this one was a piece that took me around 2 years, specifically because I just was struggling a ton to get a good translucent plastic effect so i kept just putting it down and coming back to it. the actual model itself i had for a while!

as you can see, i modeled the inside of it as well, since i knew that getting that accurate would help out with making the translucency feel more tactile. of use was a copy of Madagascar for the GBA, pictured below. i forget how i finally got it open, you can see my attempt to open Home on the Range in the background with a cheese fork but that failed. (i also made sure neither of them were expensive and in desperate need of game preservation)

along with modeling the inside, i also modeled the inside.

i did not need to add as much detail as i did - normally this could just be accomplished with a texture and a normal map and maaybe a few extra pieces of geometry sticking out. i was too lazy (???) to do that so i just individually modeled every single bump instead (???? i have adhd)

i did paint the green part of the circuitboard in procreate though instead of modelling all the little circuits (though i could see myself doing that in some timeline where my iPad was on the other side of the room or something) - there are luckily tons of reference pictures of pokemon GBA cart circuitboards because it's a game that a lot of people need to check the authenticity of. i used Ruby's just because it looked a bit more interesting than Emerald's. sorry.

for the shaders on the circuitboard it's pretty standard stuff. in that literally a lot of it is just unity's Standard Shader, with the metal bits using a custom metal shader that basically is just a reflection map. the only nonstandard thing i did do that i really didn't need to do was use a stencil shader to make all the little metal bits have "holes" in them so you could see through to the other side. here's the gif again, you can just barely notice it sometimes in just the bigger hole on the left when it's turning from the back to the front. there was almost no reason for me to do this. just be glad I didn't physically model the holes into the mesh and opted to use the stencil shader instead.

anyways. don't do this. or at least don't do this if you're making this for an actual video game. if you want it to look pretty and tactile for a gif though then well maybe you will take joy in copy and pasting the same 48-vertex torus 183 times.

let's talk about something else let's talk about the outside!! i trial and error-ed a LOT of different techniques to try and get something that i was happy with: what I settled on were two different sets of shaders stacked on top of eachother. the first one ended up being: literally just the unity transparent Standard Shader, with an occlusion map baked from blender (essentially just a map that darkens any part that should be getting less light than other parts). i also picked a normal map that's not necessarily physically accurate to a GBA cart but it was a bit grainy and reflected the light in a way that i really liked.

and then the second shader, which was layered on top of the above one:

it's comprised of four different parts. the classics, rim lighting and sparkles, and then some specular reflection. the parts of the GBA cart that are rougher in real life i made sure to catch the specular less so its roughness was up in the material too. the fanciest thing going on is as you can hopefully see the circuitboard is blurred a bit. this is because i'm rendering just the circuitboard to another camera that has a blur image effect on it, and then mapping that via screenspace onto the shader, so it looks like the blurred circuitboard is inside. this lets me realtime make it feel a bit more translucent rather than just transparent. It's not too convincing on its own, but when you combine the two together.....

yayyyy and then there's the label of course, which is some rim lighting, environment reflections to make it shiny, and sparkles. this is all on a normal map, but I didn't want the normal map to be on the sticker of approval, so I have a mask for that, and then I also masked out some parts that i don't want affected by anything and just display the original color. here's what that looks like (it's a bit scuffed but it's small so it's fine (should have taken this to heart about the 183 toruses)):

and that's it!!