today we are going to look at art and
design essentials art and design
essentials includes octave 3d uber
standard shader ultra and fog volume 3
these assets are designed to improve
your productivity working in unity and
to help you create beautiful content the
scene I've created here is a fly through
of a Japanese village on a misty morning
as the camera moves through the scene
snow begins to fall and blankets the
environment we are going to look at how
I use the assets from art and design
essentials to create this first let's
look at octave 3d octave 3d is a robust
unity editor extension which allows you
to build 3d worlds from modular
components with a variety of snap and
paint tools working with it makes laying
out large levels super fun and easy
since this is a quick demonstration I'm
going to add a simple fence to my scene
I'll begin by creating an empty game
object and attaching the octave 3d world
builder component to it next I'll open
the octave 3d prefabs window and drag my
single fence segment prefab into it now
I'll select the paths mode I'll make
sure that rotate objects to follow path
is active so that as my fence turns my
objects will be oriented correctly a
click once to place the start point of
my path as I move the mouse we can see
rectangular gizmos being drawn which
outline where my fence will eventually
appear I'll click to set each of the
four corners of the fence enclosing the
flat area outside the houses
when I'm done I'll hold shift and click
the left mouse button to instantiate the
fence this is an awesome quick way to
layout a level in which elements snap
and align cleanly together and allows
for tons of creativity and rapid
iteration next we'll look at how we
achieved our dynamic shader based snow
effect using uber standard shader ultra
uber standard shader ultra is built on
top of unity standard shader but adds a
whole variety of excellent effects
including diffuse scattering refraction
translucency dynamic weather effects and
many more we're going to use it here to
create our dynamic snow effect the first
thing we need to do is to make sure that
all the materials for the objects which
we want to receive snow are using the
uber standard shader luckily since it's
built as an extension of the standard
shader we can just select all those
materials and change the shader via the
shader menu once we've done that with
the materials all still selected we want
to turn on the dynamic snow portion of
the shader will turn on world mapping
which will map the snow on top of
objects in world space we want to be
able to globally adjust the snow level
for our scene so we'll switch that on at
the bottom as one of the global controls
next in order to control our snow at
runtime will click the controller button
this will prompt us to add an uber
global params grip to the main camera
we'll accept in the script added to the
main camera we'll turn on the rainfall
snowfall controller and set the fall
intensity to 0.3
I've added a simple script which allows
me to set the temperature to negative
one when I right-click and 20 when I
left click I'll also add the snow prefab
from the package to the scene this is a
particle system which will follow the
camera and display snowflakes when the
temperature drops as you can see we've
quickly and easily created a
dramatically different feeling in our
scene without reauthorize the third
asset we're going to use is fog volume 3
this asset creates beautiful dynamic
volumetric fog effects which add tons of
depth and atmosphere to your scene
possible effects with this tool include
clouds nebula and all kinds of
interesting dynamic visuals here we're
going to use it to add some misty clouds
blowing through our scene
adding to the cold wet atmosphere first
we're going to add a fog volume game
object to our scene by choosing fog
volume create fog volume we'll see that
this will cause a gray box to appear in
the scene view this is the area in which
our fog will be generated since our
camera is flying up the street we'll set
the shape of the fog volume to
predominantly cover that area now we
want to give it some character the main
thing we'll use for this is noise we
want some wispy clouds that we can fly
through and noise will help us to shape
those will activate the noise module and
set the scale to around 15 we'll add
some swirl we'll set that to 0.8 then
we'll add a nice slow rotation speed of
1.5 and set the axis of rotation to X so
that the clouds blow horizontally across
our scene we'll also assign a gradient
texture to fade their opacity a bit
we'll use the provided clouds oh six
texture now when we play our scene we
can see that we've got these great wispy
clouds that our camera can move through
if I had to create any of these three
assets from scratch it would have taken
a huge amount of time and effort instead
using octave 3d uber standard shader
ultra and fog volume 3 I got to spend
that time playing around being creative
and thinking about my artistic goals
while trying to create a scene that
captured a certain emotion for me this
is what the essentials packs are all
about providing tools so that you can
spend time being creative instead of
reinventing the wheel check out art and
design essentials and I can't wait to
see what you create with it