Important note for devs: Make sure Razer Synapse is up to date, otherwise some SDK features will not work.

For starters, here's a handy link to Unity Chroma SDK.

One of the most powerful features of the Unity Chroma SDK is the ability to record the view of a camera in the scene and convert that to a chroma animation. A lot of creative opportunities lie within this feature, as chroma animations can, therefore, be made from a camera that sees particle systems, canvas, sprites, meshes with materials, and so on.

For our game Log Jammers, I found particle systems achieved the type of effect we were looking for with far less development time than expected. Following is a description of the process to utilize the camera capture feature of the Unity Chroma SDK.

First, set up a camera in the scene which aims at a particle system. Make sure the orientation of the two is such that the camera will see the particle system.

Open the “Chroma Particle Window” which is dedicated to this Chroma SDK feature. This is located in Unity’s toolbar if you have imported the Chroma SDK package.

Next, drag and drop the following references into their corresponding fields in the particle window:

1. Your target chroma animation object. Make this by placing the Chroma SDK animation component of your choice on a GameObject.
2. The camera you just configured to point at your particle system.

With the particle window still open, select your particle system in the scene, and press the “Simulate” button in the scene view. You should see the particles of your system in the preview window.

To start recording the camera view, press the “Start” button. I recommend timing your capture to start/stop around your particle system beginning and ending, so the transitions in and out of the chroma animation are smooth. Please note that capturing will add to the end of previously saved/recorded frames in the animation. Therefore, if you don’t like a capture, make sure to press the “Reset” button to clear the bad capture before recording again.

This workflow makes for nice looking chroma animations in little time. Below you can see examples with the above-captured chroma animations in the hardware emulator.

The Chroma Hardware Emulator

To test all of our fancy new chroma effects on Razer hardware that I didn’t have available, I used the ChromaEmulator tool.

This tool shows its emulation of Chroma effects in real-time for all types of Chroma hardware, including ChromaLink. This tool works with Unity without extra effort. Just fire it up, select your hardware of choice to emulate, and select show for each of them. These are some examples:

Keyboard

Numberpad

Laptop

Here's a helpful link to information for devs on chroma-link (explains the significance of the color channels).