Accessing the Gyroscope in the Unity Editor

Lately, I've been doing a lot of AR development for the HoloLens! Very exciting stuff, but a little rough on iteration time! Deploying to a device that has the right sensors, hardware, and setup just takes too much time, especially considering that in many cases, these sensors and hardware are already on my laptop! They're simply not accessible from within the Unity Editor by default. Adding access to them has really sped up development for a number of my use cases, so hopefully this will be of help to you as well!

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Blended Normals, or Soft Flat Shading

Flat shading's harsh edges and flat colors have never been something I find visually appealing, but I always feel like there's something nice still hidden in there! Well, I finally found a way to soften the harshness of it all, and I really, really love the results!

The key is blended normals! Take flat shading normals, and blend them with the usual vertex normals! This will preserve the hard edges created by the flat shading, but also add in some of the smoothness of traditional gouraud! Add in some sliders for tweaking, and you have yourself a beautiful retro/modern hybrid approach to lighting.

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Making Callisto's Wind

In Callisto, I needed to add some motion to the scene, some visual activity to make the place seem alive! Since it's technically a fairly barren ice moon, with more snow than life, it made sense to add something to make it look windier.

I quickly settled on a cartoonish looking wind swirl, which you can see above! It looks cool, it's easily recognizable, and it's super easy to implement quickly! I didn't even need to write a custom shader for this, as it's accomplished entirely through scrolling the UVs on the material.

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