Okay, so today I wanted to mess around with creating a “table spot” effect. You know, like when you see a table in a game or something, and there’s a highlighted area showing you where to put an object?
First, I grabbed a basic table model. Nothing fancy, just something to test with. I threw that into my scene.
Next, I needed a way to show the “spot”. My first thought was just a simple plane, so I created one of those and scaled it down to fit nicely on the table’s surface. I made it a child of the table so it would move with it.
Now, for the highlight effect, I played around with a few things. I could have used a projector, but that seemed a bit overkill for this. Instead, I opted for a simple transparent material.
- I created a new material.
- I set its shader to something that supported transparency (like “Standard” in Unity, and then I switched the “Rendering Mode” to “Transparent”).
- I picked a nice, bright color – a light blue, kinda glowy.
- I dragged that material onto my plane.
It looked okay, but a bit flat. To give it a bit more “oomph”, I added a second, slightly smaller plane on top of the first. This one, I gave a more solid, white-ish color, but still with some transparency. This created a sort of “inner glow” effect.
Then I fiddled with the transparency values of both materials until I got something that looked good. Not too opaque, not too subtle. Just a nice, clear indication of where the “spot” was.
To make the table spot little bit fancy, I tried to add a very simple animation on it.
- I selected the plane with a “inner glow” effect.
- I opened the Animation window.
- I hit the record button, and created a new animation called “spot_breath”.
- I adjusted the scale in different time point. scaled up to 1.2 and back to 1. It looks like breathing.
So, that’s pretty much it! A simple, but effective way to create a table spot. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good starting point. You could definitely expand on this by adding some particle effects, or maybe a more complex shader.
