Recent Blog Posts

Unity Optimisations

Here's a list of optimisation tips collected together from various sources for faster access:

Watch the whole videos linked below to get additional explanations.

Optimization tips for maximum performance – Part 1 | Unite Now 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRDHEqy2uPI

Use arrays or lists if you need to access elements fast by index. Use dictionary if you often need to add or remove elements.

Use object pools instead of instantiating and destroying objects Destroying objects creates a lot of garbage. Create a pooling system and reuse unused objects.

Use Scriptable Objects for storing gen...

Posted on Jul 13, 2020 by Daniel Kürsten

Unity Timelines

Unity's Timeline component is a powerful NLE animation system with a highly modular internal structure.

As such it can be interesting to access parts of it via the API:

// PlayableDirector references to the timeline asset called PlayableAsset
PlayableAsset playableAsset = director.playableAsset;

// Cast it to a proper timeline asset
TimelineAsset timeline = (TimelineAsset)playableAsset;

// Get all the timeline tracks as TrackAsset
IEnumerable<TrackAsset> trackAssets = timeline.GetOutputTracks();

// Iterate through all the tracks
foreach (TrackAsset trackAsset in trackAssets)
{
    Debug.Log...

Posted in Development, Unity on Oct 14, 2019 by Daniel Kürsten

Unity WebGL size

Initial download size on the web is very important and Unity is, at least in its basic form, by nature not the perfect choice for building small, efficient WebGL applications.

But there are a lot of dials and buttons to press, allowing us to tune the size even without having to resort to Project Tiny.

I set out to see how small I could get a WebGL build. As reference I took the default Unity Universal Render Pipeline template and went through all the optimization options.

Results

Posted in Development, Unity on Oct 09, 2019 by Daniel Kürsten

Shader 101

Here's a collection of shader algorithms in node form for the Amplify Shader Editor. Useful, should you ever want to build a shader with custom lighting and are too lazy to do it in code.

Diffuse

Simply the dot product between the surface normal and light direction in world space.

Specular

The dot product between the surface normal and the normal half way between view direction and light direction. The hardness can be adjusted by power with the hardness as exponent.

Fresnel

The dot product between the surface normal and the view direction. This is basically the incidence angle and can be us...

Posted in Development, Unity on Jul 06, 2019 by Daniel Kürsten

Kids Activities around Cologne

Posted on May 01, 2019 by Daniel Kürsten

VR / AR Headsets

Some current and up coming main stream VR headsets

Tethered VR

Posted on Apr 26, 2019 by Daniel Kürsten

Blender 2.8

Jumping on the hype train about Blender 2.8 and while it's looking nice, getting to grips with new software is always hard.

Documentation for 2.8 is currently being updated.

I therefore compiled a list of hotkeys that I found useful for working with Blender:

Posted in Blender on Jan 06, 2019 by Daniel Kürsten

Mobile Unity Optimisations

Optimisation tips for various platforms taken from various Unity/Unite talks:

Mobile VR:

Youtube: Unity LA 2018: Going for Speed Maximizing Performance on Oculus Go

CPU

• Enable Single-Pass Stereo
• Static Batching - One material per Mesh and mark meshes as static.
• Bake Lighting - Per-pixel lights break batches.
• Occlusion Culling - Don't draw stuff you can't see.
• If Umbra fails build custom occlusion engine - Interiors work better with a custom portal engine.
• Oculus Go can handle large textures - 4096x4096
• Oculus Go can do small head translations in addition to head rotation.

GPU

• Faster Fragmen...

Posted in Development, Unity on Dec 04, 2018 by Daniel Kürsten

Adding SSH Key to Bitbucket from Windows

Here is a quick cheat sheet on how to add a proper ssh key for Sourcetree / Bitbucket from a Windows system with the PuTTY Key Generator.

The process is not complicated by any means, but getting things mixed up simply results in Bitbucket or Sourcetree rejecting the key, making tracking down the problem more difficult than it should be.

Steps are:

1. Press Generate to create the key.
2. Press Save private key to save the private key to disk.
3. Copy the public key from the text area box above into the clipboard.
4. Paste the public key into the Bitbucket > Settings > SSH Keys section on the website.

If...

Posted in Development on Nov 09, 2018 by Daniel Kürsten