Book Image

Unity Game Development Essentials

By : Will Goldstone
Book Image

Unity Game Development Essentials

By: Will Goldstone

Overview of this book

Game engines are central to the video games we know and love. From the artwork to the mathematics that underpin the frames onscreen, the engine calls the shots. Aside from offering one of the leading 3D game engines, Unity also provides a superlative development tool ñ a tool that can produce professional standard games for Mac, PC, and the Unity Web Player. This book is a complete exercise in game development covering environments, physics, sound, particles, and much more, to get you up and working with Unity quickly. Taking a practical approach, this book will introduce you to the concepts of developing 3D games before getting to grips with development in Unity itself. From creating 3D worlds to scripting and creating simple game elements you will learn everything you'll need to get started with game development for the PC, Mac, and Web. This book is designed to cover a set of easy to follow examples, which culminate in the production of a First Person 3D game, complete with an interactive island environment. By introducing common concepts of game and 3D production, you'll explore Unity to make a character interact with the game world, and build puzzles for the player to solve, in order to complete the game. At the end of the book, you will have a fully working 3D game and all the skills required to extend the game further, giving your end-user, the player, the best experience possible. Soon you will be creating your own 3D games with ease!
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Unity Game Development Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Chapter 7. Particle Systems

In this chapter, we will take a look at some of the rendering effects available to you as a Unity developer. To create more dynamic 3D worlds, rendering effects outside of simple materials and texturing are used to simulate, and often accentuate, the features of the real world. Many 3D games have adopted visual conventions of camera-captured imagery, introducing such effects as lens flares and light trails as part of a simulated viewpoint which in real terms would never witness such effects.

We have already taken advantage of the lens flare rendering effect in Chapter 2, where we utilized a Sun lens flare on the light component of our main directional light. In this chapter, we will look at more versatile effects that can be achieved by using particle systems within your 3D world. Games use particle effects to achieve a vast range of effects from fog and smoke to sparks, lasers, and simple patterns. In this chapter, we'll look at how we can use two particle systems...