I posted this short animation on the X4 subreddit awhile ago, and I'm archiving it here so that I can share it more easily. All the assets and sounds came from X4 Foundations.
You know, that's a pretty neat effect, I wish that's how they made the ships in X4 instead of slowly appearing in front of you. Even a supreme commander construction like effect would be cooler.
I basically discovered this effect on a fluke. The way it works is that there's two Asgards (the white one and the painted one), and there's two invisible box rectangles that completely encompass the Asgards. The two invisible boxes are literal cube objects with transparent glass shaders, but I found out that I could adjust their transparency to 100% to make the boxes invisible, AND if I adjusted the render queue (the order in which things are rendered, I guess) for these boxes and the Asgards, the boxes would hide anything with an adjusted render queue inside or behind them (but things like the shipyard scaffolding and the space background will still show up as their render queue is uneffected). I then just move one of the boxes back to unveil the first Asgard (while the second Asgard was still hidden due to its spot in the render queue by the second box), and then moved the second box forward to reveal the second Asgard (which was fractionally bigger than the first so it hid the first Asgard on its own like a nesting doll). In a nutshell: 0:05 First cube of invisibility is moved backwards to reveal the first Asgard. 0:23 Second cube of invisibility is moved forward to reveal the second Asgard, and the second Asgard hides the first. 0:44 Somewhere around this point, the first Asgard is un-rendered completely so that the second Asgard can fly off. The blue wall and the trailing yellow hot metal gradient effect are just additional effects for show (created using a water shader and a texture projector, respectively); they don't actually have anything to do with the ship appearing. I sort of did a proto version of this video here: th-cam.com/video/MXV_-QrRpYE/w-d-xo.html which basically has the Asgard moving out of another invisible cube right behind the gate. The only issue with this method of invisibility is that the invisible cube also hides anything behind it with an adjusted render queue, not just things inside of it, hence why in this video you will only see the ship being 'built' away from the camera, and not towards it. It's a weird effect that honestly is probably just a glitch in how the glass shaders of the cubes work, but I won't argue with results; it's better than anything else I tried to research in Unity to achieve the same effect. Edit: I realized that I probably didn't explain the render queue stuff that well. I forget what the numbers were exactly, and I no longer have the project files for this video as I removed these old ship model files to make room for better quality ones, but it sort of works like this: The render queue is usually a number from 0 to 5000, but let's imagine we're just working between 1 and 4. The first cube of invisibility would have a value 4, the white plain Asgard ship would be 3, the second cube of invisibility would have 2, and the second red-and-black Asgard ship would be 1. The cubes of invisibility hide anything with a lower render value than themselves, so if we move the first invisibility cube with a value of 4 away, it would reveal the Asgard with a value of 3, but the second cube of invisibility (2) would still hide the second Asgard (1) until it too is pulled away.
@@gooinabox3147 I am a 3d modeller so what you are saying is probably more useful for my coder since he is all about shaders and stuff in Unity. But anyway I think I understand what's going on here and I gotta say it is pretty cool! Are you a wizard or developer?
@@oguzcanoguz6583 I think being a wizard is a better description for me, as I'm still pretty rough at creating stuff from scratch (hence why I'm "borrowing" ships from the X4 Foundations game files). Most of my animation time is spent looking at what I have, and figuring out if there's anything neat I can do with it. My current challenge is figuring out how to implement weapon effects such as lasers and rapid-fire guns, not only to make them look good but to also figure out how to lazily make sure that it reliably starts at Point A and stops at Point B, with Point A being a rotating turret on a moving ship, and Point B being another ship that is also moving. I though I was onto something for a laser beam by bouncing an object with a trail effect back-and-forth between the two points several dozen times a second, but the effect was immediately ruined when either point started moving or rotating. It makes a good slow heavy plasma shot effect at least, but certainly not a solid laser beam.
Oh, that's just an Asgard Class equipped with a Hyperspace Core from Homeworld.
i wish X4 capital ships had Homeworld FTL drives. I also wished capital ships got manufactured this fast.
You know, that's a pretty neat effect, I wish that's how they made the ships in X4 instead of slowly appearing in front of you. Even a supreme commander construction like effect would be cooler.
How is this made? Excuse the noob question. Is this a video-based effect?
I basically discovered this effect on a fluke. The way it works is that there's two Asgards (the white one and the painted one), and there's two invisible box rectangles that completely encompass the Asgards. The two invisible boxes are literal cube objects with transparent glass shaders, but I found out that I could adjust their transparency to 100% to make the boxes invisible, AND if I adjusted the render queue (the order in which things are rendered, I guess) for these boxes and the Asgards, the boxes would hide anything with an adjusted render queue inside or behind them (but things like the shipyard scaffolding and the space background will still show up as their render queue is uneffected). I then just move one of the boxes back to unveil the first Asgard (while the second Asgard was still hidden due to its spot in the render queue by the second box), and then moved the second box forward to reveal the second Asgard (which was fractionally bigger than the first so it hid the first Asgard on its own like a nesting doll).
In a nutshell:
0:05 First cube of invisibility is moved backwards to reveal the first Asgard.
0:23 Second cube of invisibility is moved forward to reveal the second Asgard, and the second Asgard hides the first.
0:44 Somewhere around this point, the first Asgard is un-rendered completely so that the second Asgard can fly off.
The blue wall and the trailing yellow hot metal gradient effect are just additional effects for show (created using a water shader and a texture projector, respectively); they don't actually have anything to do with the ship appearing. I sort of did a proto version of this video here: th-cam.com/video/MXV_-QrRpYE/w-d-xo.html which basically has the Asgard moving out of another invisible cube right behind the gate. The only issue with this method of invisibility is that the invisible cube also hides anything behind it with an adjusted render queue, not just things inside of it, hence why in this video you will only see the ship being 'built' away from the camera, and not towards it. It's a weird effect that honestly is probably just a glitch in how the glass shaders of the cubes work, but I won't argue with results; it's better than anything else I tried to research in Unity to achieve the same effect.
Edit: I realized that I probably didn't explain the render queue stuff that well. I forget what the numbers were exactly, and I no longer have the project files for this video as I removed these old ship model files to make room for better quality ones, but it sort of works like this: The render queue is usually a number from 0 to 5000, but let's imagine we're just working between 1 and 4. The first cube of invisibility would have a value 4, the white plain Asgard ship would be 3, the second cube of invisibility would have 2, and the second red-and-black Asgard ship would be 1. The cubes of invisibility hide anything with a lower render value than themselves, so if we move the first invisibility cube with a value of 4 away, it would reveal the Asgard with a value of 3, but the second cube of invisibility (2) would still hide the second Asgard (1) until it too is pulled away.
@@gooinabox3147 I am a 3d modeller so what you are saying is probably more useful for my coder since he is all about shaders and stuff in Unity. But anyway I think I understand what's going on here and I gotta say it is pretty cool! Are you a wizard or developer?
@@oguzcanoguz6583 I think being a wizard is a better description for me, as I'm still pretty rough at creating stuff from scratch (hence why I'm "borrowing" ships from the X4 Foundations game files). Most of my animation time is spent looking at what I have, and figuring out if there's anything neat I can do with it. My current challenge is figuring out how to implement weapon effects such as lasers and rapid-fire guns, not only to make them look good but to also figure out how to lazily make sure that it reliably starts at Point A and stops at Point B, with Point A being a rotating turret on a moving ship, and Point B being another ship that is also moving. I though I was onto something for a laser beam by bouncing an object with a trail effect back-and-forth between the two points several dozen times a second, but the effect was immediately ruined when either point started moving or rotating. It makes a good slow heavy plasma shot effect at least, but certainly not a solid laser beam.