Hey all!
I've been working on some helpful lil scripts for you to make weird physical stuff using compute shaders in Unity ! With it you can turn models into goo, grow hair on the models, or grow grass on the models even ( well by grass I mean weird rainbow tubes, but whatever! )
Its my first attempt at creating any sort of archeticture for compute shaders, and also my first attempt at making any sort of archeticture in unity, so please know that it could be totally wrong and silly! That being said, lets look at how to use it!
There are 3 specific scripts ( so far ) that you can add :
- Gooify
- Hairify
- Grassify
Lets look what they all need to have first:
- A Human Buffer
- A Base Physics Shader
- A Gather Shader
- A Base Renderer
Although the human buffer gets a bit more complex ( We'll go into this in a bit ) The rest of these are just to make the mesh into a compute shader that we can do strange things too. Basically, all of these scripts are to help us turn CPU info into GPU info and pass that GPU info back and forth.
I still don't completely understand what compute shaders are, so its a better bet for you to just google 'Unity Compute Shader Tutorial', but with this code it looks a bit like this:
Mesh --> Vert Buffer ( list of verts w/ uvs , normals, positions, etc. ) & Triangle Buffer ( list of triangles with dif ids )
We can then just straight up render this vert buffer by looking up in the triangle buffer ( making it no different from using a regular mesh ), But that wouldn't make it very interesting!
Thus in Gooify, it goes:
Mesh -> vert buffer / tri buffer -> Physics loop which updates the vert buffer -> render vert buffer
Hairify builds off this base and looks like: Mesh -> vert buffer / tri buffer / hair buffer -> vert buffer physics loop -> hair buffer physics loop ( which uses vert buffer ) -> render vert buffer and hair buffer
Grassify is just this plus one extra render step to render the grass itself!
All of the scripts use a 'human buffer' which basically takes the information of the player and passes it into a compute buffer we can use when we update the physics. This requires having 'Human Info' added to some place in the Hierarchy which takes in 2 hand infos ( added to steam controllers ) and a head info ( added to steam camera ). Check out the already created scenes to see how this works
- Make more shaders!
- Learn how compute shaders work!
- Morten Mikkelson for helping me learn about Compute Shaders
- George Michael Bower for the delightful models!
- Yağmur Uyanık for sounds!
Copyright (c) 2017 Isaac Cohen
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