September 11, 2019
General Graphics Information
Meshes, Shaders, Vertices, UVs
Youtube – MESH COLOR in Unity – Terrain Generation
Youtube – Learning Shaders in Unity – Everything about Meshes in under 5 Minutes
Youtube – Pico Tanks: Vertex shader in Unity
Tutorial #1
I was interested at looking into using vertex colors for objects, which led me to a few interesting videos on various aspects of 3D modeling in general. Tutorial #1 was a nice example of using vertex colors in Unity, as well as giving me a simple tutorial to look into on mesh deformation as well. It uses Unity’s shader graph to apply vertex colors, and just simply sets colors with a gradient onto the vertices themselves based on their height (y position).
Info #1
Info #1 was a very brief but general overview of topics on meshes.
- UVs: It explained how UVs are used to map textures onto faces of objects, which was the biggest topic I had not really covered up to this point. UVs also belong directly to a vertex.
- Vertices: It also went into how their can be more vertices on an object than you’d expect (since they have a normal that goes with individual faces).
This video was specifically aimed at Unity, so some of the information was most likely Unity specific. For instance, the fact that the Mesh class contains Vertices, Normals, UVs, Tangents, Triangles, and Colors. It finally got into vertex colors at the end, which also showed an example of it being used that just made a very cool colored cube I thought.
Info #2
Finally, Info #2 was just a very quick video of a game project showcasing their use of vertex shaders to actually move trees in their environment when objects are moving through them. Moving objects affect the colors of an underlying texture map, which use this “color information” to apply affects, such as rotating the trees.