Introduction

Hey I'm Isaac of the art team. In this initial devlog I'll discuss what I accomplished in the 2/15/2020 week.

Shaders

I mainly tried to implement a shader in a way as it wasn't working as we would like. 

So I tried my best to make it possible for the game to have different shader colors but several issues arose. This task took a lot more time and effort then you may think to the point I probably should have given up earlier so I don't get burned out.The Obra dinn shader is programmed for the Standard unity Pipeline. In order to use more specific camera settings Universal Render Pipeline. Upgrading custom shaders to URP requires you to actually recode it properly so it fits URP and I have no experience in shader languages. Trying to recode shader language was practically impossible to do and decided not to continue as a lot of time was spent researching it. 

I eventually found a sort of alternative but it does have an issue. Essentially you have two cameras, one attached to the other as a child. The parent will render everything that you want to have it’s attached shader script. So the image below shows what the parent camera renders.The second camera uses a culling mask to render only one layer and also needs a don’t clear flag as without it it would clear the parents rendered view completely which wouldn’t be useful. Below is the child camera alone’s view where a sphere with its shader turned off is on the Layer this camera can see.

Layering the Two gives this below which isn't bad if we texture materials on that layer to match the shader’s style but not ideally what we are looking for.

The Miserable Issue is that adding a second shader to the child camera doesn’t simply affect its one yellow sphere as you would think as the black would be transparent and not counted in things that get shaded. Instead the whole image gets shaded so it rewrites over the parent camera and then I believe there truly is no other way to change it except for coding functionality in shader and I do not have time to learn shader language at least in this sprint.

Verdict objects in different layer cant use a shader but can have their materials. Or just stick to one shader, Obra dinn does that and looks good regardless.

Reference Images

I gathered a some more images as reference of possible environments we could make. This included underwater pictures like coral clams and seaweed, and spooky forests.

Object List

Created an object list doc so we had some ideas of possible things we would need for different areas. I took some items I think could be useful from the writing team as well and added them to the list. I previously worked on Heavenly Sin and we did something similar and turned good results in workflow so we are repeating it here.