ArchViz tips - Let's make Unity better than ever! (Photorealism)

Everyone's a critic..

 

LOL, and unity's high quality anti aliasing, cough cough! Will keep that in mind for the next scene though.

 

Hey its a Eames chair, it deserves love

 

@ShadowK did you use shader graph when you did your scene with HDRP? If so what was your thoughts?

 

I didn't chief, I used a shader / lighting framework on top of Unity that I half arsed years ago because I didn't have the full understanding to get it working right.. Looks pretty in a screen shot, not so much in practice.

 

Hello all
I am Newcomer in unity forum. I use unity for archviz like you.

in Archviz we should rounded edge for more photorealism and have good AA but when I round edge in SketchUp and transfer model in unity Problem occurs.
I have a problem in generating UV2 with unity and I wanna to know Which method do you use for UV2?
in fact, the "generate lightmap UVs" of unity ignore small polygon and its bad for me. do you have any solution in unity?

My thread for this problem :
https://forum.unity.com/threads/limitation-of-polygon-size-in-geneate-lightmap-uvs.534309/

 

Have you experimented with the sliders under the lightmap uv generation settings in the import settings of the model?

 

Finally someone gets my daily duties on these forums.

 

I'm getting mixed messages there.

I think his question wasn't about the normals but about the lightmap UVs of the very thin polygons on those rounded edges. Imho your example solves a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place if the data is properly setup and exported in the 3D tool used to generate the mesh.

 

thanks for your replay.
the sliders under lightmap UV generation settings has 4 option and None of them Are not benefit for this issue.
you can test this easily :
draw the standard box, for example, 2*2*6 meter. now round one of edge with 3 millimeters and transform box to unity And up to end.

for your Comfort, I upload the example box (FBX and SKP, and unity project ) :

test small polygon .rar

thanks for your replay in advance.

 

@iamthwee

thanks for your replay.
it was not my problem. please see my last post.

 

It's really hard to get answers to your questions outside the general forum. Which is funny since it's not supposed to be used for support

 

No it's not. As a mod I see most people get support outside of general. General is where people get "support" for things they don't know they need "support" with. Does that make sense? This thread is a giant and useless mess, but it helps people orient at least.

I wouldn't call it support even slightly. Definitely a general topic about graphics with a very impressive title (which wasn't before I got to it).

 

I ment for example why I posted earlier about my problem or Nabi_sarvi about his, very rare I get any response to my questions, like

https://forum.unity.com/threads/strange-lighting-error-in-baked-lightmap.531720/#post-3516070

 

Guys, guys, let's keep it on subject.

This is like 6 posts in a row now with no screenshots. Unacceptable!

 

Keep up with the great work hippo, your spam busting services and edits are most appreciated.

Screenshots coming don't you worry pal!

 

That's because 90% of unity users who aren't making games or doing anything productive hang out in the general forums. . . Oh wait isn't that. . . Anyway logging off to throw together some more screenies for you guys.

 

Child's room with variations, not happy with overall look but it'll do for now, a lot of these are overexposed because of the spot light but meh. I'll fix next time, baked with enlighten of course.

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Maybe bathroom or kitchen next.

 

I tried and I can't find a solution that makes automatic lightmap uv generation work better with your mesh, but I think you're overdoing it with the poligon based edge smoothing anyway. I would suggest to try something like this and then just set all the normals to smooth. It'll save you a lot of polygons and at normal viewing distances should look the same or possibly better at farther distances:

 

Quick Living room fireplace test, this time baked with PLM

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Just putting together an Emission control test but I'm having major issues with light leaking with this one. Hmmm. Back to the drawing board for more tweaks.

 

Why do these look so surreal? There is some over exposure for sure, but something else is going on there I think.

Are the materials miscalibrated?

 

@iamthwee

It looks good, but one of the spoilers when it comes to realism is post processing.. You've got a bit of washout due to excessive lighting and / or bloom, I wouldn't even bother with chromatic abberation.

 

Yeah I was thinking that, it almost looks cartoony - which for that particular picture I actually like, oddly enough, I was just experimenting with the post pro effects a bit too much. The materials probably ain't proper PBR - also the models themselves are kinda surreal too.

Good points, I guess I like to have things over exposed but it is definitely something that can be worked on.

 

Very nice work!
Can you post some information about light / baking time and an editor screen with lights placement ?

 

Will do, I'm actually going update my git repo so you can just download the room with the lights and post processing effects preconfigured, but at the moment I'm still not entirely happy with the settings as pointed out by ShadowK.

 

thanks, martin for your reply and The amount of time you spent.
round or fillet edge make magic in rendering. I do this always in my offline work :
https://goo.gl/QS3uai

but in the game engine, i do not have enough experience and I started to read an article and saw this one :
https://80.lv/articles/lighting-magic-with-unity-5/

According to this article, rounding edge is necessary for unity too.
your method is very Wisely but my general problem is ignoring small polygon in the generation of Uv lightmap in unity
perhaps the " unit Berlin" Conference is for solving this bug (Shout to Unanswering my thread by the moderate )

 

hello hippocoder.
english is not my first language and I do not get your approach correctly.

I should do which work for giving the answer to my issue ? in this thread :
https://forum.unity.com/threads/limitation-of-polygon-size-in-geneate-lightmap-uvs.534309/

thanks in advance.

 

I was wondering how the absolute best of breed arc vis works and what goes into it.

Came across this while looking into Ikea catalogs (as an example of absolute best of breed arc vis).

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Not really useful from the standpoint of someone trying to work with Unity, but I found the discussion of materials to be really interesting (~2:30)

The level of detail they look for is kind of incredible.

This one is a high level overview of the corporate process. One of the interesting points is that they started a training program that took 3 years to train photographers in 3d art and 3d artists in photography.

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The 3 year investment in their people's skills blew me away.

 

I did see that previously yes, and I think the level of detail they go into is mind blowing. Probably even a tad too much for a photograph shot IMO.

The thing is light-mapping a scene is different to rendering a 'shot.' When rendering a shot, the mesh can have insane amounts of vertices poor topology and doesn't even need to be uv-unwrapped. Oh and the lighting solutions don't even have to 'unbiased' -vray certainly isn't unbiased, but it certainly approaches realism.

You can use vray to generate the lightmaps and import into unity, not something I've done but I've seen, looks like it would take a long time. The point is, so far it is difficult to get an archviz quality with PLM or enlighten, I'm trying to figure it out, but it's not easy.

Sometimes I think enlighten, other times PLM, I'm looking at more intricate meshes with just a plain white material and all manner of problems are exposed. . . Throw in baked emitters and that opens another can of worms.



The way I see it, is the light-mapping tool is going to have the most impact when getting close to hyper realism here, the materials and post effects are just fluff to take it to the next level.

Also, we're impatient as game devs. Who wants to wait for a 4096 light map to build at a 120 resolution with final gather? I'm guessing although I'm not sure, unreal engine takes a long time to build archviz quality scenes because it must mimics the way vray or unbiased renders, light a scene.

I did see they've got someone working on GPU lightmass.

https://forums.unrealengine.com/development-discussion/rendering/1460002-luoshuang-s-gpulightmass

I wonder if @ShadowK has a chance to check that one out or neggy. Maybe they don't even care, because you probably wouldn't make a game with such level of baked details anyway.

It looks comparable to Unity's GPU promised light mapping tool.

Also, I guess 'portals' would be useful as well particularly for archViz.

 

My money is on the artist's skill having more to do with it, the other things are just tools.

Haven't watched the video but I've read an article about that in the past. Their stuff is among the best that I know because with most of their images in their catalogues I can't with 100% certainty tell what is a photo and what is a rendering. Before I read about it I thought they are all photos. Their training approach makes sense because archviz experts sit at the intersection of several different disciplines. Someone who only knows one of these really well but e.g. lacks in interior design knowledge or makes weak photographic compositions, will still not be able to compete with the best in the area, because they're really good at all those things.
I briefly considered switching over and specializing in archviz, but it looked like job opportunities in that field where on a downtrend and I wasn't really enjoying working in that direction so I quickly abandoned that thought.

 

@AndersMalmgren check that thread - there's an example that looked like your tile problem. Seems like it's a resolution issue.

 

I responded to you in the my thread about it @frosted

Have you guys seen the work of Jeryce Dianingana? He is a god at this

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/rB2qL

 

PLM vs Enlighten again.

As I was saying default mat, white 0 metallic 0 smoothess, setting kept the same, no post effects.

PLM - obviously not fully baked

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Enlighten

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Musings. . . I'm not sure if cranking up final gather to a much higher setting would match the quality of PLM. So I'm going to investigate that next???

 

Final gather ray count set to something higher 2025

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@iamthwee

I think your shadows from example table legs looks good, my looks like this,makes the table leg look detached from the floor, tips?

 

Another example, look at the left pillars

 

Last image didnt post for some reason, here it looks really bad

 

Its not open world but alot more open than Archviz



The two pillars from above pic are in red circle Resultion is 40, which results in 1.22 gigs of lightmaps

 

Kitchen scene, some materials still need to be worked on, will update later. Enlighten again.

Lots of issues with black spots on this one, I think I need to increase the lightmap res on the smaller items.

Spoiler

 

A few things to note, the only way to fix the seaming issues inside enlighten is to bake with a higher lightmap res, I prolly went a bit awol with 500, but at least it worked, possibly something in-between 150-250 would be fine. On the other hand stitch seams with PLM will work at lower lightmap resolutions but the downside is longer bakes.

Spoiler

 

Most issues are to do with meshes and UVs and NOT enlighten

After racking my brains for almost an hour with tweaking the lightmap settings I realised most issues are to do with YOUR mesh and preparation, I noticed some black spots behind the painting and couldn't figure out what was causing it. After deleting the mesh and remodelling and uvunwrapping inside blender- making sure the normals are kosher etc, all lightmapping issues were fixed. Same with the towel you see in the scene below.

The trouble was, it wasn't evident inside blender. So that was another important finding for me.

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Cooking this mofo with PLM lightmap res 5000 lol and proper materials now - bake time ~3hrs on ma mac-mini

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^Bear in mind that was with prioritise view as well so the rest of the scene is even more noisy AF

 

Bathroom AAA scene test to follow just hitting the gym will be back later boys and girls. . .

 

Oh yeah I forgot to add the pasta inside the jar has a S*** tonne of vertices, so obviously that's gonna shoot up bake times, if you need that level of detail in your archviz shot - fine, just be aware of that otherwise it is a good idea to simplify with decimate modifier or just remove that mofo altogether!

Spoiler

 

@iamthwee Were are you getting all models from, your own?

 

You're really configuring PLM very wrong it seems. 5000 texel density per meter? I doubt going over 100 (1 pixel per cm) ever makes sense unless you're doing weird macro shots.

 

Yup, I figured that, I'm just throwing different values into the lighting engines to see what works best - it's pretty random TBH as I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing so this is kinda like a discovery thread, thing is there are some very intricate objects in that scene e.g the pasta but 5000 was prolly overkill. In any case that kinda detail will probably go unnoticed anyway, and yeah it's PLM so there's that.

 

That looks photorealistic to me.

 

You think? I feel there is still a lot of improvements to be made. Maybe I just set the bar too high.

In any case this isn't suitable for games by any means, in case anyone was wondering.