Journal

Working on a heat haze effect for the desert.

My thinking here is that the sphere that applies this effect could be centered on (and follow) the player character.

Some things are coalescing.

[♪] Jim Guthrie - With Sword and Shield

Working some wind movement into the tree branches by way of vertex displacement in the shader.

Wasn't using the vertex color channels for anything so I used it to weight paint the branches for the wind effect. It works, but I have no earthly idea if this is anything close to a good way to do this.

Getting there.

Once I saw the winter scene with the snow storm I knew I needed to add some drifting snow build-up on the tree.

[♪] Tool - Schism

Wanted to try out GL. After doing some reasearch I decided to make a camera overlay script that adds some compositional helper lines in the game view.

[♪] Zeal & Ardor - Servants

Adding drifting and falling snow to the winter scene.

[♪] Kvelertak - 1985

Building out the underwater variant.

Exploring light baking in Unity. Seems like there's a lot of moving parts. It'll probably take some time to figure this out, but seems doable.

Tried my hand at generating a pattern in the sand here.

Not quite there yet.

Starting out on the desert scene. Learning a lot about mesh topology and edge flow.

Working on the winter variant of the tree scene.

Generating a mist cloud mesh and animating it in the shader.

[♪] Vangelis - Blade Runner Blues

Working on a camera drift/sway effect and continuing to visualize stuff with Handles and Gizmos in Unity.

Visualizing what's going in the code like this takes a bunch of time, slowing down development, but I find it helps me keep a good mental model of he logic and whenever I come back to something like this I instantly remember how it works.

Stylistic explorations with character variations in 3D.

Making a star field generator and getting better aquainted with some of the tools Unity has for vizualising stuff in the editor — mainly Handles and Gizmos.

Testing out movement animations for the main character. I'll probably have to redo these about half a dozen times before they're anything close to okay.

Exploring the look and feel of the tree across realites.

/ Reflections

Sketched out the tree in Blender and began building the scene in Unity.

Reflections proved a challenge. Did some research and found a lot of forum post, articles and instructions on planar reflection in Unity.

I set up a secondary camera that mirrors the position of the main camera - capturing a reflected view of the scene into a render texture. Plugged the render texture into the shader for the water and flipped it upside-down.

Slight issue. A part of the tree juts out under the surface of the water and that's captured by the reflection camera.

Duplicated the tree and made a shader that chops away (clips) everything below the water level. That version is then rendered by the reflection camera alone.

[↑] Playing around with the colors.

Considering mirroring the mesh to create the illusion of a reflection later (I'd be able to get rid of the extra camera). Keeping this solution for now.

/ The Old Tree

The gnarled tree is an important presence in Vesper. I won't go into it now, but it occupies a pivotal role.

I already had an earlier design, but I wanted to revisit and update it, so I did a bunch of exploratory variations to see if something stuck.