APOLLO (Light Based Shaders) Official Forum

Welcome to APOLLO (Light Based Shaders) official forum

Here you can ask questions, post your work and follow every new update of the package.


Find APOLLO on Unity Asset Store
New APOLLO mirror shaders are now available on Unity Asset Store






















(Pure screenshot with no image effects. APOLLO shaders on the LEFT Unity Standard shader on the RIGHT)

APOLLO packages which are coming soon:

(Toon shading )


(Light based Unlit shader)


(Soft and Hard toon shading )


(Next Gen Car shaders)




LATEST UPDATES FOR THE MAIN APOLLO PACKAGE:
*Subsurface shader included
*New Real-Time Ambient Lighting

NEXT UPDATE:
*Anisotropic shading

 

I actually have no idea what a light based shader is. Can you explain with a comparison of venefits vs. the standard shader?

 

Hello Rajmahal,

Light based is a name that I decided to give to my shaders as I wanted to focus on how light really interacts with a material. It is a PBR alternative as I wasn't satisfied with Unity's standard shading. It has more Lighting options and it reveals Unity's real GI power







Here is an example to highlight the deference between APOLLO's and Unity's standard shader. Both images have been rendered under the same settings and image effects. You also need to know that APOLLO can imitate Unity's standard shader at any time, just by changing the settings. But Unity can't reach APOLLO's shading results.



APOLLO PBR is also compatible with Mobile and VR and there will be more shaders that will set Unity's rendering to its best use Here is a skin shading which is going to be on the package in the next few months.

 

Thanks ... it certainly looks nice. Is there a performance impact vs. The standard shader?

 

The main shader is a bit lighter than Unity but you can get a way faster perfomance by using the mobile shaders. Especially if you don't need effects like AO, emission, parallax etc.

 

Hi Rispat could you elaborate on Prometheus option? Does it work somewhat like SSS, or Translunency? I noticed its great for waxed wood panels, although im not sure why

 

Hi bugaj! Prometheus is neither like SSS or Transulancy. As you mentioned it works great for wood and some other kind of materials like cardboard. This is because lighting plays an important role on how those materials look like. Transulancy will emit light on the other side of the shader like if it is passing through but in the case of promitheus those materials are kinda emitting light while absorbing it. This will create a more saturated result to the texture's colors and it will make the material look even more "alive" regarding its lighting nature. Or by being more reflective it will make a wood look like it is waxed (because of the saturation).

 

thanks can you explain how it is emmiting light? you are not talking about emmisive materials, right?

 

It is not actually emitting light. It is increasing its own brightness through the texture's colors

 

The latest version of APOLLO is here! Check out the new more accurate Metal shading and get ready for the new Updates I am working on!

Also! Let me know your opinion and get the chance to earn one of my Narcissus packages for free!

 

I am intrigued. Is this compatible with the screen space reflections included with Unity's Post Processing Stack?

 

Sure! Unity's SSR is compatible with APOLLO and it is connected to the shader's glossiness. All you need to do is activate the specular highlights in the shader and set the camera rendering to Deferred.

 

That's great. Is there any plan to support tessellation in the future? Along with SSR, tessellation is quickly becoming the industry standard and it's difficult to make much of anything without it.

 

Sure thing! Tessellation is on its way I will have to finalize all standard shaders and then I will start modifying to work with Tessellation and other effects.

 

One last question (until I think of more): will this package be continuously updated, or are you going to charge more for future updates and all these additional shaders you're talking about like skin, grass, foliage, etc?

 

The price will remain the same for any update I will make in the future. Although I will publish additional APOLLO packages regarding Stylized shaders etc.

 

Do they work on the Mac? OpenGL core / metal?

 

Yep!

 

APOLLO BETA.3 is now available on Unity Asset Store!

What's new:
*Issues fixed
*All scripts converted to C# with an updated layout
*Finalized Metallic Shading
*New Shader optimization and better rendering
*New Transparent + Cutout Shading

 

Unity2017.1.0f3
Color Space = Gamma (Good)
Color Space = Linear(Bad)
Future plans to support it?

 

Hi Maskvp,

Have you update the package to its latest version? Also be sure to adjust the light manager settings. It seems that the Add light value is too high. Lighting will work differently between Linear and Gamna color. Be sure to adjust the light manager settings to your preference.

Can you send me a picture of the light manager settings?

 

C

Here is the scene in Linear Color with deferent Light Manager Settings

 

It`s OK TKS! ^_^

 

1. I need a demo.

I've been burnt many times on the store. I need a demo and it should have a button that legitimately switches from Unity standard shaders to APOLO. I would also like it to have a button to turn off all post processing. Is this possible in the near future?

2. Is there a way to quickly switch the entire scene to using your shaders? I expect something like a Unity-standard-shader analogue to quickly switch all of my shaders to and then add or modify those I want afterwards. Will your shaders work with only the standard set of mettalic PBR textures? Or do they absolutely require extra texture/res?

3. You need more technical details.
Unity's shading system does not exist in vacuum. Models in Unity actually look exactly like those in Substance Painter and Substance Painter is THE industry standard. And now you come into play and argue that they are all wrong. This raises big suspicions in my mind:

a) You package may work, but it might produce huge technical bugs in the long run. Things like occasional massive frame drops, etc. I know how Unity's pipeline is setup. All of my artwork partially revolves around that pipeline's limitations. I can guess that you at least have a custom shader for GBuffer writing stage and a custom shader for the lighting stage. Because you use additional textures and Unity's GBuffer only has like a few unused bits, you may be rendering geometry more than once during GBuffer stage and your system likely has a larger GBuffer, which requires more VRam. Extra geometry pass and a larger GBuffer are huge issues and if I am even partially right in my theory I MUST ALREADY HAVE READ ABOUT THIS, instead no technical details are easily available.

b) On some pictures (esp the one with the metal statues) you show DRASTIC differences, which seem implausible without changes to lighting and/or introducing an extra texture on top. That screenshot actually creates a feeling that you are using two different texture sets instead of a new set of shaders. Please explain this better.

c) Transparent objects that are lit and receive shadows is a TREMENDOUS system. I KNOW why they are impossible in Unity - the shadow map simply DOES NOT EXIST after you switched to rendering another shadow casting light and transparency blending cannot be performed until you finish the lighting faze. You need to explain the way that system works and what are its limitations.

4. In light of the Scriptable Rendering Pipeline announcement, what are your plans of integrating your shaders into the new rendering system? What you are selling is a lifetime commitment and I need to know whether you plan ahead.

In short, please write a detailed description on how your stuff works.

 

Looks amazing!

Do you have an update on the skin shader? Can you estimate how much longer?

 

Hi wetcircuit!

I am currently working on the APOLLO refractive shader that will come with the next update! The Skin shader will come right after that. I will first have to make sure that everything works as I want before uploading all shaders on the store

Here is a picture of the Refractive shader I am working:

 

It's not available in assetstore. What happened?

"Unfortunately, APOLLO (Light Based Shaders) BETA.3 is no longer available."

 

Hi there!

In APOLLO BETA_2 I updated the package by converting all unity scripts into C#. Unfortunately one small script stayed inside, so Unity deprecated the package. I removed the script amd submitted the package again. It will be soon back with us in a few days

 

This is interesting.. but I would like to see a demo that compares directly with unity's one. Performance indicator is must too.

 

Good questions by @cubrman, I had many similar ones.

 

AMAZING !

 

Very impressed after playing with Apollo for an hour. Very excited about non-static!

 

Hi,

I am very impressed by the results I have seen with the content you provided.

Some questions:

A) Is it feasible to render a entire scene with this shader? So far I have only sceen single objects with Skymap.

B) Does light baking still work with this shader? Will it look differently?

C) Are reflection probes and light probes supported / needed?

D) Is the shaders technology specially made for static / non-static objects?

E) Can it use Forward Rendering, Deferred or both?

F) Are there scenarios where you would not recommend using this shader over Unity's?

G) Do the default settings match Unitys Standard Shader? Or how would you recommend texturing in a third party programm like Substance Painter or Mari and get exact the look that you saw there?


Sorry for the many questions but I am really intrigued by your package and especially look forward to the Skin Shader

 

Hi BPR! Thank you for the questions.

A)You can definately render a while scene with APOLLO. I am recently working on the creation of some mobile game examples where people can see how PBR works on mobile. Also I am looking to cooperate with other artist to make some bigger scenes examples.

B)The light baking remains the same. Although APOLLO will give you more options on how the scene is lighted. It will enhans the colors of your model and it will reveal the true power of Unity lightmaping

C)Apollo has it's own Reflection prob system along with a cubmap maker. You can also use the custom lightdrops but the new update will bring an even more effective lighting solution for your characters that can also be supported for mobile.

D) The shader is made for both static and non static objects.

E) You can use both Forward and Deferred Rendering but you need to adjust the settings of the Light Manager each time to feet your needs.

F) Nop. APOLLO also supports optimized shaders for mobiles and VR. Something that let you customize your scene even more without missing any lighting value or PBR effect.

G) For making the shader as unique as it is not everything matches Unity standard shader set up. The textures you need in the other hand are maps tgat these engine are making. Roughness and Metalnes need to be in Greyscale. In the future I will make an edition that will use the RGB values of a texture for more optimazation. The look will be the same and even better when lightmaping is used

I hope I answerd all of your questions. Feel free to ask me again gor anything you need.

Best,

Rispat

 

Thank you for your fast and extensive answer.
I just purchased it and hope to put it to good use in one of my upcoming projects.
Please keep up the good work and consider making a good Hair Shader in the future too

Kind regards,
BPR

 

Thank you for downloading APOLLO! I will definately create a hair shader in the near future

Best,
Rispat

 

Hi, I have an console error conflict with another asset (which unfortunately is my architecture building asset in Unity). Since the overlap appears to be with lightbaking, I don't want to start hacking away at the asset folder to resolve the conflict… Do you have any advice? Thank you.

Code (CSharp):

1. Assets/Archimatix/Scripts/Editor/NodeGraph/RenderCubemapWizard.cs(5,14): error CS0101: The namespace `global::' already contains a definition for `RenderCubemapWizard'

 

It seams you have the same name for a function called "RenderCubemapWizard" You need ro change this name in one of your scripts. In the next update I have give unique names to all APOLLO scripts to avoid this issue in the future.

 

The reflection textue is too large.

 

H yaboo, This is caused due the position of the camera. You can fix it by scaling your environment to fit the cubemap texture or you have to move your camera. If you need realtime reflection you can use Unity's SSR image effect which is controlled by the Specular highlights of the APOLLO shaders

 

Hi !
I've got some questions:

1. Is it possible to use this shader on webgl 1.0 ?

2. How does the shader perform in gamma rendering ? Do you have corrections for things like, dielectrics picking up basecolor in specular reflections ?

3.Would i be able to use Shaderforge or some other node based Shader editor, to extend your range of Shaders ? I'd like to do things like constructing basecolor texture out of a few masks and color Inputs.

4. Is it compatible with SSAA ? Madgoats package on the unity store.

5. Can you do a comprehensive Tutorial showing what you can do with those shaders and what your intents were when creating these ? Do you have a documentation that goes into more depth ?

Thanks in advance for answering these and keep doing your magic

 

Will this work with amplify occlusion. Color etc?

I am looking for some decent pbr deferred renderer that is faster than the unity one. It also needs to support the image effects that works with standard unity pbr workflow.

Will this asset work on the consoles ?

 

dose it need unity's pre-compute to achieve this effect?

 

Yes! In the left image we see how the GI is affecting Unity's standard shader and on the right we see the results of the APOLLO.

 

Hi there! APOLLO shaders work with every image effect. Although please note that the SSR effect is connected to the shader's specular highlights. APOLLO is compatible with every console

 

Thanks for the reply.

Can you let me know about Apollo's performance compared to standard unity specular work flow shader? Is it faster? If so by how much?

Does it support Unity standard pbr specular work flow map? ( not metal )

 

Also you mention about usage of deferred rendering. So do I have to change the internal unity's deferred rendering lighting shader with the one from Apollo? For forward rendering, this is easy because the lighting will be done with the rendered object's shader but for deferred, there is dedicated deferred lighting pipeline?

 

Nop! You don't have to make any changes. The shader will work for deferred shading as it is. The lighting results will only different based on the Light Managet settings.

 

APOLLO standard shader is a bit faster from Unity's standard shader but it even supports PBR shaders for mobile. APOLLO doesn't uses or imitates Unity's standard specular workflow but it gives you the ability to have the same results.

 

Oh.. ok?

But I am still not sold.. how do you manage to do different deferred rendering lighting? Unless... you change Unity's internal deferred lighting rendering shader? Can you explain how Apollo handles the deferred rendering internally? I need to understand how this rendering pipeline works, before I can purchase it. What part of the rendering are you doing custom wise for deferred rendering? Are you using a surface shader? How does Apollo's deferred rendering different from the Unity's default one?