Retro Road Visualizer

---

The goal of this personal project was to create a Unity 3D (HDRP) parallel of a retro-themed Blender animation created by Ducky 3D. The goal was to create a visualizer that is just as aesthetically pleasing, while having game engine capabilities such as procedural & configurable terrain generation, runtime capabilties, ray-tracing, and most importantly, scripting potential.

There are many possiblities that can make this project more interesting. Some future goals may be to:

• Add mutating/randomized terrain generation as the camera travels through the landscape. This would make the visualizer intruiging for longer periods of time.
• Make a custom shader to replace the need for a wireframe mesh.
• Synchronize the terrain to music with mp3 frequency or MIDI data.
• Add new models or assets such as a retro themed car to create a focal point in the visualizer and make better use of ray-tracing.

Getting Started

1. Pull this repository.
2. Open the /RetrowaveRoad project folder with Unity 2021.3.14f1.
3. Make sure HDRP is updated and working.
4. Make sure the MainScene is selected under /Assets/Scenes. If you have a slower machine, you may want to select the BareScene.
5. Make sure the materials in /Assets/Materials have valid shaders selected in the Inspector. The recommended shaders are in the /Assets/Shaders folder.
6. In the Hierarchy, select the Global Volume game object which is a child of Lighting. Open the HDRI Sky dropdown in the Volume component in the Inspector. Make sure that an HDRI is selected next to the Hdri Sky checkbox.
7. Press play to run.

• To change the speed of the camera, select the Main Camera in the Hierarchy and toggle the speed of the CameraController script component in the Inspector.
• To change the properties of the terrain, select LandscapeGenerator in the Hierarchy and change the values of the TerrainGenerator script component in the Inspector. Note that terrain setting presets can be selected by clicking the slider icon at the top of the component.
• To view changing terrain values during runtime, enable Test Values Realtime under the Terrain Properties. Note that this will stop camera movement and disable the wireframe. The slider values will now modify the terrain while the program is running.
• Contact scott@fitzpatrick.net for any questions or for a higher quality HDRI.

References

• Mesh Generation Basics by Brackeys
• Procedural Terrain by Brackeys
• Generating Terrain by Brackeys
• Combining Meshes by Tudvari

Built With

• Unity 3D 2021.3.14f1
• Unity HDRP
• C#

Author

• Scott Fitzpatrick