Game Dev Digest Issue #113 - Visual Effects

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Learn all about VFX in this issue, plus plenty more! Enjoy

Building a Simple & Fun Drifty Car Controller! - We set out to build a fun arcade-y but chunky physical little car controller, and I was really pleased with the result given how little effort it took to produce, so I thought why not share it with the rest of the wonderful people that participated in this little jam!
MildlyDisturbing

Gentle Introduction to Realtime Fluid Simulation for Programmers and Technical Artists - A simple intuitive breakdown of fluid simulation for programmers and technical artists. Instead of complicated mathematical expressions, I try my best to offer an easy geometrical understanding of fluid simulation. The implementation is done in Compute shaders using Unity 3D, however the ideas are technology independent.
shahriyarshahrabi.medium.com

Catlike Triplanar Mapping - There are a lot of triplanar shaders out there but most of them don't handle normals gracefully (they usually invert them on the "wrong" side!).
Team Dogpit

Custom Lighting in URP with Shader Graph - This article will demonstrate how to support custom lighting functions when using URP and Shader Graph. We’ll start by exploring how Shader Graph works. Then, we’ll build a tool to override the default behaviour with our custom behaviour. There’s a lot to cover, so let’s get started.
Bronson Zgeb

Compress Strings With .NET and C# - This post will show how we can use compression algorithms in the System.IO.Compression namespace to compress and decompress a string value. Compressing values should result in significant byte reduction.
khalidabuhakmeh.com

How to run your first automated tests using Unity Test Framework & AltUnity Tester - In this article we are proposing a testing scenario using Unity Test Framework and AltUnity Tester for a Unity example project: Endless Runner. We will briefly describe these two solutions and show you some steps that you can take if you are looking for a solution to test your product.
altom.com

A living brand: Say hello to our new logo and product identity system - Our new branding better reflects who we are, the evolution of our products, and where we’re going – and this is just the first of a number of exciting brand updates we’re rolling out in the coming months and into next year.
Unity

Videos

Principles of Visual Effects with VFX Graph: Episode 1 | Unity Let’s Dev - Join us as we run through the principles of VFX Graph! We'll be making special potions, falling leaves and fire effects. Gain a better understanding of the VFX Graph’s components, Sin Waves, Randomness and Texture as Data. We take audience suggestions throughout the video to illustrate the flexibility of these concepts.
Unity

Unity VFX Graph - Stylized Smoke Tutorial - In this Unity Smoke Tutorial we are going to see how to achieve a stylized / cartoon effect using Visual Effect Graph and Shader Graph! A quick technique with an awesome outcome!
Gabriel Aguiar Prod.

Shader Graph in Unity 2021! (changes from 2020 | URP 10) - Learn what changed in Shader Graph 2021 in URP 10!
Code Monkey

Unity Tutorial: Post Processing Effects - We've previously looked at post processing effects from a high level. In this tutorial we'll look at them more in depth. In particular we'll look at how to create our own simple post-processing effect and we'll look at how to interact with existing effects purely in code.
Iain McManus

Remaking SQUID GAME in Unity #1 - Red Light, Green Light - hallo, im back. enjoy this first video on a series of "me remaking cool shiz I see in other means on entertainment", starting with squid game! this show was so reFRESHING, i loved it.
PhillDev

Using Wind Zones to Make Trees Sway (Unity Tutorial) - In this Unity game development tutorial we're going to look at how to use wind zones to make trees sway.
Ketra Games

Zen of Streaming: Building and Loading 'Ghost of Tsushima' - In this 2021 GDC talk, lead engine programmer Adrian Bentley examines the technology choices that made Ghosts of Tsushima’s fast load times and compact patch sizes possible.
GDC

80 Level Round Table: Minute of Islands - Anjin Anhut, Game Director on Minute of Islands, joined Kirill Tokarev to discuss Studio Fizbin’s latest captivating game and talk about how the team came up with its concept. Minute of Islands is beautiful story that offers players to explore strange and wonderful islands and dark labyrinths, plus solve different satisfying puzzles. It has one of the best art decisions in the recent years so we had to dive deeper and find our what’s inside.
80lv

Google Maps, Not Greyboxes: Digital Location Scouting for 'Untitled Goose Game' - In this 2021 GDC talk, House House’s Jake Strasser talks about using location scouting for real-world places to build the levels in Untitled Goose Game.
GDC

Assets

Particle Party Sale - All assets from 3 Particle Publishers, Kripto289, Archanor VFX, and Hovl Studio, are on sale for 50% off from October 4 through October 9.

In addition, each of the 3 Particle Publishers has one asset that will be offered FREE during the sale using coupon code: PARTICLEPARTY

Unity FPS Games & Game Dev Assets Software Bundle - Another amazing Unity asset bundle deal from Humble Bundle, which as we said about the Fantasy assets bundle (P.S it's still going on as well!), are automatic buys for us. The deal is too great to pass up. Over $1,100 worth for less than $30. Assets you may want and new ones to discover you never knew you wanted.
[The bundle has been extended until Oct 14!]
Humble Bundle Affiliate

SpriteDicing - Sprite Dicing is an extension for Unity game engine allowing to split a set of sprite textures into dices, discard identical ones, bake unique dices into atlas textures and then seamlessly reconstruct the original sprites at runtime. The technique allows significantly reducing build size when multiple textures with identical areas are used.
Artyom Sovetnikov Open Source

ShaderForge - A Shader Editor for Unity. [reminder for those that can't upgrade to ShaderGraph, Shader Forge is still out there and receives updates!]
Freya Holmér Open Source

SkuldsShader - All purpose shader with a toon effect for Unity. It was designed to be as lightweight as possible. It works especially for the Oculus Quest v1 and Go. But it's also extremely flexible and as full featured as the Unity Standard Shader.
chibiskuld Open Source

Unity-GeoAO - Fast ambient occlusion in Unity baked at runtime.
nezix Open Source

Kino/Datamosh - Datamosh is a post-processing effect that simulates video compression artifacts, specifically one called datamoshing.
keijiro Open Source

Dual quaternion skinning for Unity - GPU skinning with compute shaders. Blend shape support (calculations performed in compute shader). Works with any platform that supports compute shaders. Preserves volume with deformation. Zero GC allocations per frame.
ConstantineRudenko Open Source

MGS.SkinnedMesh - Unity plugin to create skinned meshes in scene.
mogoson Open Source

EventBetter - A Unity pubsub/messaging/event system for the lazy. Here's why: Raising events is alloc-free. No interfaces to implement, no base types to derive from. No initialization, no cleanup. No message codes. Coroutine/asyncfriendly. One source file (everything else here is just for the test environment). Clear and readable.
gwiazdorrr Open Source

MercuryMessaging - The Mercury messaging toolkit is a new way to handle cross-component communication in the Unity game engine.
ColumbiaCGUI Open Source

Unity3D BSP Importer - A lightweight plugin for importing BSP maps into Unity3D as meshes.
wfowler1 Open Source

Community Addons - A community-driven project for extending Unity Visual Scripting with custom nodes, assets, types, and helpers.
RealityStop Open Source

Unity Runtime Inspector - Enable you to inspect a running Unity game just like in Unity.
DearVa Open Source

uGameFramework by gentlymad - A modular, service based, multithreaded framework for Unity that keeps the code side of your project de-fragmented, organized and reuseable.
Features an optional multithreaded ECS imlementation, modular services, parallel global eventstreams, MVC, reactive state machines, serializer interface, double precision Vector2/3/Quaternion/Math, and many other things that makes your life easier.
dotmos Open Source

UniWindowController - Unified window controller for macOS and Windows to control the position, size, and transparency of your window. You can also accept drops of files and folders.
kirurobo Open Source

Bit Collections - Bit Collections for Unity is all about saving as much RAM and/or network bandwidth as possible, by providing array value types of single bits, aswell as array value types of signed- and unsigned integers with a given number of bits.
MrUnbelievable92 Open Source

Spotlight

Timemelters - Strategy... Witches... and Time Travel! Featuring a full Co-op campaign and designed by the Co-Creator of Sang-Froid - Tales of Werewolves, Timemelters is a hardcore action-strategy game featuring a unique game mechanic which allows the players to go back in time and fight alongside themselves.

[You can back them on Kickstarter and wishlist on Steam]

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