Our first piece for the Unity Web Player is called HelloRacer Unity and follows the racing tradition that started almost three years ago and still lives in my personal website carlosulloa.com.
We began playing with Unity during the summer with the intention of building iPhone apps. We released HelloRacer iPhone and had a lot of fun in the process, so we decided to dedicate a bit of time to the web player.
The Unity Web Player is the most powerful 3D platform we’ve worked on, and it certainly was a challenge to make good use of it. We focused our work on building a highly detailed experience, paying particular attention to the shaders and the physics.
We have found the Unity Web Player an excellent option for high-end 3D in the browser. While plug-in adoption is still very low, the quality of the experiences make installation worthwhile for most users. We don’t believe interactive 3D is just for games, as it has so much potential in other fields such as data visualization and advertising.
Shaders
We used separate materials for the different surfaces of the car. Body matte, body shinny, brake light, brake light glass, decals, driver, front light, interior, steering wheel, vents and windows are individually recreated with distinct textures and shaders.
While Unity comes with a great library of shaders, we chose to develop custom versions to achieve the look we wanted with a maximum performance. This approach also enabled us to create specific shaders for the reflection as simpler and faster variations of the originals.
Shader programming is incredibly powerful and gives the developer precise control of how each pixel is rendered.
We also have three shadows, one for the car and rear wheels, and a separate shadow for each front wheel. From a geometric point of view, they are planes positioned at ground level, but their texture is what makes a difference. Baked in Maya using ambient occlusion, the shadows are subtle, but serve to add depth to the scene.
