Asset Creation: Unity Scenography Creation Tools - Creating Games with Unity and Maya - page 138

Tips and Tricks
When creating a new asset (like a material), Unity will create and place
that asset within the Project field within whatever folder is active. So, if
for some reason, the folder Standard Assets is highlighted in the Project
panel, that is where the new material would stick itself. To make sure to
create it outside all the folders (where it can be seen and then placed
later), just click any of the empty-space in the Project panel first.
Step 7: Change the WaterStream Material's shader type to use Particles/
Additive (Soft). To do this, select the material in the Project panel. The
Inspector panel will then show you the attributes of this material.
Immediately under the name of the material is the Shader-type drop-
down menu. Change this to Particles>Additive (Soft).
Why?
Shaders are tricky things and although they can be written from scratch, the
authoring of such things is way beyond the scope of this topic. So generally
we will be using the built-in shaders. Not to worry though—many a great
looking game has been created without making custom shaders. The
built-in shaders are a powerful collection of tools to manipulate and exploit.
Anyway, emitters don't need to emit objects that have particle shaders
on them. However, for smoke, fire, and steam, these particle shaders are
just the ticket, and they produce some engaging visual effects. Additive
(Soft) provides a gentle very transparent effect that makes the start of one
particle and the end of another very hard to visually detect.
Step 8: Find a smoke puff that would work as a steam puff. This can be
done manually by rendering something manually in Photoshop, or our
good friend CGTextures can provide a good resource. http://cgtextures
.com/texview.php?id=43653 is the texture used for the next few steps and
are shown in Figure 6.25 .
Step 9: In Photoshop, use the Crop tool (and hold Shift down to crop to
a square (future power of two) image) to get the core parts of the image
( Figure 6.26 ).
Step 10: Use the Clone Stamp tool to soften out any hard edges ( Figure 6.27 ).
Why?
Although this image will have a heavy alpha and thus be largely
transparent, making sure there are not hard edges to highlight where
the end of a particle is will help hide individual puffs of steam. The image
should be seamless due to black around the entire edge of the image.
Step 11: Run a Gaussian Blur filter to soften the image.
Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur… with a setting of around 2 will provide a nice
soft image (very smoky; Figure 6.28 ).