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

For the future APV, would it be possible to create realtime, no baking probe-based lighting specifically for games targeting high performance and quality?

 

Will Enemies, and Lion, ever come to community as demo projects, or they're just in a long list of things the community will never get to play with?

 

Can we get a glimpse at the APV features and improvements planned for 2023? I'm hoping I can use APV and replace light probes (and some small static objects) in 2023.

I tried to use APV in 2022, unfortunately there's a lot of sample noise/artifacts, also noticeable on dynamic objects, movement and transitioning between probes. And I can't realistically use SSGI to clean up the noise by default due to performance concerns.

 

The feature are available in github, not the demo though, but enough to import your own asset and try to reproduce the demo.

 

But when will the Siggraph video land ...

 

APV really pushes volumetric fog quality, ends up looking so much better with APV.

 

Good evening. So I've taken APV for a spin and it's quite easily to set up my scene but I'm having some difficulty having the probe volume take the sky into account (I'm using a sky volume and it's set to HDRI sky.)

How do I get the sky working with the APV? Thank you

 

It does work as usual Lightmapping.
Have you checked the Environment tab in the lighting settings?

 

Yes. I had my Volume set to an HDR of a cathedral and the probes would only cover half my character. I'm using a simple LookDev scene with a plane and a character model, and wanted to make sure it would play nice before I did anything else.

@francescoc_unity as this is my first time using APVs, I also think that they should generate lighting if I also hit generate in the usual lighting tab. I was getting issues where only half if my character (he is a dynamic object) was getting hit with probes. And also the probes DID NOT stay within the bounds of the volume. I'll do a render in a bit

 

Here is a test render of APV in my current LookDev scene, and notice while the scene baked correctly, the sky was NOT taken into account. Look at where the probes are too, it's not filling the volume as I am expecting it to. How can I ensure that this will take the full environment into account? Since I will be using Enviro in a lot of my scenes and most of my levels will be outdoors, this is very important.

The floor plane is set as Static and to receive global illumination as a lightmap (old habits die hard) unless I can just use the probes, but I am using the Lightmapping for irregular shapes. I'll have to build an actual level to really test this

And here is shot of APV using a character that has Subsurface scattering on him. Man this looks incredible, but I want the probes to stay IN THE VOLUME. Remember the Original Light Probe Volume? Exactly like this

 

I'm starting to like this APV feature. It even plays nice with Subsurface Scattering too. There are NO ACTIVE LIGHTS in the scene, just the sky.

 

No problem. I'll have to test this further with a note complex scene with more geometry and more sky details. I actually did hit the generate tab in the lighting panel and the probes work very well. Also did a test with no sky and emission and it looked really good. Even with subsurface scattering

 

thanks i had the same problem

 

Hello,

Is there a recommended way to programmatically add a scene to a baking set? As part of our build process, we generate scenes and I would like to automatically get those in the correct baking set. It seems like a lot of the things required to do this are marked as internal unless I am missing something.

We also seem to be having an issue when baking in batch mode from our build machines. We get the exception:

Code (CSharp):

1. NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
2.   at UnityEngine.Experimental.Rendering.ProbeGIBaking.FindWorldBounds (System.Boolean& hasFoundInvalidSetup) [0x0008a] in D:\Jenkins\workspace\SkyFights_Bake\SkyFightsUnity\Library\PackageCache\com.unity.render-pipelines.core@13.1.8\Editor\Lighting\ProbeVolume\ProbeGIBaking.cs:135
3.   at UnityEngine.Experimental.Rendering.ProbeGIBaking.OnBakeStarted () [0x00016] in D:\Jenkins\workspace\SkyFights_Bake\SkyFightsUnity\Library\PackageCache\com.unity.render-pipelines.core@13.1.8\Editor\Lighting\ProbeVolume\ProbeGIBaking.cs:198
4.   at (wrapper delegate-invoke) <Module>.invoke_void()
5.   at UnityEditor.Lightmapping.Internal_CallBakeStartedFunctions () [0x0000d] in <bccfc7dedc604845b69da832e24281ea>:0
6. UnityEditor.Experimental.Lightmapping:Bake_Injected(Scene&)
7. UnityEditor.Experimental.Lightmapping:Bake(Scene)

As a result, no probe assets are created.

This doesnt seem to happen when running the same script from the editor.

To bake the scenes, we are simple iterating over all of the desired ones and baking them in this manner

Code (CSharp):

1.                 Scene sceneToProcess = EditorSceneManager.OpenScene(AssetDatabase.GUIDToAssetPath(assetReference.AssetGUID),
2.                                                                     OpenSceneMode.Single);
3.  
4.                 SceneManager.SetActiveScene(sceneToProcess);
5.                 Lightmapping.Bake(sceneToProcess);
6.                 EditorSceneManager.SaveScene(sceneToProcess);
7.                 EditorSceneManager.CloseScene(sceneToProcess, true);

We are using 2022.1.11f1

Thanks
Chris

 

Hello,

While debugging some of our struggles with getting probes to bake programmatically, we encountered an issue where the ProbeVolume UI was always saying the volume had changed all the time.

Upon stepping through, it appears that ProbeVolume.GetHashCode is not stable through Unity restarts, and specifically objectLayerMask.GetHashCode() is the issue.

This doesn't seem to be doing what is desired as there is no LayerMask implementation, so it ends up doing a Object GetHashCode which is scary, and changes each unity run. Perhaps LayerMask needs a hash implementation, or LayerMask.value.GetHashCode is desired here.

Thanks,
Chris

 

I've also been testing out the APV and I wish that any probe volume added to the hierarchy in the current scene is added to the baking sets of the currently open scene, which should make life so much easier.

Also, it would be nice if there was a button to add the currently loaded scene because if you have a lot of scenes in your project, that list gets very long

 

isn't that how it currently works? as long as the scene are included in baking sets any probe volume in scene hierarchy are automatically added into the baking sets.

i second this, also drag and drop scene file/s into the baking sets scene list

 

I'm not entirely sure about the auto appending of the APV, but I don't like how they don't stay within the bounds I set, especially for characters.

 

what do you mean by the probe not stay within the bounds? character? can you show screenshot?

 

Like this.

 

this is somehow related to the subdivision. if you increase the lowest subdivision level, it would start filling in the blank area. The placing algorithm in 2021.x does not seem to be very advanced yet. I read somewhere in this thread that there are lots of improvements in later versions.

 

I'll be keeping an eye out. I love how it cuts down the time that would usually be reserved for placing probes

 

ah @francescoc_unity already explained above about that one.
also it kinda remind me of Forza probe placement

i think Need for speed GI Probe also using similar placement, not uniform grid probe

 

This was a very interesting video and a neat way to optimize their usage. For example, if I were doing a fighting game level, a majority of the probes would be in the fight area and I would have a sparse volume for props and buildings.

I would use this for the terrain and foliage

 

Scrolling around the source code I've noticed that the lightmapper can also output octahedral depth values for each probe (64 values per probe). Is there any info on what layout is being outputted? Currently can't make sense of it. Forum thread: https://forum.unity.com/threads/lay...values-from-getadditionalbakedprobes.1332096/

Also, will they ever be used in APV for leak reduction a-la Nvidia's DDGI?

 

No problem

https://unity3d.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/2/IN-15727

 

@francescoc_unity any updates on when URP support might happen?

 

Is there a Changelog on APV Iterations and/or Info on which APV Version can be found in which Unity Editor Version?

 

No luck there: https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.core@15.0/changelog/CHANGELOG.html
Cant find anything APV specific, just some sparse Notes regarding Probes in generel.

 

Oh I was wrong apv don't place probe at surface only lol. There is probably something to investigate here.

 

Are we able to access APV data from within Shader Graph? Is this integrated into any of existing nodes, like Baked GI?

 

Hello,

We have been having an intermittent issue with APV where the scene ambience flickers based on the camera direction (neither of the flicker states are actually correct, either). It seems that probe based lighting works fine for us as soon as it is baked, but after reloading the scene, APV never seem to work again.

I have attached an image of the correct (straight after bake) lighting, and the two bad lighting states (obtained by wiggling the camera)

In this test scene, the house and grass use probes.

Unity 2022.1.11f1

 

I have also noticed sometimes we get long streaks of broken probes.

 

It seems that GI dimmer option in volumetric fog is not working when using APV, 2023.1, haven't tested previous versions
It was an old project I upgraded to 2023, not sure if that has something to do with it

edit: seems to work on a different project, so maybe false positive

 

Does this mean it's also not planned? I guess it would make sense to integrate this.

 

APV has changed so much in 2023, that the initial instructions in post 1 of this thread is totally useless.

I figured out how to enable it in HDRP settings/asset and add it to the scene, but then to actually generate and use it, I can't figure that out...

I'm also using raytracing in my scene by the way and I have a large sttic building only in scene with a single ligth saource, namely the sun (directional light)

 

Frankly I dont know what is going on after I placed the APV
I deleted it since I could not get it to work.

Now I placed it back in again to screesnhot my settings to you, however now its even worse as my sy sun is stuck on realtime and I cant switch it to mix for unknown reasons.

My sun (stuck on realtime)


My probe volume (no matter what I do, that baked message does not go away)


Lighting settings:

 

if I press bake, it has some data, although it says 0 B:


show probes, but I dont see any:

 

tick baked global illumination in settings

 

ok, but then it will just bake regular light maps isnt it?