It's become painfully obvious that my portfolio needs a stronger emphasis on VR. To remedy this, I've polished-up my Google Cardboard Turret Shooter prototype into something much more stable. I'm also adding zombies. I was really always hoping to do something a little more original with this shooter, but it's pretty much been begging for zombies since Day 1. Now that I've got a final-quality zombie in-engine, I'll get a rough environment up and running before adding more zombies. The goal is to get this shipped to the App Store ASAP. Finished assets will be posted to a dedicated tab in the Models section.
Physically-Based Car Jumping
Wow. Just, wow. I started converting the art assets in "Car Jumper" from the Legacy mobile shaders to the new physically-based Standard Shader in Unity 5. The difference is shocking, which is a testament to how powerful Unity has become. After I've finished converting all of the shaders, I'll start in on the GUI. I have to rewrite the GUI code, implement some visual feedback for power-ups, and add some art to the actual UI elements.
Physically-Based Shading in Unity 5
Finally sat down and explored the new PBR shader in Unity. It's been a while since I've done a good old-fashioned still life, so I found a couple of random objects in the back yard and went to work. After shooting some reference photos, I quickly free-modeled the assets in Blender so I could focus on the materials. Unity 5 offers two material workflows for its Physically-Based Shading: Metallic and Specular. For this first project, I used the Metallic workflow, since it more closely resembles the old material workflows I used for "Car Jumper". Once I understood the difference between Metallic and Smoothness parameters, I was shocked by the quality of the results. 3d rendering packages have had this functionality for years, but to see it in a realtime environment is extremely cool.
Group Shot
Various Reference Photos
Hose Nozzle 1
Hose Nozzle 2
Spade