I’m making a game in unity and I’m looking into ember gen.
I saw that there are a couple of export paths possible towards unity. one is VDB (I won’t be using this one since what’s bringing me to ember gen is I want 3D FX in my game) another (if I’m not entirely mistaken) is openVDB which is nicer since it is in 3D.
I found that support all around for this on unity is rather middling. this format seems to be old and I also want my game to be a linux native, I’m not sure the lib for importing openVDB into unity works on linux unity. (also that project as a whole is unclear on how you install it to unity)
The new standart for unity seems to be VFX Graph / point cache bake
Is exporting to that from embergen a possibility?
what would be the exact method I should opt for in my situation (Unity/3DFX/Linux) ?
So VDB or openVDB is the same exact thing, they’re both 3d volume formats. If you’re wanting volumes in your game, getting them in there through VDB is not the answer since that file format is so bloated. We have plans to support our own volumetric format in the future but I don’t have a timeline on that. Currently there isn’t any way to export point caches from EmberGen to Unity either.
The core usage most of our unity users use EmberGen for is flipbooks. With the right shading or usage of things like our 6 point lighting textures, you can fake volumes very very well.
what I’d also like to know is what is the best method to scale this?
I don’t care about having super high res 3DFX but do want a solution that allows me to have potentially 500 of these on screen.
I’m making a grand scale RTS where you’ll often be in control of a thousand units at once.
because tons of them will be firing shots that explode on impact I want to be able to for example have a single explosion 3DFX that I’m instancing, or something of the sort.
I’m also wondering if spinning the camera from the top down view will reveal the subterfuge in the faking trick you linked to.
I don’t know if 500 effects in general will affect performance a ton, the big killer of performance is overdraw (particles overlapping and transparency trying to sort itself). If it’s a topdown game then there are a lot of optimizations you do in general in the rest of the game.
Most players never notice that explosions are sprites, what we see as developers is mostly ignored by players. See any command and conquer game and it worked out great. These explosions should only be on screen for a split second then they’re gone most likely.