Fading out an entire scene w/ Unity -- how is this typically achieved?

trzy

I'd like to gradually fade in/out all objects in my scene during transitions. They all have different materials, including a few with materials that do not have a color property that can be scaled.

I guess one way to do it would be to find all renderers in the scene and then, for each material, gradually fade out by either dimming the color toward black or manipulating the alpha channel. The latter would look better in mixed reality captures but not all materials have alpha processing enabled.

Is there some clever trick I'm unaware of?

stepan_stulov

Hey, @trzy

You can just put a black rectangle to cover the entire frustum so that it's slightly further away from the near clip plane and is attached to the camera. Simply fade its transparency. At least that's how it's often done in 2D games. Except on HoloLens black will act as erase.

Cheers

dbarrett

You might be able to do this with an animation. You can either do it the material way, by just animating the material color on open but, like you said you have a bunch of different materials that you can't control the alpha channel so that probably wouldn't work. Another way, is not really fading but more of a pop in type of entrance would be to animate the objects' scale from 0 to 1. As long as your objects have a scale of 1 then it would work for it. Otherwise just create another animation controller and animate to whatever the scale of your object is.

If you're looking to animate all objects in the scene it would probably be best to create a parent object and then animate its scale from 0-1 if you are looking to go that route.

Closing/Fading out would essentially be the same animation where you do the reverse.

As far as fading to transparent/invisible if you're using the standard shader, you need to change it from opaque to transparent. Otherwise the user will still be able to see the object even though it is black.

stepan_stulov

Hey, @trzy

You can just put a black rectangle to cover the entire frustum so that it's slightly further away from the near clip plane and is attached to the camera. Simply fade its transparency. At least that's how it's often done in 2D games. Except on HoloLens black will act as erase.

Cheers

dbarrett

You might be able to do this with an animation. You can either do it the material way, by just animating the material color on open but, like you said you have a bunch of different materials that you can't control the alpha channel so that probably wouldn't work. Another way, is not really fading but more of a pop in type of entrance would be to animate the objects' scale from 0 to 1. As long as your objects have a scale of 1 then it would work for it. Otherwise just create another animation controller and animate to whatever the scale of your object is.

If you're looking to animate all objects in the scene it would probably be best to create a parent object and then animate its scale from 0-1 if you are looking to go that route.

Closing/Fading out would essentially be the same animation where you do the reverse.

As far as fading to transparent/invisible if you're using the standard shader, you need to change it from opaque to transparent. Otherwise the user will still be able to see the object even though it is black.

trzy

Thanks, guys. A black rectangle sounds like an easy solution but the downside is that this looks bad in mixed reality captures. Grabbing all materials in the scene and modifying them might be doable. I'm wondering whether I can clone each material, programmatically enable alpha blending and then when finished, simply restore the original material.