Unity "Must-Have's" from the Asset Store for Rift Dev

[saviornt]

After looking at Unity for the last few days, and thinking to myself, "How I wish this was more like UDK", I started looking at the Asset store for extensibility. Here is a list of what I am thinking:

Shader Forge: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/14147

Shader Forge is a node-based shader editor, aiming to push the visual quality of Unity to new heights, giving you the artistic freedom of shader creation in a visual and intuitive way - no code required!

Skyshop: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/8880

Marmoset Skyshop is a comprehensive suite of shaders & tools for HDR image-based lighting in Unity. Illuminate your scenes with natural light!

Skyshop's editor tools control importing, converting, and managing panorama backgrounds into HDR cubemaps. A full custom library of shaders included for fast high-quality rendering.

Relief Terrain Pack v3: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/5664

Feel relief watching RTP3 in action:
- AAA look of terrain at great framerates
- 8 POM textures with self shadowing in 1 pass
- Up to 12 layers usable (with PM shading)
- Hard, well defined blending between detail maps
- Advanced dynamic snow
- Triplanar with PM shading
- Global normal / color maps
- Advanced dynamic water features
- Static reflections
- Caustics
- Built-in complementary ambient lighting
- And more...

UniStorm: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/2714

UniStorm is an incredibly powerful dynamic day and night weather system that creates realistic storms and weather at AAA quality, all at a blazing fast frame rate.

UniStorm is programmed in both C# and JavaScript and features all 4 seasons, seasonal weather, photo realistic skies, many weather types; rain, snow, fog, and many more, a 24 hour day and night system, in-game time keeping system usable with events and quests, sun, moon, and stars system, a moon phase system with selectable phases menu, sunrises and sunsets, an adjustable sun axis; works with Unity’s fog, SSAO, HDR, and Color Correction, an easy to use editor, and much more.

Ludosity's Steamworks Wrapper: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/2211

Ludosity's Steamworks Wrapper is a fully managed .Net wrapper of Valve's Steamworks SDK. It supports Windows, Mac and Linux!

Autodesk Scaleform Unity Integration (PC): https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/13468

The Autodesk® Scaleform® Unity Plug-in for PC offers the number one AAA user interface tool to Unity developers at an Indie friendly price.

Dialoguer: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/14854

Dialoguer is a visual, node based dialogue editor. It allows you to quickly and easily create dynamic, branched dialogues for your scenes and characters, and gives you an easy way to play them back at runtime.

uScript: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/1808

Created by game development veterans, uScript is easy to use while containing the power and flexibility for entire teams to create professional products. uScript will dramatically improve your ability to rapidly prototype, iterate, and bring your ideas to life.

Playmaker: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/368

Quickly make gameplay prototypes, A.I. behaviors, animation graphs, interactive objects, cut-scenes, walkthroughs...

For characters, I'm probably going to use Daz3d/Poser since I have a "mega-crap-ton" of character-based content and I was able to successfully import a character from daz -> unity. From the list, does anyone have any experience with using the Rift with those different "extensions" and what are your thoughts? Am I missing anything I should look at?

[Lane]

Shader Forge is great but has issues in Deferred Mode.

Marmoset Skyshop is pretty experimental and has expensive shaders. It's intended use at this time is for showcasing pretty models or using in very small scenes. It doesn't scale well, but they're making progress on that and working on some cool Box Projection shader stuff.

RTP and Unistorm are both good tools.

I don't know anyone that has used the Scaleform Plugin.

Dialoguer is useless if you have Playmaker.

uScript is pretty good from what I hear. I prefer Playmaker. You do not need both.

PlayMaker is priceless and very often on sale between $15 - $60. If you're an artist its basically a must-have, UT should buy it and ship it stock - considering their userbase. If you're a very experienced coder its not much more that a rapid prototyping tool or AI design/execution tool. It builds FSMs, so do what you will with that.

For characters, UMA is a new free tool that is going to grow fast. It makes you wonder why people use DAZ at all. The Power Tools and Helper Pack extensions make it basically a skyrim chracter creator screen that you can bake prefabs out of and throw into Mecanim.

Poser was retarded 10 years ago, I can't imagine its got an less retarded.

[saviornt]

Gotcha, I'll go ahead and drop Skyshop and Dialoguer for now, and put off Shader Forge. From what I've read, I thought Playmaker was geared more for Animations, while uScript was more of a general purpose visual code editor; or is that not the case?

For UMA, I may as well go with that, it'll save me around $400 in licensing fees :shock:

As far as the scaleform, it sucks that it is only for one OS, but I can deal with it. I'd prefer to use this (Flash) even though it has a bit of a memory leak if not done properly; but I've been using flash/actionscript for a fairly long time now.

[Lane]

"saviornt" wrote:
Gotcha, I'll go ahead and drop Skyshop and Dialoguer for now, and put off Shader Forge. From what I've read, I thought Playmaker was geared more for Animations, while uScript was more of a general purpose visual code editor; or is that not the case?

For UMA, I may as well go with that, it'll save me around $400 in licensing fees :shock:

As far as the scaleform, it sucks that it is only for one OS, but I can deal with it. I'd prefer to use this (Flash) even though it has a bit of a memory leak if not done properly; but I've been using flash/actionscript for a fairly long time now.

If you're using Forward rendering then Shaderforge should work out of the box 100%.

Playmaker is hard to explain. You make FSM's, put actions into states and connect them with transitions. Pretty simple, but very flexible. Coders go on about overhead, but I've yet to see anything significant and I've done all of my systems with it and integrated all of my purchased assets with it, including the Rift.

I believe uScript is more like Kismet, I took a glance at it long ago but never got into it.

If you're bent on using flash, you should keep abreast of its situation. There isn't exactly piles of support for it, so you'd be in a small boat and might have a hard time getting support if you intended to use it prolifically. The RageSpline/RageTools set is what I ended up going with. It's certainly not Flash, but you can still do a lot with it.

UMA is worth at least experimenting with. There isn't much content yet, but you should expect at least a few packs of UMA chracter gear sets for various settings in the next few months. There is also a Skype channel for us devs using it if you begin integrating it more seriously.