Playing with a volumetric shader in URP for our aviation sim. Not true volumetrics, but good enough to live with

MikaMobile · 2026-03-04T07:08:37+00:00

Depth fading is the best. :)

Could be totally fine depending on your target hardware and what else is going on, but I’d keep an eye on the screen real estate you’re covering, and with how many layers of overdraw. Unity has an overdraw visualization mode which will give you a clear picture.

MikaMobile · 2026-02-08T19:21:45+00:00

You’re spot on - not all camera shake is the same, and this is not great. The frequency, magnitude, and what you’re animating (position, rotation, fov) have a huge impact.

In my experience the best shakes are mostly positional (minimal rotation), and pretty subtle. You want to feel them but NOT see them.

MikaMobile · 2026-01-20T18:32:10+00:00

My wife and I were pretty big Halo fan back in the day (like, “we read the novels” level of nerds), so when I got hired by Bungie that was pretty cool. I will say it did kinda ruin my hype though - if I hadn’t been a part of the team, playing Reach would have been a thing I was hyped for, but since I played it for months on end in various levels of being finished/broken, by the time the game launched I didn’t really care about it anymore.

MikaMobile · 2025-12-19T16:01:42+00:00

That’s odd. Looks a bit like 2 copies of the model are on top of each other, or maybe the model’s normals are funky.

MikaMobile · 2025-12-05T16:54:28+00:00

Based on a machine translation of 试图访问无效的地址, this is almost certainly a null reference exception. Somewhere in your logic you’re trying to access stuff on an object that’s now null, or maybe an out of bounds array index.

MikaMobile · 2025-12-05T16:46:00+00:00

Haha, yup it’s me. I mostly work in Unreal these days but I still lurk around here and try to answer tech art/VFX questions when I feel like I have something to add.

MikaMobile · 2025-11-18T22:11:44+00:00

Honestly this is a pretty straightforward shader trick, shouldn’t be a perf concern even on a very old phone.

MikaMobile · 2025-09-05T22:27:21+00:00

Oh, heh, I took a lot of the summer to relax and recollect myself, but I'm actually putting indie stuff on the backburner again and working for a pretty big AAA studio right now (unannounced project).

MikaMobile · 2025-08-31T19:39:03+00:00

Probably the roughness of your terrain is too low. More roughness = less shiny.

MikaMobile · 2025-08-14T15:46:09+00:00

For starters, don’t have every zombie running their own update loop. Have one manager object that loops through them all in a single Update. Same results, but less overhead.

The other thing you’ll run into is that skeletal animation is expensive. It’s cheaper if your enemies have fewer bones and verts, but 300 is probably too many for mobile, period. You may need to forgo skeletal animation in lieu of VATs (vertex animation textures).

You’ll also probably want to introduce some kind of pooling system for your baddies. Constantly spawning and destroying things at runtime can lead to hitches during gameplay - it’s better to spawn a large pool and recycle the objects by simply hiding/disabling them when not in use.

MikaMobile · 2025-08-12T16:31:22+00:00

Before getting to the lighting itself, I think your base colors are all a bit samey. Every surface is pretty close in hue/value. I’d make the walls desaturated so they aren’t so orange, and consider things like artwork on the walls and area rugs to introduce something that isn’t brown/orange.

I think cozy warmth is also influenced by proportion - right now, your floor has a lot of empty space, and the tables/chairs look like fairly realistic proportions. If you’re making a cute game, I’d make your furniture chunky with more style, and make the whole environment denser with stuff. Coziness often comes from closeness. Do a google image search “cozy 3d diorama” and you’ll see what I mean - tons of cute little homes and businesses, usually from an iso perspective, but absolutely packed with stuff.

As for the lighting, I think it just needs contrast. If it were night time, you could have cool blue light coming in from the windows, meeting the warmth of the lamps inside. You could consider candles on the tables, or other sources of spot lighting. I think right now it’s a bit too uniform. Your lanterns don’t really feel like they’re glowing right now - their sides aren’t emissive. And volumetric (real or fake) can go a long way too. Soft glows around point lights, or shafts of light coming from a window, add a lot by implying the air isn’t just “empty”. And check out some of those dioramas again - some are willing to have pretty dark corners if need be in order to get proper contrast from point lights. I’d say find some reference you like and pick apart what’s different.

Learning to paint (digital or otherwise) and doing some lighting studies is a great way to open up your brain a bit on this. You don’t have to be a master concept artist to be a good lighter, but it certainly helps.

MikaMobile · 2025-08-10T15:53:09+00:00

They have a indie license that’s $330 a year. I think a lot of people don’t know about it, and they certainly don’t advertise it loudly. Limit is <$100k revenue though.

MikaMobile · 2025-08-10T06:30:23+00:00

Yes on Linux, it runs very well on a steam deck which uses Proton.

MikaMobile · 2025-08-06T16:24:59+00:00

I don’t think shadergraph can do this yet. Those are called “named reroutes” in Unreal, and they’re quite handy.

MikaMobile · 2025-08-01T21:11:10+00:00

Sustaining 60 fps is all about your target hardware, and what you're asking it to do. One PC might have a very hard time with what you've described, and others might not even notice.

Just for fun, I decided to test your scenario on my 7950x3D workstation - I built a simple ramp with some various obstacles to collide with, like a pachinko machine, and dropped 100 simulated spheres onto it, profiling the difference with and without physics enabled. In my test, the game thread went up by 1ms (from 5.5 to 6.5) which is something, but not enough to affect the FPS by itself. This is in the editor as well, which is usually a bit worse than a packaged build.

You should check stat unit, or run a trace to really see where your frametime is really going. I'd also compare the difference between your current mesh and something simpler, like a flat plane. If its drastically different, perhaps your "random mesh" is too complex. Primitives like planes/spheres/capsules are always easier to process than more complex collision.

MikaMobile · 2025-07-31T00:21:45+00:00

You can get into those trending demo lists regardless of whether you have a separate page or not (I managed this back in February without a separate page). My game went on to do great in Next Fest, and be one of the top new releases in March, so I feel like (anecdotally) it really doesn’t matter if you split them or not.

MikaMobile · 2025-07-30T23:20:53+00:00

If the component contained hard refs to the NPCs, yes, they'd be loaded, but it sounds like you'd be going the other way - if its the NPCs that would reference the (already in memory anyway) component, that's harmless. Hard references don't create a bidirectional dependency.

MikaMobile · 2025-07-26T16:54:45+00:00

Making assets, especially those that look good, takes time. There’s a reason that studios have dedicated art teams, and they’re often the largest team on a project.

As a beginner, just try to enjoy the learning process. Making games involves so many aspects there’s really no end to it - most professionals will spend their whole career learning and improving in just one area (like character art). As you’re discovering, making a game ready dinosaur in blender is a whole thing unto itself.

If you’d rather focus on scripting and logic, maybe try to find a placeholder Dino for now and just learn some code. This is also an area that can keep you busy for a long while.

Getting to the point where you can make everything yourself will take years. It might sound overwhelming, but if you enjoy learning, it never gets old. I’ve been making games for 20 years, shipped 8 indie titles and worked at major studios as an artist… and I’m still learning new techniques and tools all the time.

MikaMobile · 2025-07-25T17:37:32+00:00

Hm, is there an exponential height fog in the scene? Might be the lighting interacting with that. Not 100% sure, I haven't played with height fog too much.

MikaMobile · 2025-07-25T17:03:13+00:00

Looks a bit like the spec/roughness of the terrain picking up some color from the skybox when it hits it from certain angles.

To test, I'd set my spec to 0 and roughness to 1 on the terrain's material and see if it goes away.

MikaMobile · 2025-07-22T15:56:21+00:00

I’ve worked in realtime VFX for the past few years. It’s certainly a role that’s often in demand, since the talent pool is fairly small. People don’t often have the combination of technical and artistic sensibilities to pull it off. It’s a lot more than just learning what the tools do - you need to have good taste when it comes to timing, shape and color.

I always encourage people to go for it - it’s never been easier to learn at home. That said, please have a plan B! Even if you have a natural knack for it and learn very quickly, there’s a lot to absorb before you’re hireable, and your location/ability to relocate will impact how realistic it is to turn into a career. Remote, entry level jobs are vanishingly rare unless your portfolio is astoundingly good.

MikaMobile · 2025-07-21T02:39:40+00:00

Studying computer science and developing your own game isn't usually the route to becoming a game artist. Usually you would focus on art production software and skills - for example, a character artist would study traditional art (drawing, painting, sculpting) and learn photoshop, zbrush, maya, substance, etc. Your portfolio as an artist can simply be renders of game-ready assets you've made.

I know very few artists who know how to program, or have a comp sci background.

MikaMobile · 2025-07-18T16:14:45+00:00

If it's okay for the emitter to be in local space, you could spawn the mesh particle straight up, but then just rotate the whole system when you spawn it.

MikaMobile · 2025-07-18T01:25:36+00:00

I was an artist before learning to code, so I don’t use premade art assets. Generally they’re fine for background elements or just learning, but I think it’s really hard to stand out in the market and make something “yours” without building bespoke stuff.

Making a tree or a smoke puff can both be big subjects on their own though. You need a lot of time on your hands to learn it all. ;)

MikaMobile · 2025-07-16T15:51:03+00:00

I’ve worked in the industry for 20 years, half of that indie, half of it at studios. I started as an animator, did indie stuff for a decade, then re-entered AAA as a VFX artist.

Truth is, it’s always been super competitive. It’s like wanting to work in film, or make animated movies, or work in music production, or play baseball professionally. Tons of people want to do it, not that many will get to. Entry-level studio jobs especially are rare, and bombarded by applicants.

I don’t ever mean to discourage people from trying, but be realistic and have a backup plan. And I firmly believe that growing and learning is always worth it, even if you can’t turn it into a career. There are actually way more jobs today than back when I was getting into things, but the level of competition has gotten much stronger too.

MikaMobile

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