Creating a Portal System with Player Collision in Unity

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It all started when I randomly thought: Wouldn’t it be cool if I could make a scene where I walk through a portal into another world? Like literally, walk into one space and boom — you're somewhere completely different.

I immediately thought of the game Portal, which has those awesome sci-fi doors you can go through and see what’s on the other side. So, that was my goal.

Starting with What I Know: Modeling in C4D

Since I’m already familiar with Cinema 4D, I figured I’d build the portal frame and some basic scene geometry there. Way faster than modeling inside Unity, and I could be more creative with the shapes.

Once I had the basic portal built in C4D, I exported the models as and imported them into Unity. Luckily, that part was pretty smooth (just make sure your scale settings aren’t messed up!)..fbx

YouTube to the Rescue 🎥

Then I thought, Has someone done this before in Unity? (Spoiler: of course they have).

I searched YouTube and found a super helpful video:
👉 How to Make a Portal in Unity Like in Portal

It looked intimidating at first — shaders, cameras, RenderTextures?! But I was curious enough to keep watching. It turns out the guy explains it really clearly, and I realized I needed to start with a first-person player before anything else.

Bugs, Broken Bones, and ChatGPT

Here’s where things got messy.

I tried building the first-person player from scratch, but immediately ran into problems:

  • My character kept falling off the map

  • Jumping didn’t work

  • The camera wasn’t rotating properly

I spent like an hour tweaking Rigidbody settings, playing with colliders, and checking layers. Nothing worked. I was honestly about to give up.

But then I asked ChatGPT for help. It walked me through:

  • How to make sure the character stays on the ground

  • How to handle jumping with a ground check

  • How to attach the camera properly for first-person view

And it worked! 🎉 I finally had a player I could control smoothly.


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