A small Unity project that focuses on tech art and graphics programming. My main focus was on the fish character and the scene design. The fish is not rigged, but rather simulates swimming with a vertex shader and animates turns with blend shapes. Made with 2 other students
Features:
• Reactive kelp
• Water distortion
• Fish swim shader
Features:
• Reactive kelp
• Water distortion
• Fish swim shader
Play the game on itch.io
Rig-less Fish
Rather than rig and animate the fish for the project, I wanted to apply a shader to make it seem as though the fish was moving. Mirroring how Abzû makes their fish, I applied a sine wave offset in the vertex shader to simulate a swimming motion.
To make the fish character more robust, I added several blend shapes to the fish model in Maya. These included simple blends like looking left, right, up and down as well as a bite for when the character interacts with a food power up in the pond. All of this took about a day to create and implement into the character controller. For that I simply had the character's movement drive the look blendshape values, and a collider event drive the bite blendshape.
Environment Design
Here are a few shots from around the pond
