docs (psx-spx) instead of copying other PS1 shaders. To test everything I built a hall with one station per feature. You walk up, press E, and that feature changes.

In the video:

• 0:00 vertex snapping
• 0:05 affine texture mapping
• 0:20 camera snapping
• 0:36 hardware resolutions (320x240, 256x224, 368x240, 512x240)
• 0:47 frame hold
• 0:57 dither (hardware strength vs 4x)
• 1:07 CRT scanlines and interlace
• 1:23 PS1 depth cue fog
• 1:28 Gouraud vs Phong specular
• 1:39 baked vertex colour lighting
• 1:44 affine vertex shading
• 2:00 texture quantization

It’s called True PSX Effects and it’s coming soon. Before release I’d love to know which PS1 quirk you think gets faked wrong most often, and what you’d want in a kit like this.

Playable on Browser Demo: https://sourpickle35.itch.io/true-psx-effects-unity-urp-demo

What do you guys think of this progress? I am fully open to advices on both snowboard and ski controls and feels.

We make a character generator where bodies, faces and a pile of clothing pieces can be combined however you like. We needed cheaper versions of those characters for crowds, so the people at the back of a scene stop costing as much as the person in front of the camera.

This is where we ended up.

Attempt 1: run every piece through a mesh simplifier

We started by giving each clothing mesh to meshoptimizer and asking it to keep a quarter of the triangles.

One of our characters came back like this (original on the left, simplified in the middle).

Those dark slivers are the inside of the shirt, and the teal bits are the T-shirt underneath. Clothing is made of surfaces a few millimetres apart, like the outside of the shirt, its inside, and the T-shirt below. The simplifier tries to keep each surface close to its original shape, but it doesn't know which nearby surface is supposed to be on top. Flattening a curve by a few millimetres can push one surface through the next.

It's tempting to ignore this, since nobody inspects the shirt of someone in the background. But far away, each pixel of a character ends up as roughly the average colour of everything that lands in it. A few triangles of the wrong surface mixed into a light shirt pull that average darker, so the shirt visibly changes colour the moment the character switches to the simpler level.

Asking for fewer triangles made it worse.

Attempt 2: protect the dangerous areas

So we found every spot where another layer sits close underneath and told the simplifier to leave those vertices alone. That's the third image in the first comparison. It's also barely simplified, because on clothing almost everything sits close to another layer.

That version became our nearest level, and it's still in there. The far levels had to get down to a quarter of the triangles and below, and protecting vertices kept more than half.

Attempt 3: let the vertices move, then fix the overlap

A simplifier can also move vertices to wherever best keeps the original shape, which looks much better at low triangle counts. Each piece on its own looked fine, but the sweater came through the coat on top of it.

Our first idea was to check every coat vertex after simplifying and push it back out if it had ended up inside the sweater. That check only looks at the corners of each triangle.

We tried checking points inside the triangles too, across several poses and body shapes, and a fix that worked in one pose kept breaking something in another.

Cheating where the camera can't see

Nobody looks at a far-away NPC from the inside, so the coat only has to win the depth test in the pixels where it belongs on top.

Every vertex of a simplified piece stores one extra number, the count of clothing layers beneath it. The body is zero, the sweater is one, the coat is two. In the shader, each vertex slides toward the camera by that many small steps.

Each vertex moves along the line between itself and the camera, keeping its position on screen while changing its depth. Giving the outer layer a larger offset helps it win the depth test where the simplified surfaces overlap.

Here's a sweater and a coat as two simple tubes (simplified, then simplified with the trick).

Here are the same tubes from an angle. The white outline on the right is where the simplified coat really is. The drawn coat has shrunk toward the original camera, and the sweater sticks out behind it.

From anywhere other than that camera, the cheat is obvious. That's fine, because the shader redoes the offset every frame for whichever camera is looking.

Two more things made it hold up on real clothes.

• Some garments contain inner surfaces that stay covered by their outer surfaces. For the far levels, we remove the covered areas, leaving a band near the edges where the inner surface might be visible.
• The layer numbers get smoothed across the mesh, so neighbouring vertices don't get very different offsets and tear the surface apart.

After that it was mostly smaller Unity work. Update When Offscreen, for example, kept hidden LOD levels skinning every frame, and each far level got merged into a single renderer. In the zoom tests, the characters look consistent at their intended distances and the transitions are hard to notice.

How small is small?

Here's each level at roughly the size it'd be drawn in one 1080p setup, blown up so you can see the pixels.

(This is for our Archetype Character Generator on the Asset Store.)

First the cables, then the grass. It was probably time to give the main character some attention. 😂

Pixel finally has animations! A little more personality for the little square at the heart of Hello World, our narrative physics adventure.

Some technical details behind the movement:

• The body uses a custom sprite deformation system with a 4×4 control cage driving a smooth mesh.
• Each eye is a separate 3×3 mesh, so I can reshape the eyes independently for different expressions.
• The control points are animated directly in Unity’s Animation window, using regular animation clips.
• Expressions blend through the Animator, while the Rigidbody2D and collider stay separate from the visual deformation.

That lets Pixel bend, squash and change expression without changing the collision shape or how the character moves.

It’s surprising how much personality you can squeeze out of a square and two eyes. Which animation feels the most expressive to you?

Hi r/Unity3D, we're Ripstone, publisher and co-dev of The Spectrum Retreat: Redux, Dan Smith Studios' first-person puzzle thriller, which arrives on Nintendo Switch 2 on 29th October.

The original came out on Switch in 2018 on Unity 2017. Rather than do a straight port, the team moved the project to Unity 6.5 and rebuilt the visuals for the new hardware. The shots above are Switch 1 (left) vs Switch 2 (right).

What changed:

- Introduced Volumetric lighting and fog, ray-marched reflections and enhanced HDR

- Dynamic shadows at four times the original resolution, plus ambient occlusion and higher-res textures

- Switch 2 features including mouse controls and HD Rumble 2

This was our first time seeing what Unity can do on Switch 2, and we've loved it.

Happy to pass questions about the upgrade to the team, whether that's the jump from 2017 to 6.5, lighting or performance on the hardware.

It's out on Thursday and free for owners of the Switch 1 original!

Check out my Buckshot Roulette & Amnesia The Bunker inspired game - RESIDUUM! 🫶

RESIDUUM is a solo-dev project created & published by myself!

RESIDUUM is a first-person psychological horror game set in a decaying research facility. Armed with only a dwindling flashlight and a faulty heartbeat sensor, manage your power, uncover the truth, and escape what hides in the dark.

SURVIVE THE MONSTERS

Your flashlight needs constant attention, and a faulty heartbeat sensor can warn you when danger is close. Each encounter brings a different threat. Learn when to move, when to find another route, and when to use your limited chance to fight back.

EXPLORE THE FACILITY

Search interconnected areas for keys, supplies, and clues. Solve item-based puzzles to open new routes, and piece together the story through recordings, photographs, and notes left behind.

ESCAPING THE DISASTER

Explore and progress the game your own way in a semi-open world. You must explore and figure a way out. Search for what went down here - what has happened to the others? Why are you here? What creature lurks within the shadows?

Let me know what you think this was made on Unity 2022.3.17f1!

FULL GAME OUT NOW AT 10% OFF

AVAILABLE NOW

Join the Discord

I've been thinking a lot about slow motion lately. For me SUPERHOT VR is still the gold standard: time only moves when you move, and in VR that feels incredible.
What other Unity games nail slow-mo in your opinion? And what makes it feel good: sound pitch, VFX, camera, how responsive the controls stay? Would love to hear examples, and how you'd approach it if you've built something similar.

Hello dear community,

i have this problem where i just installed Unity and Unity Hub from the scratch on Windows 11, i want to create and open a new project but every time i try, i got these two errors i just attached to this post, Unity just crashes and can’t open a single thing, the editor just won’t launch. I tried installing older Unity versions but nothing seems to work, i spent 2 hours uninstalling and installing Unity on different drives too, using the main SO drive, etc, nothing seems to work. The other solution i found was trying to modify ProjectSettings.asset and ProjectVersion and downgrade DirectX12 version to DX11 as Cursor AI told me to, but same results with no success, i never did this kind of thing like 4 years ago when i worked on Unity to make some little projects; maybe i’m missing something else now, i really need your help to start coding.

If you need any kind of info i’ll be waiting for your answer and questions, thanks in advance ~

hi, all.

i'm planning to make a game on my laptop but I only have around 50gb free space on it. Is it possible to have my game files to be on my external drive while I run unity on my laptop so I can freely make the game bigger as needed? I'm a beginner and made like 2 mini games before and i'm trying to make a mini 3d open world game as a gift, and idk how much storage this will eat up on my laptop. I'm afraid unity will just keep crashing on me.

I always try to free up space on my laptop and I have just around 40-55gb free for real. I can't remove my apps since I always use it, like Blender etc. Thanks in advance.

1 and 2 are for NPCs and 3 is for player controller

Update on performance https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/s/Rb83x2xMe9

Hello!

I am an indie gamedev (hobbyists, not full time) that is creating my first game, and I thought I'd ask here to see if there is anything I can improve on my enemies in my game.

How I create them:

In short I am using the unity animator to create a finite state machine enemy. For example, the animator image attached, there are different states the enemy can load. This is generally controlled by 2 things: A common enemy script that just defines whether the enemy can see the player, and whether they are in range for attack AND the movement script, which is just a path finding script with different movement options attached (e.g does my enemy move on floor? Can it jump? etc)

The only problem: Script on the animator are considered static so I cant change 1 variable on 1 enemy without. To negate this I use a 'base script' which is just a monobehaviour that sits on my enemy game object with several settings. When my enemy wants to use those settings in the animator state, it just gets a reference to the base script (this is done in start and stored so it doesn't need to get it every time it enters the state).

If anyone want to read my code, here is a paste bin link (don't steal it lol)

THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF 1 STATE BASE AND BEHAVIOUR - there are many this one if just for firing projectiles.

Base script: https://pastebin.com/28SNFrLr
Enemy state script (Sits in animator state): https://pastebin.com/ZZc64Y7E

So: How is my approach to creating enemies? Is there a better way I could do it? How is my code generally? Can I make improvements to it?

All feedback is welcome!

P.S: Here is a clip of a (more) finished enemy if anyone is interested. I apologize for 30 fps, thats a reddit thing not me.

The part of my game where the buildings are gets really dark, and the game looks a little off. I haven't been able to figure out what to do to fix it. This happens when I start the game, but everything looks normal when the game isn't running. How can I fix this?

Dummy question