Unity Issues

I noted that when you moved around with the camera, the fps count was throttling constantly and it wasn't a very smooth play experience. I searched on Unity website, again, and I found a brilliant way to optimize the assets even further. Basically, the camera from the player's perspective is only rendering objects that are in sight and gets rid of the other ones. This drastically improved my process and now I could walk around without worrying about stuttering anymore.



While wondering around and ensuring everything is on point, I forgot about animating the banners so they will move when affected by wind conditions. Then I realized I had to split the rail from the cloth so that I can specify how and what moves. Thanks to Unity's docs, again, I managed to get them moving and it looks awesome.



In order to make the banners move and specify how much you want them to move you have to assign a cloth modifier to the game object and tweak the acceleration values to achieve the wind condition you want. Then you have to go to edit constraints and paint the vertices that you don't want to move. You need to have enough vertices so the movement is more realistic, not just a flat plane. Basically the ones that are attached to the rail are not moving and then, to make it easier, I didn't paint all the weights, I just played around with the stretching and bending stiffness.



The scene still lacked something that made it pretty, then I just came up with the idea of creating like a sand dust or a sandstorm effect and for that I needed some help on Particle Systems in Unity. I started out modifying some basic parameters like spread, distance and I used an image to make little dust particles instead of default circular ones. I applied a WindZone to make the particles spread in a direction and emphasized the effect of dusty wind. Here I have some renders:



References

Unity Technologies, 2017. Unity - Manual: Cloth. [Online]
Available at: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-Cloth.html
[Accessed 28 April 2017].

Unity Technologies, 2017. Unity - Manual: Draw call batching. [Online]
Available at: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/DrawCallBatching.html
[Accessed 28 April 2017].

Unity Technologies, 2017. Unity - Manual: Occlusion Culling. [Online]
Available at: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/OcclusionCulling.html
[Accessed 28 April 2017].

Unity Technologies, 2017. Unity - Manual: Skinned Cloth. [Online]
Available at: https://docs.unity3d.com/460/Documentation/Manual/class-SkinnedCloth.html
[Accessed 28 April 2017].

Unity Technologies, 2017. Unity - Manual: Using Particle Systems in Unity. [Online]
Available at: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/PartSysUsage.html
[Accessed 28 April 2017].

Unity Technologies, 2017. Unity - Manual: Wind Zones. [Online]
Available at: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/terrain-WindZones.html
[Accessed 28 April 2017].