Official Adaptive Probe Volumes (APVs) experimental release for HDRP in 2021.2

Does this work for realtime enlighten GI? As I saw lights must be set to "mixed".

 

@francescoc_unity Any chance we can get somekind of probe placement preview before baking, either automated or on demand/manual update somekind of update probe placement button on Probe Volume component? having to bake the lighting just to see the probe placement kinda not intuitive

 

Oooh i thought that only work with baked data. Thanks for the info!!! i'll test it out

 

Just test the alpha build, the blend function are nice. What is the best practice for day-night transition though?
Might gonna need a small example for that

 

It's amazing!
does terrain support using APVs as indirect lighting in the alpha version?

 

Thanks. Also having a small example could help i think.
It might be just my setup, but i find it hard to get a smooth transition from sunset > night time > sunrise.
Also i find if we keep calling this line everyframe it eating the fps a lot.

Code (CSharp):

1. ProbeReferenceVolume.instance.BlendLightingScenario(TargetScenario, blendTime);

Might want to add this into the docs if it's not exist yet, to remind people to call it on demand not everyframe.

 

Wow, that's surprisingly good! How's the process? Do you need to bake every lighting conditions and APV just blends between those?

 

Yeah you need to bake each of the Light Condition (in the APV term it called LightingScenario), then from script you need to define the current active scenario and which scenario to blend.
I'm using this script for my test, heavily modified of course since i'm using more than 2 scenario.
https://github.com/Unity-Technologi...s/Assets/Scenes/007-BasicAPV/LightScenario.cs

 

Are the light leaking pulls in the latest public alpha?
from my testing I can get pretty nice results with APV + SSGI. Would be a nice and welcome replacement for the regular lightmapping.

I had to mess with the bias quite a bit to get a correct look, which in itself leads to some slight issues, but all in all it's looking promising

for me SSGI was a must for good visuals in alpha9, it helps a ton with noise/weird artifacts and better lighting.
The final issue I'd like to mention is SSGI cost is quite high even at the lowest settings so I can't treat it as a universal solution for public projects. (APV+SSGI that is)

 

Could you put that on by default? I mean there isn't any practice where you would want meshes to leak light.

 

In 2022.2.0a9 and HDRP, I have a typical exterior architectural scene with only 2 buildings and some hard surface floors, paving, parking etc. (about 600m X 600m). No plants yet. 1 grey material applied to everything for now.

I set everything to static, however in each object, I DID NOT manually set it each object's "Receive Global Illumination" setting to Light Probes, instead, left it on Lightmaps. There are too many objects to manually switch this 1 by 1
We need a different mechanism to switch this setting, or some kind of editor script to change all selected objects (even if those objects are inside a hierachy)

Anyway, I thought the baking was suppose to be quick?!? In my Ryzen 9 5950X and RTX 3090, its estimating the scene will take 1 hour to bake on default settings. However, it keeps fluctuating between 40 min and 55 min, and the time doesnt get less, but seems more like increasing...

Is this APV, meant to eventually be similar to Unreal's Lumen system?

EDIT1: Now its already sitting on an estimated 3.5 hours!

EDIT2: It briefly jumped to 16 hours, now its on 4 hours

EDIT3: OK I geuss this is still way too experimental to even be attempted in an actual project sized test. Fine in a scene with 3 cubes, but any real project and seems dont bother for now.

EDIT4: Actually let me hide most obejcts and switch that receive gi setting to probe volume on a handfull of objects and see

 

You’re probably just regular light mapping.

No.

 

Nope, its using the APV bake:


I had 5 objects visible, and that seems to go in few seconds. Now swiched on my other objects, and its just sitting there

EDIT: It kicked in and telling me 12 hours!

 

you probably still are baking all light maps in scene. I think the AVP baking button still triggers this.

 

If you have set the meshes to receive global illumination via light maps you are baking both light maps and APV. And light mapping is probably the one taking forever.

 

I only have 1 directional light in the scene, the sun


So what are you guys saying? I'm doing somethign wrong. or AVP automatically triggers regular light mapping also?

 

All my meshes are set to this now:


I have no light probes in my scene or setup as far I know
Only the AVP. Am I still doing something wrong?

 

No this seems correct. Does it still take forever?

 

yes :-(

 

what's your lighting mode in lighting window? maybe you are baking the shadowmaps?

 

My sun settings:



My AVP setting:


Lighting:

 

I'm trying the latest 512.15 NVidia studio driver and see if anything changes...

I have SSGI on. Can I use that together with AVP or I'm suppose to switch it off?

 

turn on "Override subdivision levels" in your probe volume.
then set the "Highest Subdivision Level" a lower value, that will greatly decrease the baking time.
in my experience 2 or 1 is good enough, for testing purpose you could use "0".
make sure everything in your scene are set to "Receive Globe Illumination" with "Light Probes"

 

That seems to have done something. It took about 7 seconds this time. Will see the probes visually and switch on/off to see if it actually did anything. Back soon...

 

Getting somewhere now it seems.

I set the override subs to:
highest = 3
lowest = 0
probe distance between 1m and 27m

however, I'm getting some nasty artefacts looking from the interior of one of my buildings:


Temp switching off the APV and just having SSGI:


Is there any settings I can adjust to adjust light leaks or get rid of those nasty black artefacts?

 

What does this "Normalize Reflection Probes" do in the Probe Volumes? I'm not using ANY reflection probes, only SSReflection

 

I was only able to get rid of artifacts in interior by setting the probe distance really low (like 0.1), but this will very likely increase your baking time again drastically.

 

What is the touchup volumes for? or what it do actually?

 

Leak reduction doesn't seem to be in the latest alpha from my testing. I found no option for it anywhere. I believe it's meant to show in the volume options.

 

it's a volume you place to manually invalidates probes that are causing light leaking.
In a way it's manual light leak prevention. Pretty nice compromise.

 

Yup, additional properties are enabled. I've also seen screenshots of it in the pull showing the settings for it so I think I was in the right place.

 

and i'm getting this, where probe volume are already enabled in the project?

 

Turning the editor on and off fixed it apparently :|
Oh neat, using touch up volumes can fixed the leaking (in my test scene)

 

I see so it's invalidate any probe inside of it, i thought it was somekind of Clip Shape GI Volume like Treyarch GI tech

 

@francescoc_unity I forgot if i ask this question already or not. Will APV have a sky occlussion to occlude skylight and sky reflection?

 

I'm running into an interesting situation using the Probe Volumes. I am using 2021.2.18f and on the scenes where APVs are used, I bake lighting and my dynamic objects look great. However, on a few of my scenes I'm using all realtime lights, do not enable APVs on the camera, nor have any volumes in the scene. In the editor (play mode or not) my dynamic objects look great. When I make a build, the dynamic objects look too dark. The thing is, if I disable APVs at the settings level and rebuild, these scenes look good - so it's almost like the APV-aware Lit shaders are acting differently even though I'm not using them in these scenes. Any ideas on what I could try, is this an actual issue with the current alpha implementation?