Tiny Forest
Overview
A Unity exploration into art pipelines, shaders, and bringing a living world to life at runtime. The project covers runtime-editable grass, trees, and water — all driven by custom shaders — alongside fauna systems that add movement and personality to the environment.
Interactive Grass
Grass, trees, and water are all runtime-editable via custom shaders, allowing the environment to respond dynamically to the player and to in-world events. The player can only walk on grassy areas, and the grass shader makes way for the player and fox as they walk over it.
300,000 Butterflies
When the player approaches the butterflies, they scatter and avoid them in real time. This uses a compute shader and a vertex shader with a shared buffer to simulate a boids algorithm for butterfly movement with player avoidance. The video demonstrates 300,000 butterflies simulated simultaneously with full player interaction and no frame rate drop.
Cloth
The main character was an opportunity to explore the full modelling, rigging, and animation pipeline end-to-end. A key focus was understanding cloth behaviour and inverse kinematics in Unity.