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Some interesting Unity3D packages from Forest Johnson

At http://forestjohnson.blogspot.com/search/label/unity%20packages you can find some (older) Unity Packages by Forest Johnson for Unity3D, the cross-platform game engine.

I did manage to get the following examples to run on my free version on OSX:

  • the lightmapper. With some effort and slight adjustments to the scripts, the demo ran. It creates a shadow map as a texture which is calculated when the game starts. While the new Unity3D 3.x has the Autodesk BEAST lightmapper included, this approach might come in handy as it shows an approach to avoid the lack of "Render to texture" from the Pro version.

  • The real time raytracer did actually work quite well, although the image is rather crude. Imagine real-time raytraced reflections in your model. Might require some hacking to have it work more easily in custom projects, but the source is remarkably short as the lion's share of work is using the built-in raycast feature from Unity itself.
  • Real-time SSAO or "screen space ambient occlusion" > this technique is currently available as part of Unity Pro only, so I was hoping to have this script work in the free version, but alas, I could not run it due to some error I could not immediately solve.

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