Happy Earth Day

VFX
#1

I’ve been trying to learn a bit more about unity, and I stumbled across this really cool function:

Audio.GetSpectrumData(samples, channel, FFTWindow.BlackmanHarris);

It returns the frequency spectrum of whatever’s happening in the game. Combine it with some music and there are a ton of super fun visualization experiments to be had. You can drive shader params, particle system properties, really anything. In this case I’m driving the velocity and scale of particle effects that form the sun, and offsetting the position of the planets to get some orbital dance action™. The track itself is just a rough cut from our unnamed band, but I think it’s a good fit for earth day. Best part is deploying to mac, pc, iphone, and the web was as easy advertised. I’m impressed.

Web Player
PC/Mac Native

#2

dude, I’m not going to lie, when I saw the title of the post I was sketpical, but the end product is a really kool little prototype. How long did you spend on this?

#3

Hahahah - thanks!! I think it took about 3 or 4 evenings? Something like that - not really long at all cause most of the time went to learning unity scripting and deploying to various platforms. Oh - and i spent an evening getting the orbital distances, periods and the relative planet sizes correct That was probably unnecessary but I figured if I was going to call it out for earth day i’d better get things in the right place!

In the end I felt like most of my time was spent actually being creative instead of wrestling with code bugs, which I liked :slight_smile:

#4

wow awesome! I’m still wrapping my head around unity scripting, coming from very little code knowledge :frowning:

#5

Oh yeah, Unity’s a lot of fun to work with. Super fast to prototype and polish stuff.

I messed with Audio.GetSpectrumData when they introduced it, and it’s a stupid amount of fun to use. So much fun/silly stuff you can do when you have access to that sort of info :smiley:

Nice job with the prototype, it’s definitely cool stuff :smiley:

#6

Nice find! Unity is indeed great for quickly testing ideas. I’ve been looking at it a bit more lately as kind of a case study, as it uses GUID for assets management.