I found the VFX positioning to work very poorly

[heckert]

It might just be how I set up my scene, but basically me exit is about the same in the corner.
During editing in the scene view it looked perfectly fine

But when playing, I found that the canopy was moving quite a lot over the exit’s position, so unless my character was beneath the canopy it was completely covered and if the canopy was turned transparent the VFX on the exit was still very subdued, and also it made it look pretty badly because now the cutoff on the opposite side became clearly visible.

At first it was about at the edge of where the camera moved so it was practically at the edge of the screen until you moved right into it. I moved the exit in a bit but it didn’t help much.

On the other scene it was even worse, here it about just entered the screen when you already hit the exit and move to the other scene…

What I think might work is pulling the canopy back so far that it will about just reach the exit area in play mode and make sure the player won’t touch any of it when he’s close enough, so it doesn’t get transparent and the cutoff of the VFX’s back side becomes visible again, which would be quite a bit away from the position when editing the scene…

I suppose what also would be a good idea is to fit the area exit in a drawing layer that would put it in between the path (cosmetics tilemap) and the hill (foreground tilemap), so it could be enlarge for some good amount to fill up all the room between the two wallls put around the path tiles… This might not change the Canopy placement situation but would allow for the area exit visually being much larger so it’s back side can be hidden under tiles on the foreground tilemap, so one could have some gap in the canopy…

[heckert]

I worked on the scene…

Now this looks mostly good:

until I moved over to the neareast accessible bit of canopy to make it transparent:

One option would be to tweak the scene to have no accessible bits of canopy within the visible range of the exit (so only canopy on top of the foreground hills/walls so out of reach).

Another option I could think of would be another canopy layer which gets the Parallax script but not the transparency, and use that one for the area around the exit.
Maybe even a canopy layer without parallax effect to make it easier to cover the backside of the exit’s VFX…

It actually sounds like a useful idea, combining the canopy and another opaque canopy layer might allow some interesting ways to give more depth to a scene…

[heckert]

While the positioning of the canopy is still very cumbersome, at least adding that extra opaque canopy layer fixed the issues with the look of the area exit VFX…

[heckert]

Re-watching the video againI noticed Stephen mentioning the canopy shift in passing and setting up his west entrance about one grid cell apart from where the canopy ends, so the difference is much less than I got it…

I think it would be preferrable to have some setup that wouldn’t depend on fine-tuning this so much so it would be easier to move the entrance at a later time, if desired.
Also, eventually one might have some areas that are less “in the woods” and would need some other framing the portal’s effect in a neat and clean way. Having the non-transparent canopy tile layer that still moves around might be insufficient, so I guess I will add yet another tilemap that is not parallaxing but above the current foreground layer. Not only can I place some canopy directly on top of the exit(s) without having to tune them carefully, it would also allow having another level ot hills/mountains with the current tile palette which should add a huge amount of possibilities for enhancing how the levels look like…

Eventually we could need some update to the portals for looking good on a north/south exit, and if we wanted to have the same for entering a door in town, we would need a bit of scripting to support exits that don’t have/need the VFX in the first place…

[Stephen_Hubbard]

All good points! I’m seeing this a bit late but I think all the points you raise are super valid. I have it set up in my lectures so that the portal vfx goes alllll the way to the edge of the cinemachine camera confiner to avoid the canopy visual issue. But I think the vfx overall could be cleaned up. So perhaps I’ll make a quick vid towards the end in a polish section cleaning it up! Thanks for bringing it up