Blacksmith demo?

The Blacksmith demo is awesome, but I have to say I'm a little disheartened that the description says it used "special custom" code for shadows, environmental scattering, hair and skin shaders, motion blur, color correction, and possibly more, rather than using any of the effects that actually ship with Unity 5. Any chance we'll ever get access to any of this stuff? And why do you guys keep making demos with secret better effects than what you sell? It seems silly to spend dev hours making polished versions of your own effects but then not actually selling them.

 

Well it's butterfly demo all over again, if you're going to demo a product demo the product. Not a product that could be, or should be.

Playing devil's advocate, you could do this sort of thing with Lux / Marmoset and SSR in Unity 4 anyway. There's not a massive difference between the two versions, if you look at the sheer amount of tech and lighting options in UE it's mind boggling.

 

I think I heard some part of this demo will be available in a few months / weeks. Lets hope those shaders and some of the fancy extra features would be part of it...

 

I believe they said it involved features that won't be included until later in the 5.x cycle, so I doubt the demo will be available for a while.

 

If they include some of it in a later 5.x version it would be great. But if I recall, all the work from the Butteryfly Demo just sort of disappeared and never got released which seems like a waste.

 

So you mean when they showed how to reproduce the scene from the Blacksmith demo seemingly illustrating it could be done right in the U5 that can now be downloaded... that copy actually had special shaders or something else inside it?

 

Well, all the lighting and everything they showed does work. The things that aren't included are the post effects, like the blur and bloom filters, the better shadows, the sky effects (atmospheric scattering), etc. They go over what's "custom" and what's not here: http://unity3d.com/pages/the-blacksmith

 

Where did you get that idea from? We got loads of stuff from the butterfly demo, 64 bit editor being the most obvious.

If anything it's better they do it this way as they can see the weaknesses of the engine first hand and figure out what to prioritise for the 5.x cycle.

 

The 64-bit editor didn't come out of the Butterfly Demo; that's been in the works forever. There was a ton of stuff made just for the Butterfly Demo (which showed up at the beginning of Unity 4) that never saw the light of day: the IBL framework (Unity 5 uses Enlighten instead, not the code Unity wrote), all the new shaders like the skin and hair, subsurface scattering, blend shapes support, much better DoF/bloom, explosion effects, etc.

 

WHat I'm interested about are the character setups used in the demo. I'm searching around for some info on this. Vital for me as a character artist Would I have to use Skyshop? I love the standalone Marmoset and thought this is where Unity 5 was headed.

 

I'm too tired to get into the full debate about demos and shipping right now.

But I can certainly say that there were some very, very encouraging posts in the beta forum in recent weeks, as it applies to post effects. For example check out some of the Joachim Ante replies on both pages of this thread about SSR:

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/ssrr-request-from-community.297961/

 

Everything they used will come in 5.X
Just like it did with the butterfly demo. Oh wait.
Don't worry, everything will come in 6.X!

 

Does anyone else get errors with Viking Village demo? And warnings stating Unity Pro only?

 

Even if it has a lot of custom shaders, it still shows what the engine can do. If you really want a hair shader or motion blur then you can make them in Unity (btw unity pro had motion blur but it sucked anyway so you better maked your own). They can't add every possible shader else graphics programmers would lose there job

 

I'm fine with demos that can actually be done with the version of Unity they are shipping/selling to us. Not with future or experimental versions of Unity that contains custom features that never see the daylight.

 

Well that's the key, providing a solid base to tweak. If I want something different from UE's standard setup which looks fantastic already I have all the tools necessary. Although generally it looks so good there's little reason to do so.

It's preferable when it becomes a choice, not a necessity.

 

I totally agree that having the freedom to customise is extremely important. What I don't get is that you paid a guy to make a better version of, for example, your Motion Blur effect, but you ship the old one instead for some reason. The work is already done and paid for; why not ship the improved image effects instead of the old version?

 

As far as I know there are improved image effects on the way, as stated by Joachim Ante in these forums.

 

Yeah hopefully these will show up sooner or later. I'm a little hesitant after the effects from the Butterfly Demo never surfaced, but who knows? Also, the Blacksmith kind of reminds me of the Nameless One from Planescape, so maybe this is a sign that Unity actually had released the effects multiple times in the past but then kept using wishes to undo the past because the better effects had unintended consequences that forever altered our fates. Yeah, now that I think about it, that's probably the real reason.

 

Wow. It's like the witcher 3 meets Ryse.

Very impressive. Unity 5 is capable of some really beautiful stuff in the right hands.

 

That was exactly what I thought, when I saw that.
It definitely shows that Unity5 is capable of triple A graphics, given you have the skillful people.

 

Why not release those demo asset as a separate assetspackage some kind of the StandartAssets. No need to include all of the graphic assets, at least the custom shaders and tools(except the sequencer of course) as an additional package would be a great way to learn unity. Really interested with all of those custom shaders since we doesn't have any built in solution at the moment.

 

Question is what happens if you add a world the size of Witcher 3 around it. Not that I want to make it bad, but rendering 2 characters or a whole world is a huge difference.

 

Anyone?

 

Then it all goes to hell, but generally this is the case with most engines. The only one I've found that can really pull it off is CryEngine and you need a medal if you can use it properly.

 

I'd assume that having such a huge world, needs some careful optimization and good coders. I doubt there is any engine, where you simply can drop a huge terrain with thousands of assets into and then it immediately works.
At least Unity 5 is 64bit now and has a profiler. So I guess it is possible.

But what do I know. I have set some realistic goals for my games, that don't need decades to get done

 

Just chiming in to say that I reaaaaaaaaaaaaaally enjoyed watching the video (for the 5th time now). You guys did a hell of a job on that demo. I hope you have plans for more!

 

If we can't get the files, how about a Postmortem for BlackSmith demo? with complete breakdown

 

I think this was one of the sessions at GDC... It'll probably be available online eventually.

 

isn't that unfair that the demo uses non-standard stuff and claim to be a technical demo? Same like I show a video how fast my porsche is but I silence that I modified the engine by nitrogen extension which is non standard.

 

Why would it be unfair if its technically possible with the current version? Did you even read the thread?

And if you like analogies, with every post you do in various threads you just seem to be more and more like a football hooligan that goes to a match just to provoke people and get a fight started and not caring about the match. Why don't you go back to your UE4 forums or the cave where you came from

 

Actually I never use any Unity shaders, I write my own, but luckily they give you all the source for the shaders to create your own custom stuff!

So yeah, so far I have 5 custom standard shaders, just for all the little things I wanted my way...as I'm sure was the case when the team was doing this demo...although I did see somewhere that they were releasing the demo, and also some alternative standard shaders for skin and other stuff...so be patient!

 

Ah so you only used custom shaders? Ah okay. Sorry I understand, and by seeing the demo, I thought that you are using a different light engine and a special shadow system, not standard unity. But I think Iam wrong.

 

Yeah, I almost never use the built-in unity shaders, they are just way too basic. The standard shader in Unity 5.0 is much better than before, but I find myself rewriting it anyway into something I can actually understand and customize. I doubt there's a game out there that is using nothing but built-in unity shaders

 

It only looks like custom shaders to me and to be honest, not far off what the standard one would do, I only modify because I like to have specific shaders for Road, with only Road relative settings for example, I might tweak the lighting functions a little too, but not much.

 

Excuse me, but this sounds to me like some marketing b*******. Just open source this and butterfly demo and everyone will be happy. Not "bits and pieces", give us whole damn project.

 

but why should they? Yeah, it may be nice to have, but a lot of the tech behind it is still work-in-progress and some of it slated for later 5.x release.
Anyway, there's a real disconnect here between what you've already been given, for free, and this entitlement attitude that you should be able to get everything in the world "just because".

 

Are those PowerVR Ray Trace Shadows used on the Blacksmith demo? are the plans for integrating it still comming in Unity 5 to have a Better shadow engine?

Or at least make it available on the Asset Store...

 

Simple, because Unreal do it and it's a great learning practice. Shaders and lighting are the second most important thing to the actual artwork itself and they are both extremely difficult subjects to get right.

It's fine having a starting point but you'll need several years to really study the latest and greatest white papers on how all this works to get it right.

 

This.....

 

Well they are releasing it when they are ready so, it's just a case of being patient, it would be pointless them releasing something if they haven't fully tested it, documented it or anything, people will just complain...I mean they gave away all the pro features and people complained...

 

Well, it uses some of U5 features that are yet to be released, but I think there should be more shaders in default Unity installation. Those are hard to code (at best I can make shader that fills whole screen or object with single color - and I need GLSL/HLSL manual for that!) and not everyone can do it on their own/buy shaders or "shader maker" like Shader Forge. IMO material editor, similar to Shader Forge or one found in Unreal is the way to go. I mean, I was far more productive with it than with writing shader in a text editor. Shaders are visual thing. Code isn't. Visual and non-visual things shouldn't be mixed.

And yes, Standard PBR shader is great and very versatile, but "shader generators" are the way to go IMO. They give you ability to make literally any shader that you want, not only configure existing one.

 

You're misunderstanding the problem. Unity has a habit of creating demos to showcase their engine. It might even be appropriate to suggest that they are trying to pass the demos off as what Unity is capable of out of the box. Yet these demos typically cannot function without extensive custom-made code that is not included with Unity.

Unreal's demos, by comparison, showcase exactly what the engine is capable of and are given away to anyone who wishes to see them. Further any resources used to create them are fair game for developers to use in their own projects. This includes commercialization.

If Unity wishes to keep their demos private that's their choice but they need to understand some of us are completely disregarding the content they show. It simply cannot be trusted to represent the out-of-box capabilities of Unity.

 

Except this isn't the case here, as Silvia already stated above.
The only thing not currently possible from the demo in Unity 5.0 is the "Director Tool", which looks perfectly feasible to create yourself if you so wish, and will be available in 5.x.

Calling it false advertising, when it's a game engine where you are required to create your own content, is just incorrect really. The only thing that makes the blacksmith demo not possible right now is developer skill.

 

Except it is using custom-written shaders to achieve that. Shaders that are no Standard Shader or any shader bundled with Unity or released by Unity on the asset store.

 

I don't consider this to be a good excuse. If they want to showcase their engine, they should be using tech that is available at the time of release. If they feel part of a demo won't be ready to leave R&D, they should avoid showing that particular part.

The presenter stated that it used Unity 5's new capabilities and that it was showing how far they felt a small team could push the engine. He could have stated that part of the demo's tech was still in R&D, but that would somewhat defeat the purpose of such a demo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=fmu6rzYDt1w#t=643

 

AFAIK people are still waiting for infiltrator. Just saying.

 

Custom written shaders are normal and done in nearly all games and there is nothing wrong with that as it's usually the best way to make best game/scene specific performance and visual quality. In UE you do with the material editor and with Unity you write it or use things like ShaderForge. It's not false advertising.

 

Uh, so where's our shader editor that's super optimised for 21 platforms