I have a number of assets from the Unity Asset Store – some paid, some free. I hunt around in them for various models that I can use in scenes for my animations, such as trees and bushes. Some use the Unity Tree Editor, which have given me problems after upgrading to HDRP. Here are … More Unity Tree Editor and Shader Graphs
For my hobbyist animation efforts I started with friends as voice actors. However, not having many friends… I mean, it is hard for my numerous friends to commit to being a voice actor over a long period (and it’s unfortunate if voices of characters change mid series). The obvious answer is to write the script … More Emotional speech synthesis for animation is here!
Back in 2021 there was a forum thread on video quality for the MP4 recorder. A few people reported getting poor quality MP4 files recorded, myself included. I have since upgraded from 2021.2 to 2022.2 (with a newer version of the Recorder) so was curious to see how much better the results were. First, a … More Unity Recorder Output Format Wars
Ambient occlusion is a lighting effect that increases shadows where two surfaces meet. In real life, there is less light bouncing around surfaces in corners or where two walls meet – this is called ambient occlusion. As I am aiming for semi-realistic images in my videos (not 2D cel shading as in most comics and … More Selecting Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) HDRP volume settings in Unity
When you use a walk animation in a Unity Timeline using an Animation Track with Scene Offsets applied, you may come across a problem where you want to have the character end up at a precise location at a specific time. The problem is if you are in Preview mode (the default), moving the character … More Precise positioning with walk animations in Unity
Here is my current implementation of captions in Unity, the writing you see at the bottom of the screen that shows what the character is saying. You might do this when the original movie is in a different language, or in my case, I am using captions to avoid having to worry about voice actors … More Implementing Captions in Unity using UI Document
One effect I used in my first episode is rain to amplify the mood. This involved raindrops on glass windows, rain falling from the sky, and ripples/puddles of rain on the ground. Here is an example shot with rain falling from the sky, glistening in the lights, with puddles rippling on the ground (although the … More Rain, raindrops, puddles, and water in Unity HDRP
Unity recently published The complete overview of Unity toolsets and workflows for technical artists, an ebook summarizing many Unity technologies and concepts directly relevant to creating animated videos. (This is not its sole focus, but its a fantastic introductory overview to get into all the concepts and terminology.) It covers topics such as It is … More New Unity ebook on Workflows for Technical Artists
I am creating a simple animated cartoon using Unity and the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP). One challenge that comes up is how to control the lighting levels of shots – how to make it look “good”, and consistent with neighboring shots in a sequence. Unity with HDRP provides a number of tools that can … More Lighting Tricks in Unity HDRP for Cinematic Effect
I am using Unity Sequences to create a cartoon series (slowly). It is probably more accurate to say I am learning the technology to create such a series as so far I have spent more time on technology than delivering results! But getting closer. One problem I came across was how to split a Unity … More Splitting a Master Sequence between Scenes in Unity
Extra Ordinary, the Series 