Well, the port to Unity 5 took a bit longer than expected. Then again, what port doesn’t? Overall, we’re very happy with the more robust namespace support in code, and the physically based shader model. It took quite some time to re-tool all our custom shaders into a PBR model, but once done, the results are spectacular, no pun intended.

R2D2 with the new PBR in Unity5. We’re loving that blue-alloy metal look!

And, we finally solved the mascara issue with all our character models, which we created in Mixamo’s excellent Fuse product. For those techies / artists out there: the trick is to duplicate the existing Legacy/Diffuse-Bump shader for each character, keep the textures and normals, and set the shader model to “Standard / Specular / Fade” with a smoothness of 1.0. Do the same with the eyes, and you’ll have that beautiful “twinkle in the eyes” that all pseudo-living avatars should properly exhibit.

Luke finally drops the mascara and gets real eyebrows — and a spark

In other news, our friends at Magic Leap released their first actual concept video. Just single-player for now, but fun stuff nonetheless.

That’s all for today.

Onward.