Mercedes-Benz Showcase

@kipash :cactus: has created a great automotive scene:

:point_right: https://warp-citrine-act.glitch.me/

This thread is for collecting feedback about the project and the workflow to get there, and suggestions for how to improve it.
20221014-024923_chrome-42.mp4

Original Post on Discord

@kipash :cactus: would be great if you could collect your feedback here! Thanks!

Build: https://chrisstman.eu/needle/

Hey :wave:Soon i’ll try to describe how i made some elements and describe my overall experience.

Looks absolutely stunning! Great work

by user 103054507105067008

Hey, first i want to disclose that this is just a internal demo. The car model is not mine. I borrowed that form a colleague.

i’ll describe my “workflow” and elements from my showcase.

.
.

  1. Lighting. First i set the skybox mainly for the environmental reflections.

The car asset was made that it needs only environment reflection and strong enough ambient light.

With this setup, i’ve originally didn’t have any lights in the scene.

But some parts look a bit dull.

Adding very weak directional lights added a slight specular highlight (2 directional light opposing each other with 0.04 intensity)
The carpaint material is not reflective like a mirror, so this seems like a not noticeable change, but it really helps in all the bends.


  1. Background / environment
    The scene would look like this since the skybox is always visible

I’ve decided to make a custom shader to create a gradient and use it on a big inverse sphere.

This acts as the visual skybox™️.
Everything in this inverse sphere will have the sphere as the background

Needle seems to be supporting unlit shader graphs very well!

Here you can see a simple shader that samples the Gradiant based on the Y Object axis.

I noticed some banding so i wanted to implement some sort of dithering, but that didn’t look as i wanted. I left that in, but doesn’t really do much for the visuals.

unknown.png

Shader graph doesn’t support Gradients as material parameters… but instead the gradient is baked into the shader program itself.

Anyways, this seemed more simpler then making a simple 1 pixel wide, 100 pixels long gradient texture which would do the same.

Perhaps i’m too afraind of photoshop :smile: Here i would actually recommend a texture which you can dither externally.

Although, that workflow is harder to iterate upon. Here it just works in unity.

.
.
3) Fake motion

When the car was stationary, it was the time to make it interesting. There are quite a few “fake” running car experiences like this one:
https://playcanv.as/p/RqJJ9oU9/

The car itself is not moving forward, but the wheels are turned and the grid is tiled so it looks like the car is moving.

unknown.png