r/Unity3D • u/jandkgames • 1d ago
Show-Off How we made a stop-motion look with no physical models
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We're a two-person team developing MYRIORAMA, a top-down adventure with rearrangeable dungeons. This is an excerpt of a deep-dive art style video we produced recently for our participation in ICO Partners' Unmistakable Festival on Steam. Since we're using Unity I thought it could be informative to share here!
Full video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhM1F993Ga8
While this is technically a 2D project, we're doing a lot of 3D fakery to try and pull off the stop-motion look with dynamic lighting and shadows. It's been a fun challenge.
Happy to provide more specifics or answer any questions!
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u/destinedd Indie, Dungeon Quest, Marble's Marbles & Mighty Marbles 1d ago
its very cute, i love the minature look and feel. The rearrange thing is cool too but feels like it is from another game.
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u/jandkgames 1d ago
Thank you! The idea of being able to manipulate the dungeons was partially inspired by Breath of the Wild and the ending dungeon of Skyward Sword—not sure if that’s it. I will say that every dungeon will be manipulated differently; this first one is side-to-side but our goal is to have a bespoke map/controller for each one. Thanks for the feedback!
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u/lashhKween 20h ago
The miniature look really does it for me too kind a wanna mess around in unity now after seeing that
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u/destinedd Indie, Dungeon Quest, Marble's Marbles & Mighty Marbles 16h ago
look up tilt shift if you want to try get that effect
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u/Snoo_79687 1d ago
Amazing art style. Definitely something special y'all got going here! Looking forward to seeing more.
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u/Exciting_Bunch2386 1d ago
This is really incredible love for the detail. Very well done guys!
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u/jandkgames 1d ago
I’m so glad that comes through, we definitely both obsess about detail a lot haha. Thank you!
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u/GolemiteGames 1d ago
This looks insane, what a great job and a great video demonstrating your techniques!
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u/Basil-Bytes 1d ago
Super impressive work!
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u/jandkgames 1d ago
Really appreciate that. It’s been challenging but a lot of fun to see come together.
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u/GuruKimcy 1d ago
Super cool. It looks great. Also really appreciate the indepth explanations and transparency. Great watch.
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u/jandkgames 14h ago
Thank you! Happy to share, and glad to hear you enjoyed watching the breakdown!
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u/bartolomey-wong-3rd 23h ago
Very cool, thank you for sharing! I will watch the full video on YouTube.
I'm working with voxel art models and wanted to achieve the similar stop motion effect. Much to learn from you here! About lighting, too.
Do you bake your lighting or not? I've just started learning lighting, I'm working on my first game and learn as I go. So I'm not sure if I should bake lighting or not. I have just one small game scene, with one house in it and a garden around it, that's it.
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u/jandkgames 13h ago
Thank you, happy to share! I guess you might call the lighting "half-baked" haha. Our pre-rendered lightmaps are fully rendered using Cycles in blender, so in that sense a lot of the lighting is baked in. In Unity, the lighting calculations are dynamic, essentially using the light direction to determine which pre-rendered lighting to actually apply to the base sprites. The shadows are fully dynamic since we wanted them to respond to light direction. Depending on how much control you want, you could pre-bake everything and just have a single albedo texture, or you could make a separate pass with just a rim light or other direct light and apply that dynamically, which might be a bit simpler than multi-directional lighting.
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u/NavigameLtd 23h ago
Wow, the art style in absolutely incredible. Would you (or have you already) thought about adding some of the art-style explanation in a trailer? People love to see how unique games are being hand-made.
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u/jandkgames 14h ago
Thanks so much! That's very kind. We hadn't really thought about putting technical details inside an otherwise normal gameplay/story trailer, but we would definitely consider doing more "how it's made" clips in the future. I agree, it's always fascinating to see what goes into a game.
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u/KarmaInFlow 19h ago
As someone learning Unity and blender this is mind boggling
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u/jandkgames 13h ago
They are both so powerful (and often obtuse), so it's made for a long journey full of experimentation, challenges, and lots of googling!
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u/timbencker 1d ago
Amazing work! And a great breakdown