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Last week I set up the raycast toolkit to make strange, chaotic landscapes using signed distance functions. This week I wanted to look into how to shade them in interesting/useful ways. The main difficulty here is the builtin shader has a particular lighting function-- lighting is applied, material is applied, an ambient occlusion pass is applied-- and this is hardcoded. The builtin functionality lets you script the material color, but the "realistic" lighting pipeline is always applied on top of this, so any hope at doing something like cel shading is excluded.
I pestered the creators of the raycast toolkit and it turns out there *was* a way to fully define the shading function, it just wasn't documented. They added those instructions to the documentation and I was able to make the thing I wanted: An edge shader, where the shade is a simple color plus a combination of the ray vector and the surface normal. As you move around objects, the edges (facing "sideways" relative to your eye) are always dark, and the parts you view head-on are always light.
This gets me closer to my goal of making shapes that look like dripping paint with a sort of shiny gloss on them.
Next goal is probably to figure out how to extract Z-buffer information from the raycast so I can detect if the headset has collided with an object surface.
Last week I set up the raycast toolkit to make strange, chaotic landscapes using signed distance functions. This week I wanted to look into how to shade them in interesting/useful ways. The main difficulty here is the builtin shader has a particular lighting function-- lighting is applied, material is applied, an ambient occlusion pass is applied-- and this is hardcoded. The builtin functionality lets you script the material color, but the "realistic" lighting pipeline is always applied on top of this, so any hope at doing something like cel shading is excluded.
I pestered the creators of the raycast toolkit and it turns out there *was* a way to fully define the shading function, it just wasn't documented. They added those instructions to the documentation and I was able to make the thing I wanted: An edge shader, where the shade is a simple color plus a combination of the ray vector and the surface normal. As you move around objects, the edges (facing "sideways" relative to your eye) are always dark, and the parts you view head-on are always light.
This gets me closer to my goal of making shapes that look like dripping paint with a sort of shiny gloss on them.
Next goal is probably to figure out how to extract Z-buffer information from the raycast so I can detect if the headset has collided with an object surface.
Week 6
This week I began prototyping 3dof tools for the Go. I began with a saber, a wand, chopsticks, and a hammer. For my game, I want to break free of the typical controller with a laser pointer, so I am continuing these experiments until I get both a nice collection and a solution for my application. Personally, I really enjoyed the hammer and the chopsticks. This week I am going to grow this tool kit and do some play testing to see what other find satisfying.
That's it for this week. Thanks for reading!
- Ciera
Oculus ID: Ciera_Jones
Instagram/Twitter/Facebook/Medium: @cieraej
Email: ciera.jones.cj@gmail.com
Website: cierajones.com