koobas.hobune.stream
Applying partly transparent texture to a 3d model made in Blender.
Ok so I am making a gun muzzle flash for my FPS game. I've made a cube in Blender and scaled down one face so that it is like a pyramid. AFAIK there isnt any point for me to apply the texture in Blender, as the transpareny effects etc I add to Cycles wont work in my Unity project.
So, I imported just the blank pyramid shape, but it has the grey texture for the mesh. So I set the material in Unity to 'Transparency', and in albedo I added a gun flash texture which is a 2d image of the gun flare, with transparent edges (also the flare itself has an element of transparency).
But no matter what settings I try for the texture and the material, it doesnt work. I either make the entire mesh transparent or not, also for some reason the gun flare doesnt show on the object, It just makes the pyramid change colour (but in the material preview inspector the gun flare looks great).
I set the texture to be a sprite, then I tried default again. I checked/uncheecked the Alpha Is Transparency. I set the material to many things too , and none of them seem to work.
Has anyone got an idea of what I'm doing wrong? Many thanks
For a muzzle flash, you might want to use unlit additive shader. While standard shader set to transparency is still lit (acts eg. like a glass), muzzle flash is not affected by the scene lights at all. I don't have Unity here now so I can't check, but there should be Unlit/Additive or Particles/Additive shader included in standard shader package. These don't require an alpha channel for transparency, because they just add itself (the flash texture) to the background. Making the pixel black makes it invisible.
thank you for your answer. I may end up doing this. However confusingly earlier I read that particle systems arent actually optimal for this because they arent shown from all angles or something like this. And apparently using a texture with alpha in gives a more realistic effect (apparently it was supposed to me more simple also lol)
Thanks again, I had been starting to think maybe i should explore the particle effects.
Well it really depends on what kind of effect you are trying to achieve, but in general you will use additive blending for fire. Also, you are NOT supposed to use a particle system, just a particle system shader - which is also doing some extra stuff like applying vertex color, but that's going to be a negligible performance difference. Just apply it on your mesh.
Optionally you can write your own unlit shader that can act both like additive and darkening (for smoke) but that's outside the scope here I guess.
