Issue #155 - Art Tools

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Lots of tools and tips on improving your art, animation, vfx and more. Enjoy!

Migrating built-in shaders to the Universal Render Pipeline - In this blog, we discuss the Arm project that was converted to URP, which involved the implementation of Dynamic Soft Shadows Based on Local Cubemaps in a custom shader. This post covers automatic shader conversion from built-in to URP, custom shader conversion, dealing with LightMode tags, and post-processing.
Unity

VFX Breakdown : Lightning Particles + Shader(Graph) - In this post I’ll show off how I set up my stylized lightning particles using Mesh Particles, a custom shader, Distance Field Texture, and Custom Data in the particle system.
Minions Art

Volumetric Rendering - This is the first part of a Unity tutorial dedicated to Volumetric Rendering, raymarching and signed distance fields. These techniques allow us to overcome the biggest limitation of modern 3D engines, which only let us render the outer shell of an object. Volumetric rendering enables the creation of realistic materials that interact with light in a complex way, such as fog, smoke, water and glass. Beautifully crafted effects such as NMZ‘s Plasma Globe (below) would simply be impossible without volumetric rendering.
alanzucconi.com

How much to slow animation down for giant creatures - A big creature walking only looks believable if its animation is slower than that for a small creature. It takes longer to lift a leg and to put it down again. In this post, I explain how much to slow down an animation depending on the scale of the character for the movement to look good.
tore-knabe.com

Unity 2023.1.0 Alpha 9 - Unity 2023.1.0 Alpha 9 has been released.
Unity

Videos

Giving Personality to Procedural Animations using Math - In particular, this video highlights the entire process from initial motivation, to the technical design, technical analysis, and game design considerations.
t3ssel8r

Unity Shader Graph - Sci-Fi Barrier / Shield Tutorial - Today we have a sweet Sci-Fi Barrier / Shield tutorial made in Unity Shader Graph! We are also going to have a quick overview on how to use this with Unity Visual Effect Graph. Enjoy it folks!
Gabriel Aguiar Prod.

Freelancing Tech Art Part-Time: A Few Dos and Don'ts - In this 2022 Technical Artist Summit session, Stray Kite Studio’s Taylor Wright details a dozen dos and don'ts to keep in mind when starting out and growing a freelance technical art business based on years of experience and learning the hard way, with particular emphasis on what makes freelancing tech art different than other freelancing.
GDC

Best Unity AI Tutorials – Unity Game Development Guide - In this article, we’re going to showcase some of the best Unity AI tutorials available so you can start adding this great feature for your own games.
gamedevacademy.org

2D Sprites in 3D World - Unity Sprite Billboarding Tutorial - Hey everyone! Welcome to the first tutorial on the channel! I've had a few people ask me about the sprite billboarding effect I'm using in Amber Roots so I wanted to show you exactly how I'm doing it.
Paper Mouse Games

Drag and drop in Unity UI - create your own inventory UI! - This tutorial/guide will show you how to create a great full featured drag and drop inventory user interface. You will learn how to drag items on the screen, how to drop them into special slots, how to enable snapping back to original position and finally how to manage multiple items at once!
Coco Code

Unity Tutorial: Reliable Camera Shake that can handle multiple shakes at once - In this Unity Tutorial we will create Camera Shake system that will allow us to handle multiple shakes happening at the same time. We start by creating simple camera shake and then we trigger it by using buttons.
PitiIT

Rental Assets - Assets - Learn With LootLocker - Add boosters, temporary buffs, skills, cooldowns or consumable items such as potions, herbs or strength enhancers to your inventory system. Rental assets can be used for in-game rewards, time-limited events, claimable items during an in-game event and much more!
LootLocker

Assets

Unity Art Bundle - Characters, environments, music, SFX, and artists’ tools galore Bring your game to life with this bundle of incredible art assets & artists’ tools—specifically curated for Unity creators! Featuring characters, environmental elements, SFX, music, animations, and prefabs, this library of thousands of assets and creative utilities will help you realize game worlds for a wide range of genres.

Build a low-poly 3D dungeon, or craft a lush natural world with an anime-inspired look. Discover loops and tracks to score your horror game, and add the sounds of battle to your fantasy epic. Get menageries of creatures, a fantasy realm’s worth of level-building blocks, and lots more, and help support Girls Make Games Scholarship Fund with your purchase!

• Quibli: Anime Shaders and Tools MSRP: $60
• POLYGON Dungeons - Low Poly 3D Art by Synty MSRP: $79.99
• Total Music Collection MSRP: $135
• Monsters Ultimate Pack 02 Cute Series MSRP: $159.90
• Ultimate Sound FX Bundle MSRP: $19.99
• Meadow Environment - Dynamic Nature MSRP: $50
• Boing Kit: Dynamic Bouncy Bones, Grass, and More MSRP: $60
• Toon Fantasy Nature MSRP: $48
• ProPixelizer MSRP: $25
• Forest animals MSRP: $200
• Party Monster Rumble PBR MSRP: $25
• Eternal Temple MSRP: $45
• Quirky Series - Animals Mega Pack Vol.1 MSRP: $89
• Quirky Series - Animals Mega Pack Vol.2 MSRP: $89
• Underwater FX MSRP: $25
• Monster Sounds Pack MSRP: $19.99
• Character Creator 2D MSRP: $30
• Magica Cloth MSRP: $25
• Footsteps Sound Pack MSRP: $19.99
• Basic Motions MSRP: $18
• BIRDS PACK MSRP: $54.99
• Little Dragons: Tiger MSRP: $39.99
• Pixelate MSRP: $20
• Map Graph MSRP: $49.99
• RPG VFX Bundle MSRP: $48
• Brute Force - Snow & Ice Shader MSRP: $19.99
• Seamless Texture Generator MSRP: $5.99
• 10% Off Coupon for the Unity Asset Store Humble Bundle Affiliate

Unity Tools Bundle - The ultimate Unity game creator’s kit.
Build the game you’re envisioning with this massive bundle of versatile tools for Unity, the world’s leading platform for real-time content creation! Featuring more than two dozen utilities, systems, and other assets built with game creators in mind. Whether you’re dreaming of building a role-playing game, top-down shooter, or sci-fi mech sim, this bundle will help you turn your vision into a reality—all while supporting Gameheads!
Assets included: Top Down Engine ($60 Value), Magic Light Probes ($40 Value), Prefab World Builder ($59.99 Value), UniStorm - Volumetric Clouds, Sky, Modular Weather, and Cloud Shadows ($59.99 Value), Smart Lighting 2D ($29 Value), Storyteller ($100 Value), DestroyIt - Destruction System ($75 Value), Fullscreen Editor ($20 Value), Better UI ($64 Value). Fluxy - 2.5D fluid simulator ($47 Value), Endless Book ($25 Value), Script Inspector 3 ($39 Value), Dialogue System For Unity ($85 Value), CCG Kit ($199 Value). Very Animation ($46 Value). Mech Combat Kit ($50 Value). Blocks Engine 2 ($35 Value). Train Controller (Railroad System) Ultimate Collection ($90 Value), Broccoli Tree Creator ($42 Value). Performance Tools ($59.95 Value). True Shadow - UI Soft Shadow and Glow. Archimatix Pro ($90 Value). RPG Cameras And Controllers ($40 Value). Modular Motion ($49.99 Value), Bones Stimulator ($11.99 Value), and a 10% Off Coupon for the Unity Asset Store
Humble Bundle Affiliate

I've made 125+ fantasy building models you can use in any of your projects, for free! - 125+ models (Each building has two stages, and 3 evolutions per stage.) [Direct link to download]
u/QuaterniusDev

SplineMesh - A Unity plugin to create curved content in real-time with bézier curves
methusalah Open Source

Unity Addressables Manager - The APIs provided by AddressablesManager are equivalent to that of Addressables, with 3 kinds of overloading: callback, coroutine, and async. Loaded assets, scenes, and instances will be cached for later uses.
laicasaane Open Source

Asset Management Tools for Unity - Small collection of tools for Unity used to manage your assets. Part of the DevLocker project.
NibbleByte Open Source

FBPP (File Based Player Prefs) - This Unity library is designed to replace the standard Unity PlayerPrefs.
The main difference being that it saves all records in JSON format to a text file.
richardelms Open Source

UnityFBX-To-Blender-Importer - Blender FBX Importer is a Unity Editor extension that allows you to import FBX models directly into Blender from Unity by running Blender executable with Python expression arguments.
Varneon Open Source

Unity-UI-Rounded-Corners - These components and shaders allow you to add rounded corners to UI elements!
kirevdokimov Open Source

Impact Controller - A powerful, modular first/third person controller for Unity.
FeverDevJohnny Open Source

Generating Upper-Body Motion for Real-Time Characters Making their Way through Dynamic Environments - Generating Upper-Body Motion for Real-Time Characters Making their Way through Dynamic Environments - 2022 -
edualvarado Open Source

UnityProceduralBiped - The initial goal was to have something I could quickly attach to a bipedal model and get a walking animation that covered all directions, rotations, and height differences. I don't like working with animations so I figured this would be a more fun solution.
pickles976 Open Source

Animation Utils - This package contains some utilities that help working with Unity's Timeline and Animation tools, for example drag & drop to fix warning missing clip bindings
needle-tools Open Source

Tweener - Tweener is a simple tween component for Unity.
This helps controlling animations via inspector without animator.
8izips Open Source

GroundGrowing - An Open Source Unity3d Planetary Terrain Generator and Editor Extension. This project is built as an extension to the editor, it is meant as a build tool for designers looking to generate content rapidly on the fly. The generation functions can also be exported and called inside other applications. It is multithreaded in both the inspector and during runtime so it can update and generate without slowing down either the player's or the designer's user experience. It updates in incrementally increasing resolutions start with low res in order to provide modes rapidly to the user while higher resolution models are processed in the background.
RichardGSchmidt Open Source

Better Streaming Assets - Better Streaming Assets is a plugin that lets you access Streaming Assets directly in an uniform and thread-safe way, with tiny overhead. Mostly beneficial for Android projects, where the alternatives are to use archaic and hugely inefficient WWW or embed data in Asset Bundles. API is based on Syste.IO.File and System.IO.Directory classes.
gwiazdorrr Open Source

HistoryNavigator - Simple history navigation toolbar for Unity 2021.2+ (ie. back/forward internet browser style).
kronnect Open Source

Butler Window for Unity - A Unity Editor Window for uploading builds to Itch.io.
WispBart Open Source

TinyTools - Lightweight collection of easy to use Unity tools.
lukebradaric Open Source

Spotlight

Force Reboot - Force Reboot is a fast-paced FPS with rogue-lite elements. Force Reboot is entirely focused on nonstop gameplay. You need to get past all of the rooms as fast as you can.

[You can get the demo now on Steam]
ln404

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