The Rise of Dagon: Unity 5.0 Beta - Week of Nov 1st

This week was really exciting because the Unity 5.0 Pre-order beta came out!

I spent most of the week converting the project over to Unity 5 beta and testing out if anything had gotten broken and converting materials over to the new Unity 5 default material.

So I made a comparison screenshot (seen above) for your review.

On first past you might not actually notice the difference except for one notable thing and that is the portcullis gate that I was working on can barely be seen on the right scene..

However if you look closely at the ceiling in both pictures you'll notice that they actually look pretty different when it comes to down to it.

The ceiling on the left is very  'sharp' and 'flat' looking with a lot of 'shine' where the light catches it. It almost looks like  newer polished stone? Which is a bit odd for a dungeon right?

 While the ceiling on the right looks more like old stone with dull shine .. more like a cobblestone rock would actually have.  This look is the look I was going for when I made the ceiling so I'm happier with it. The thing is in neither case did I spend much time tweaking it -- I used the default shader in 4.x and 5.x.   I'm still very much in early phases of production and don't want to spend a lot of time tweaking the way things look -- which is one reason I wanted Unity 5 - its PBR (Physically Based Rendering) pipeline was likely to pay off and look more like the way I wanted without a lot of work to tweak the materials manually.

So back to the portcullis.  I agree its much easier to see the one on the left but for a rusted metal its far too shiny!  It looks almost liked a polished metal in Unity 4 and it should look very dull and dark -- like it does on the right.

In the end I might need to adjust my lighting levels up a little bit but as I understand there are still some lighting features they haven't finished yet so I'm tempted to not spend a lot of time tweaking it right now.

There are other more subtle differences.  If you look at the very far right of the image you'll see the stone's there look chiseled and sharp .  Most particularly where the cracks are.  But if you loo to the same area on the left image .. sure the cracks are there but they are missing the highlights that give it that extra edge.  There are a lot of small things like that in the visual area that I like about the new lighting model as well.


Code wise this week I didn't do a lot of work so I am going to roll that discussion in to next week's update.

I will continue to do further testing in Unity 5 to make sure its safe to cut over to this for my project before I make a commitment. I need to vet that everything I've worked on so far either continues to work or can be fixed.  Things look really promising for swapping over to Unity 5 and I should be able to make a call on it in the next few days whether its a go or not.

I'll update you on progress for Unity 5 change over next week, see you then!