Creating A Sci-Fi Lab Room

So after I covered some of the basics concerning level design I ended up with this!

Filebase is an amazing tool… dare I say… better than the Asset Store?

Some things I want to cover here:

• How to make this a playable scene easily.
• Collider set up
• Basic Post Processing in the Standard Render Pipeline

I was totally kidding when I said Filebase is better than the Asset Store. They are both amazing tools. To make the scene easy to play through, I want to go over a really neat package you can get from the asset store. This package, honestly, has been a long time coming. Its the Starter Assets First Person Controller.

Starter Assets — First Person Character Controller | Essentials | Unity Asset Store

This allows you to simply add a game object to the scene that instantly makes you a first-person controller. Import note: You’ll need to make sure your project has been upgraded or started in Unity version 2020.3 or higher.

To get this into your project, simply download the asset from the Asset Store, navigate to your Package Manager > My Assets, and then find it in the list, install it, import it, and there ya go! You may have to restart Unity since this package requires the new Input system. If you want to expand on that feel fre to check out some of my other articles ;)

To get the first-person functionality, all you have to do is select “Tools” at the top of the window and then select “Starter Assets” then “Reset First Person Controller”. Thats IT! Press Play and you can walk around your newly built level.

You may have fallen through the floor when you pressed play. This brings me to my next point. Colliders. You’ll need to set up colliders for the “bounds” of the level basically. The walls, the floor, the objects, all need colliders so that you cant pass through them. My collider set up looks like this:

The floor, the walls, and the stairs have colliders as well. The stairs have a slanted box collider on them so the player can climb them.

Now for post processing. Right now, the scene is pretty boring. Everything looks pretty flat. Below is a link to get started with the post processing stack.

Getting started with post-processing | Post Processing | 3.2.2 (unity3d.com)

Right now we’re using the Built in render pipeline, so theres not a whole lot we can do with this scene at the moment. In the following articles, I’ll cover the Universal Render Pipeline and the High-Definition Render Pipelines.

For now I’ll show off some of the features of the post processing within the Built in render pipeline. I’m not going to go into how to set up post processing because its all laid out perfectly in the link above.

With a few simple lights, and effects on the Post Processing Volume Game Object I came up with this:

Not saying it looks great or anything. I set this up in 5 minutes. The point Im making here is that the Built-In Render Pipeline doesn’t give us much to work with. This definitely looks more interesting than the plain version though.

Stick around for the next articles where I’ll cover some neat features in the Universal Render Pipeline!

Edit:

I forgot to add some reflection probe goodness and ended up with something a little more interesting. ;) I also bumped up the temperature parameter of the color grading override on the Post Processing Volume.

The moral of the story is that there is a lot of stuff to discover in the post processing realm. I could sit here for hours and mess around with this, but there is work to be done!