From the course: Unity Medical Visualization: 01 Preparation and Design

Preparing for the project - Unity Tutorial

From the course: Unity Medical Visualization: 01 Preparation and Design

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Preparing for the project

- [Instructor] In this chapter of the course, we're going to be focusing on building the scene and the environment for our heart visualization. And step number one, the first thing that's really bothering me that we're going to be fixing in this movie is the material that's being used for the arrows inside the heart. Now, these arrows are going to be animated. They're going to be indicating the direction of blood flow. They're going to be working with the animations for the heart pumping. But if you take a look at the arrows right now, we can see them for what they really are. That is big, black, mesh strips with arrows pasted on them. And there's no transparency or anything of that kind, and that really isn't how we want these arrows to look. So, I'm going to be jumping over to the Materials folder, and taking a look at the arrows material. When we take a look at that in the inspector, you can see that by default it's been assigned the Universal Render PipelineLit material. And, straightaway, that's wrong because we don't want these arrows to be affected by scene lighting at all. These are not the kinds of thing that can cast shadows or even receive shadows. So, I'm going to grab the heart here and take a look at the arrow meshes that we can see inside the scene. In fact, I'm going to select the bottom one, and select the top one, and take a look here inside the inspector. Now, I don't want these to cast shadows at all. So, I'm going to grab this and turn Shadow Casting off. These are not things that cast shadows. I'm going to jump over to the arrows material, and I'm going to deactivate Receiving Shadows. These are not the kinds of things that can receive shadows. Actually I'm just going to put that back a second. I'll actually, no, it's something happened there, some kind of weird glitch. Absolutely fine. I'm going to go back here to the Shader settings and I'm going to change the Shader from the Universal Render PipleineLit to the Unlit material here. And this is the shader that I want to use. So, I'm going to go here into the Surface Type. Now, by default the Surface Type is set to Opaque. I want to change it to Transparent. And I'm going to set the Blending Mode here from Alpha to Additive. And this will fix the problem of the transparency. We're now seeing these arrows presented inside the scene including their transparency. The last thing that I want to adjust for these arrows here is the back facing. Right now, the only face that these arrows that are rendered are the front faces. This effectively means that if I rotate my view around to try to view them from behind, I can't do it. They become invisible. But if I change the render face from Front to Both, then we can see the arrows from both the front and the back. And in the case of these arrows, which are simply used as a diagram indicator, then this is exactly the kind of look we want for these arrows. Now, later we're going to be changing the offset for these arrows a little bit here. So, we're going to be using this kind of offset features to begin to animate these arrows using an animation. But that's to come a bit later on. Right now, we just want to configure the shading for these arrows and this is looking just to be what we need to indicate the arrows inside the scene. So, now the material is set up for our arrows. That's pretty good. In the next movie, we want to get started at creating the illumination for the scene, to get lighting to be just how we need it to be.

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