June Unity Assets: Shaders, Shadows & Castles

See some of the recent top-rated assets (a few are with discounts!) of this week on Unity Asset Store: shading tools, a custom renderer for filmmakers, an instancer, a tail animator, and a level editor tool.

Flat Kit: Cel / Toon Shading

If you’d like to create a project with a cel-shaded look, Flat Kit might be helpful. It includes shaders, models, image effects, presets, and examples that will help you achieve some general cel-shaded or toon styles as well as experiment and create your own style.

Some of the features:

• Cel-shading, Terrain & LightPlane shaders
• Gradient fog
• Mobile support
• Vertex color & indirect lighting support
• Ability to control Unity built-in shadows
• Full source code

Deckard Render

Deckard Render is a custom render solution for Unity for videos and animation which produces a cinematic quality of the picture, smooth motion feeling, dramatic depth-of-field and more. Like one of the comments says, a must have for filmmakers.

We’ll not go into great detail here – just read a self-explanatory comment from wetcircuit that says it all:

“Deckard changes how Unity renders. Essentially creating smoothed transitions where they don’t exist, on a 3D model or with image-based texture maps (see the whitepaper linked in the description for specifics.) The results are startlingly “lens-y”, at the cost of longer render times per frame.

Deckard blends multiple renders of the same frame to output images that mimic larger camera sensors – a large-format camera creates more dramatic bokeh and depth-of-field. There are also color profiles to mimic specific brands of professional cameras. Deckard leans towards video editors and VFX but it’s not too wonky. If you have ever used Unity for offline rendering, you’ll appreciate Deckard’s export settings and quality options.

[…]

If you’ve ever tried to get a beauty-render promo or high-end video out of Unity or considered ways to export a Unity scene to a traditional renderer, don’t hesitate to add Deckard to your VFX toolkit. It’s well-designed, easy to tweak, night-and-day difference – not just “better”, but a different quality of render that fixes aliasing and the issues of image-based textures. PostStack DOF is just a bad photoshop filter after this.”

Runtime Level Design

Runtime Level Design is a pack of designing tools that help build level editors, modding tools, and other applications/games that contain level design elements. To better understand how it works and how convenient it is, check the video below in which the creator shows the creation of a dungeon with the help of RLD:

Note that RLD is aimed at the developers who want to create their own level editors and cannot be used to build levels in Unity Editor. For the latter, you can also check Octamodius’s Octave3D-Level Design.

Tail Animator

Trying to simulate smooth realistic tail movements? A procedural animation tool Tail Animator should help and save you from using any external software for these needs. It will also suit any other elastic parts like plants, tentacles, capes, ropes, and so on.

Some of the features:

• Interactive demo scenes
• Full source code
• Scripts with navigating comments
• Components for tail animation in 2D space and UI

GPU Instancer

GPU Instancer is a helpful tool that enables you to display large numbers of objects on the screen while preserving performance by instancing prefabs and objects.

Some of the features:

• VR & Mobile compatible
• GPU frustum and occlusion culling
• Automatically configured custom shader support
• Multiple sub-meshes support
• Multiple camera support
• Complex hierarchies of prefabs instanced with a single click

Hand-Painted Human Castle & Human Village Packs

Packages by VSQUAD contain nice stylized models with hand-painted textures. Recently, their team prepared a step-by-step tutorial on how to create a hand-painted texture. Read it here!

Human Castle includes:

• a castle with the flag’s animation and openable gates
• a portal with VFX
• 2 land cubes
• scripts for a tower defense game
• goblin as a gift!

Human Village includes:

• a castle with the flag’s animation and openable gates
• Portal with VFX
• 9 extra buildings and props
• 10 different land cubes
• 2 trees and 2 flowers
• scripts for a tower defense game
• goblin as a gift!

Tower Defense Template

In the end, a couple of free assets – brag them into your library!

The first is Tower Defense Template which is basically a simple example of a tower defense game that can serve as a starting point for your futures projects.

Frensel Sprite Shader

The second is Fresnel Sprites Shader for Marmoset created by Dmitry Strelkov and available on Gumroad for free. Check the full tutorial on how to use it here or here.