The goal of this lab is to try out and appreciate some very simple but effective techniques for producing a life-like environment. Simple illusions.

• Unity's Particle Systems

1. Make an Environment Create any enironment you want, but make sure to have at least one indoor location where a sun can shine through from the outside. Place and rotate such strucures to align with the sun, ensuring that its rays are coming through. Make sure none of the objects are using Legacy shaders, if they are, turn them into Standard shaders.
2. Tweak Lighting Open the Window→Lighting panel and play with the Ambient settings
3. Add Ambient Occlusion Add the Image Effects→Rendering→Screen Space Ambient Occlusion script to your FPSController→FirstPersonCharacter game object. Play with its settings and look in particular at places where different polygons meet.
4. Add Sun Shaft Add the Image Effect→Rendering→Sun Shafts script to your FPSController→FirstPersonCharacter game object. Drag your Directional Light into its Shafts caster property. Drag the Directional Light higher up into the sky, in the direction of the Sun in the skybox (you can turn on the Halo property of the Directional Light to see the light as a glowing disk, which you can line up with the skybox sun, so that the light will seem to come from that direction. Move to a location in the scene where the sun is barely visible (e.g. through a window). Play with the Sun Shaft parameters.
5. Add Particle Effect Right above your Hierarchy panel select Particle System from the Create drop-down menu. It should already be producing shiny little particles. Place the system right where beams of light hit the floor of your indoor environment and rotate it so that the particles travel in the direction of the beams towards the opening where the light shines through. Look at the parameters you can adjust in the Inspector panel for the particle system. You need to make these particles imitate very small dust moving very slowly through the air. You can play with the following adjustments:
   • In the Shape module: Select the Box emitter shape. This will shoot the particles in one direction (which you can control by rotating the box).
   • In the Emission module: Slow down the rate of particle generation until you just get a few per second (e.g. 3 per second or so).
   • In the Particle System general parameter module: Play with Start Speed and Start Size. Make them really really small! If you press the down arrow next to a parameter value, you can choose from some dynamic options instead of just using a constant value. For example, try making the speed random.
   • In the Color over Lifetime module (you have to first add a check mark to include this module): Click on the color bar to open the Gradient Editor. Make the particles fade in from full transparency to full opacity and then again back to full transparency. To do this you need to add one new Alpha marker in the middle, which you set to full opacity (Alpha 255), while setting the other two Alpha markers to full transparency (Alpha 0).