Summary

In this chapter, we discovered various tricks to efficiently simulate geometry and details on our objects.

In the first section, we discussed the technique of billboarding, an easy-to-implement and yet very powerful tool for displaying “3D as 2D” in a Unity scene, and render vegetation or in-game HUD elements.

Then, we talked about parallax mapping and studied how this technique can create a fake depth effect, with no additional geometry or textures required – we saw we just need to displace the UVs on our surface in a clever way, based on the current view angle. We implemented a few Unity shaders with this feature, both from scratch and with the help of the URP built-in nodes.

Finally, we explored one last trick to simulate volume that derives from parallax mapping, called interior mapping. We learned that using just a cubemap asset, this tool allows us to create great-looking rooms inside of buildings with minimal computational cost, and that...