Welcome to another devlog! Today we'll be detailing the creative and technical journey of developing a stylized glass pipe for our project. This task came with its own set of unique challenges, pushing the boundaries of typical transparent glass materials and aiming for a more animated, cell-shaded look.
Creating a glass pipe presented several challenges. The first major challenge was to move away from a typical transparent glass material and achieve a stylized and cell-shaded effect. This required more creative shading techniques to create strong shapes and highlights from the light hitting the surface.
To achieve the stylized look, we developed a custom surface unlit shader using the Amplify Shader Editor. This tool allowed us to create the desired effects more efficiently than Unity’s default glass material parameters, significantly improving performance. A key technique, suggested by Xetirano, involved using a dot product and a vector math node for comparison. This approach helped create the shiny glass effect and the strong shapes I aimed for. Another crucial component was the Fresnel effect. By combining it with the imported texture from Blender and adjusting its strength with a float, we were able to add depth and realism to the surface. Fine-tuning the Fresnel strength and texture coordinates allowed for precise control of the effect.
Another challenge was designing a single segment of the pipe that would be repeated throughout the pipeline. Ensuring this repetition did not look monotonous required careful attention to detail and design. The texture work involved baking the effects with transparency and making additional adjustments in Unity. We further enhanced the texture in Photoshop, adding more gradient strokes to achieve the stylized look. These combined efforts resulted in a unique and visually appealing glass pipe that met the project's artistic goals.
Stay tuned for more updates and insights from our development process!
Best regards,
Playdew team
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1752540/Lost_Twins_II/