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Category Archives: General
Unity3D: Unlit Alpha Mask Shader
Over the past several years working in Unity many of my projects have involved some kind of mixed reality, augmented reality, transparent MovieTexture, or something of the sort. One custom shader that I have reused a lot for these effects is an unlit alpha mask shader. Alpha masking is simply setting the opacity of a texture’s pixels, usually with a separate texture map.
I’m certainly no Unity shader expert, but creating this shader is relatively straightforward if we start with the right foundation. In this case we’ll be modifying the closest thing to what we want – Unity’s own unlit alpha shader. We’ll start with the completed version and then explain how it was modified from the source.
Where Have You Been?
So I’ve been gone quite a little while.. It’s nothing personal, I’ve just had my hands in so many things and finding the time..
Anyways, I’ve been up to a lot of cool stuff! Upgraded job positions. Spent some time working with the Unreal engine. Made a big shift towards Unity3D. Finished up and started a couple huge multi-year projects. Got a motorcycle. Grew an awesome garden and beard. Good stuff.
I’ve been working on some libraries I’d like to share bits of. Also, to show a lot of recent Unity stuff. And don’t think I’ve forgotten about those Spritesheet tutorials. I’ve got about a billion requests for those.
Hope to add some stuff soon!
Ben
Flash and the iPhone?
Certainly many of you heard some speculation recently that the iPhone might finally be getting Flash, only to be followed by the disappointing announcement of – No, you wish, keep dreaming. Quite frankly I wasn’t too surprised or therefore disappointed, but still a little bitter. The idea of developing for perhaps the biggest technological craze of my lifetime would be both financially and ‘spiritually‘ intriguing. Since Flash content makes up a huge percentage of the web now and the iPhone is all about that it makes sense right? I mean even some of the clunkiest of phones now have the ability to display Flash content. So why won’t the iPhone get with the freakin’ program already?
Basically it all comes down to the fact that Apple can’t make any money off of browser based games and utilities. It would kill their App Store – Not to mention: Why would anyone still be willing to pay $100 A Year for the SDK if all you needed was some hosting space and a domain name?
It’s ok.. I didn’t think “There’s a Website For That.” was too catchy of a slogan anyways.
Adobe Flash Builder 4 beta 2 and Flash CS5
Flash Builder 4
I’ve been using Flash Builder 4 beta for a couple of months now and for the most part have been quite pleased. FB is the follow up to Flex 3. Adobe states that the name change is to help distinguish between the open-source Flex framework and their commercial IDE. Makes sense, but personally I like the name packaged with the initial beta release – ‘Gumbo’!
So anyways, the license on my copy of Flash Builder mysteriously stopped working yesterday. After a brief panic attack I decided to check out the Adobe Labs website and noticed that the beta 2 release was out. Cool! As with beta 1, my Flex 3 license is supposed to provide me with a new working FB copy – however, licensing software is one of my least favorite things to do so I’ll get back to that after the weekend. The renewed 60 day trial will suffice for now.
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