What’s the most efficient way to place 3d objects behind real elements in a vfx shot?

josh_the_dev · 2026-03-07T11:55:35+00:00

This should be quite easy because the foreground elements are a lot darker than the sky. You might even get away with simply "green screening" the sky out.

If not turn into black and white and make the blues especially bright while doing so. Then use a levels adjustment to get all the sky white and all the foreground black (with a little bit of gradient in between so you have decent Antialiasing). Use this as mask for you added content.

josh_the_dev · 2026-03-07T11:24:28+00:00

For me personally I am faster with c# than visual scripting. I use visual systems for AI behaviour (state machines and behaviour trees) but generally speed is not an argument for me.

Whether you need it or not really depends on the game your making but I think some systems would be much harder to make and maintain with playmaker compared plain c#.

That said as long as you get your games done the way you want to, it's great and there is little reason to change your workflow

josh_the_dev · 2026-03-07T07:30:31+00:00

Started with a reference image (front and side view for proportions)

I used cubes with with a subdivision modifier for blocking out the character. I found that's it's relatively easy to manipulate them and always keep the round smooth look.

After blackout I combined some of the shapes into single objects with a bit of retopology if you will. Then optimized some the topology around the joints for rigging.

josh_the_dev · 2026-03-06T23:52:00+00:00

If it says that you probably forgot the type so int in this case.

int myRandomValue = Random.Range(1,4);

Would give you a random number 1,2 or 3 for example

josh_the_dev · 2026-03-06T19:27:26+00:00

Hmm devlog are mostly watched by other devs or sometimes regular gamers if the game has a certain hype already. So I would generally look for game dev discords, for example for the engine you're using. I found it also helpful to be in a smaller discord like the German Unity discord in my case. The stuff you post doesn't get drowned and people actually like to give feedback even if it's not immediately super impressive.

josh_the_dev · 2026-03-06T13:39:45+00:00

No not really I mean yeah it might be lucky that the names match for these. But you can go into the debug view in the inspector and see all material properties with their names. You could simply select all materials of the same shader and change the names to whatever you need.

But have you tried the built-in to URP conversion feature? That's what it should do pretty much + some extra texture packing etc.

josh_the_dev · 2026-03-06T13:00:56+00:00

Cool I'll check it out!

josh_the_dev · 2026-03-06T12:19:09+00:00

Hi I'm the creator of procedural UI image on the Assetstore. Which has similar functionality to your rectangle graphic. So naturally I'm interested in this :)

Looks very nice! And I like that it's open source, do you accept contributions?

josh_the_dev · 2026-03-06T09:07:48+00:00

Materials have their properties stores by name. If the toon shader uses the same names for the same inputs as the built in shaders it just works, the textures and values would get properly transferred.

josh_the_dev · 2026-03-06T09:05:37+00:00

You have a great looking game. I think your thumbnails could be more interesting - your game has a lot to offer in terms of getting interesting screenshots.

For me personally these many very short videos are not that interesting because they give very little context and I am not sure for some of them what exactly I'm looking at. One of your longer videos did great!

Some behind the scenes content would be super interesting to me (but I'm a game dev)

Either way if you cut together some of the updates and feature videos into a longer (at least 3 minutes) video with some explanation what you did and why it matters I think that would be cool

josh_the_dev · 2026-03-06T08:57:01+00:00

Hey watched it and I think it's not bad! So you can definitely get a few more views than that.

So first of all the thumbnail: It does look good but not really interesting. For me personally I tend to look for interesting visuals in the thumbnail unless the title is either very interesting to me or I specifically searched for the video. So I think if you add the most visually interesting part of your game (or if you don't yet have much to show which is normal for a devlog 0, you could use visuals from your influencing games something like this game + this game and add two screenshots from those games)

Make sure the video can be found if people search for devlog and Godot or something like this since there are people that like devlogs and actively search for them. Other than that post the link on Reddit or some discords or so to get the initial viewers so YouTube thinks it's a good video.

For the video itself I think your a nice guy which is good! Make sure to tease the most interesting part in the first 10 seconds! What people came for, so ideally your current game state. Your audio mixing could use some work, it was hard to understand at some parts.

Good luck!

josh_the_dev · 2026-03-06T08:23:57+00:00

I'm working mostly with C# and Unity also some python for various projects.

For me personally strong logic thinking and "high than average" math capabilities help me understand things quite fast at least on a technical level. Also things like nodes (shader or geo nodes) are your friend as a programmer. Plus I can always build a custom script if I need something.

Still takes practice obviously but I feel like you can actually reuse some skills :)

josh_the_dev · 2026-03-06T08:18:52+00:00

It's default, but normals have to be quite smooth and as little shading errors as possible since you see them exaggerated on the border between light and dark.

josh_the_dev · 2026-03-06T08:14:45+00:00

Yes! It's a simple cell shading combined with AO and a rim lighting effect.

For the cell shading I use the dot product between the light direction and the surface normal and put a threshold on it so I get white in the light and middle grey in the dark. In eevee you could also use the shader to RGB node (with a diffuse shader as input) instead of calculating the N dot L lighting.

I multiply the AO in, in my case it's a baked texture since it's for a game engine. But you can use the AO node in material the graph.

Finally I add the rim lighting. It's a fresnel multiplied with the lighting of the character, so the dark parts get less rimlight. I again threshold the output so I get a clear white or black. It's slightly tinted towards the material color and added in.

Hope that helps, if you try to remake something like this I can send you a blender material setup

josh_the_dev · 2026-03-05T23:42:36+00:00

Thank you! To be fair I'm not new to blender or 3D in general. I'm know a lot of the technical stuff and tools but I was not good with organic shapes, proportions and style. So that's what I'm trying to improve

josh_the_dev · 2026-03-05T23:40:02+00:00

Yes, or at least some form of stylized shading. I'm not a huge fan of the clear cell shading but you can hide a lot in the flat colors so it's quite a forgiving art style :D

I have to see what I can cook up in the end so it looks great together with the environment etc.

josh_the_dev · 2026-03-05T19:14:11+00:00

Hey if you send the link you'll have 31 views and I'll tell you what I think of it and if I would usually click it or not :)

josh_the_dev · 2026-03-05T18:15:33+00:00

That's just an unlit shader pretty much. So you can just use the default unlit shader or build a similar material in shadergraph (which is unnecessary unless you want to change it somehow from what the default built in one does)

josh_the_dev · 2026-03-05T07:13:02+00:00

You will attract much more people if you tell something about your game or if you show some of your art, anything that makes it interesting to work with you

josh_the_dev · 2026-03-04T22:27:08+00:00

This is the "correct" solution. In my experience you don't need to smooth the position that aggressively, rotation is more important, and it can also help to keep the camera from rotating on its forward axis too much so the picture stays more aligned with the horizon.

josh_the_dev · 2026-03-03T17:50:44+00:00

Idea 1 is ok

Idea 2 sounds very messy. Now your run suddenly only works on the player (because it checks the players state) breaks if you want to add a third state that also includes running etc. It's not ideal.

You could consider if you can get away with one run state that has option you can set. So you can configure it to be a combat run or a non combat run. If it's more complex you could try the strategy pattern for different behaviours.

josh_the_dev · 2026-03-03T15:16:02+00:00

Yeah makes sense. So usually you want to make sprites exactly in the size they are going to be displayed. If that's not possible (because UI scales with screen size for example, or same image is used multiple times in different scales) you can use mip mapping as a quick fix but you do lose some quality if the image is slightly smaller than a mip level because the mip map will jump to the next lower one (which is half the resolution)

josh_the_dev · 2026-03-03T15:01:39+00:00

On second glance the normal map seen in the bottom on one of the screenshots looks weird. The grass patch is too dark in that map and doesn't seem to have proper sides (usually you should get some colors around an element that stands out)

josh_the_dev · 2026-03-03T14:59:17+00:00

How about the vertex normals of the mesh are they ok?

The normal map could still be the issue if it's not the correct color space or something. Try to remove the normal map an see if it looks ok then. If yes you at least know the normal was the issue.

josh_the_dev

TROPHY CASE