[DEPRECATED] PIDI Planar Reflections 3 - Real-time reflections with LWRP+UniversalRP+Mobile support!

Hi, i have a question regarding the asset. As the asset is described as not working with VR can i assume that it would not work with stereoscopic 3D?

Kind regards
Michael

 

Hi there, and thank you very much for your interest in our tool

Unfortunately that is correct, our tool is not compatible with any VR / AR / XR features which means it will not work on stereoscopic 3D nor any similar platforms.

Thanks for commenting, we hope this helps!

 

A small fix for the Alpha Blended shaders will be sent later this week. In the meantime, if you are experiencing any issues please just replace the line #pragma 2.0 with #pragma 3.0.

Also remember that PIDI Planar Reflections 3 is part of the Spring Sale with a 50% off!

 

Hi,

Me again playing with your plugin and fronting some issues that I don't manage to solve on my own... I may be doing something wrong thow.

I want to have post processing on the reflection (I'm using URP 7.3.1 with Unity 2019.3.10) but I don't get what I hope...


It's a basic scene with a small simple hologram shader and a URP Tonemapping and Bloom post process setup on a dedicated layer.


This is the actual plane using the Caster side of your plugin and you can see I'm using your Unlit Simple material (but it does the same on all shaders provided even the ones I would do on ShaderGraph myself).

Any idea what I could do wrong here?

Thanks

 

Hi there,

It seems that in SRP Unity made some internal changes to which format to use for render textures (since anything besides HDRP was originally targeted to low end and mobile), which in turn makes the reflections unable to render any HDR dependent effects (such as bloom) with their auto-generated render texture.

While we are currently testing several solutions for this while keeping the reflections being compatible with as many devices as possible out of the box, there is a very simple solution for this :

- Create a RenderTexture in your project. Give it any desired resolution. Set its format to R32G32B32A32_SFloat or any other floating point precision format compatible with your target device, and assign it to the "External Reflection Texture" slot of your Planar Reflections Renderer Component.









We hope this helps !

 

Hi and thanks for the tip,

It definitively works even if when doing this, when SceneView and GameView are opened at the same time, you'll see the SceneView planar reflection used in the GameView planar reflection.

I'm now meeting another issue that might be URP related too as I got this previously when trying to implement my own planar reflection solution using a similar approach as yours.

This is what I have in the Unity Editor


And this is what I have when I build an exe and run it either using Development or Release build:


It seems that on builds, the planar reflection doesn't appear. Would you have any idea why?
Thanks

 

Hi there, we will ask you to please contact us to our support email with your invoice number and these same details / screenshots in order to be able to provide you with better assistance for this issue, including sending any patches / fixes as needed. Currently we have a slightly long queue but we will try to make time to generate a demo build and try to track the issue down.

We hope this helps!

 

Version 3.25 will be sent for approval today and we expect it to be available for download within the next few days.

Change log :

• Improved performance and resources handling in SRP. Early tests show a 20-50% performance boost thanks to a better memory management.
• Better scene view preview for Universal RP, more predictable.
• Fixed bug in newer Unity versions where changing the viewport coordinates breaks the reflection
• Fixed bug that prevented Custom PostFX settings from being used in Universal RP 7.2.1
• Fixed a few errors in ShaderGraph shaders in Universal RP 7.2.1
• Lightweight RP no longer supported. Lightweight has been deprecated by Unity, thus from now on only Universal RP will receive patches and updates.
• Universal RP integration has been completed. Universal RP add on now labelled as stable for Unity 2019.3

New features

• New unitypackages for Universal RP 7.18 and Universal RP 7.3.1
• New "Float output" mode that forces rendering to an ARGB32 float texture format in order to be compatible with HDR enabled workflows and effects (bloom, tone mapping)

 

Hi, are you planning to support HDRP in the near future? Meaning within the next month or so. You've been mentioning HDRP support for some time now, usually as a part of 3.2 release. But your current store version is 3.19 and your last post is about 3.25, where you don't mention HDRP at all. I would gladly buy your asset, but I'm only interested in the HDRP part, which is absent now it its future is a bit unclear.

 

Hi there,

Unfortunately at the moment the HDRP port is still not ready and, with the current situation of CoVID19, our entire roadmap has been severely affected. At the moment we do not know when the HDRP port will be ready, but we will give more information the moment we have it. We hope to have something working at least for a Beta release in mid-late May.

Have a great day!

 

Version 3.25 has been approved and will be available for download later today (May 1st, 2020). See the changelog here

 

Help i have planar reflections 3 and i am getting this

Sent a support ticket to your help desk. Thanks in advance.

 

Hi there,

Please contact us through our support email with your Invoice number and precise details of your project (platform, target device, unity version, asset version, asset edition, etc). Also please refrain from sharing any logs / code on the forum and other public spaces. Our support team will help you with this issue once you contact us through the appropriate channels

We hope this helps!.

 

Update to version 3.3 is coming next Monday (May 25) and later in the week we will release version 3.35. The reason for this split is that not all improvements could be sent on time for the 3.3 update and some of them had to be pushed for the next update.

Here is the changelog :

v 3.3 :

- Improved Water Shaders, now with better intersections / interaction with billboards (for the Standard Pipeline)
- General performance improvements
- Initial package of shaders for HDRP (currently in Beta, may take a few more updates before it is considered stable)

v 3.35

- More control over the reflection settings, including how the internal reflection texture is generated.
- Greatly improved performance thanks to a now working fixed framerate option as well as some internal optimizations specific to this pipeline. Early tests show performance improvements of up to 50% in our demo scenes by limiting the framerate of the reflection to 30 FPS, which may be very useful for mobile games.
- Greatly improved performance on HDRP due to the same improvement
- Improvements to Water Shaders in Universal RP
- Potentially (may need to be pushed for later) a first simple port of the Water Shaders for HDRP

Have an excellent weekend !

 

Version 3.3 has just been released. Here is the changelog :

- Improved Water Shaders, now with better intersections / interaction with billboards (for the Standard Pipeline)
- General performance improvements
- Initial package of shaders for HDRP (currently in Beta, may take a few more updates before it is considered stable)

 

Hi! Does PIDI planar reflection standard edition work with hdrp 7.1.8 (unity 2019.3)? And does it give more performance vs unity default realtime planar reflection?

 

Hi there,

The HDRP package is currently in Beta and is being developed for HDRP 7.21, however it does work in other HDRP versions such as 7.31. For older HDRP versions you may only need to open the shaders in ShaderGraph and press "Save Asset" in order to recompile them, but otherwise the asset should work pretty much out of the box (again, keeping in mind that the HDRP package is still in beta).

Regarding the comparison with the standard Planar Reflection probe from Unity, their use case is different and thus performance can't easily be compared. The reflection probes from Unity are automatically assigned to the materials internally and have a deeper integration with the engine itself, our method depends on C# scripts. However, thanks to our asset exposing the reflection textures and give a very large amount of control over the reflection properties allow for much higher flexibility.

Trying to test both reflection methods with similar settings (same resolution, updates every single frame) our system has about the same performance as the Planar Reflections probe included with HDRP, with a fluctuation of ~2-3%. Using the different optimization methods from our system (dynamic resolution + limited framerate) you can get up to a 50% higher framerate over the Planar Reflection Probes. However, just like any other Planar Reflections system the real performance depends entirely on scene complexity and there is no way to achieve much higher performance than Unity's default solution since the underlying techniques used for basically all planar reflections systems are fairly similar.

Again, the reflection probes provided by Unity fulfill a different purpose. If you want a simple, quick to integrate solution and do not need too much control over how the reflections are rendered it may be better to use Unity's provided solution. If you want or need much higher flexibility and control or you are targeting multiple platforms and want to keep consistency between them then our asset is your best bet since its workflow is the same regardless of platform or rendering pipeline and there are plenty of settings to use and full access to the reflection texture to be used in custom shaders and effects.

We hope this helps!

 

Hi!
Congratulations on your initial HDRP release! I've been waiting for this
You've made quite a deep explanation on the current state of things with performance and HDRP, and I have a few questions:

Will it work with even higher HDRP releases, such as 8 or 9? The current 7.3 has been around for a while, and it seems likely that 2020.1 and HDRP 8 will become standard relatively soon.

I'm wondering about their difference too. Currently, if you place a planar reflection probe in your scene - roughly 1/3 of your performance is gone, and there's pretty much nothing you can do about it. It doesn't even matter what resolution it uses.

If I have, say, a table with a very glossy marble tabletop (which uses planar reflection) and a number of objects may be placed on this table in runtime, will their reflection look somehow incorrect if it's rendered with a limited framerate (30 fps) while the game itself runs at 60 or higher?

To be more specific, here's how I use Unity's planar reflection:


And I don't like how it drops my fps from 170 to 100 when I'm around it. Regular reflection probes are not an option (maybe as a fallback solution at its best) and ray-tracing would be okay if the general performance of DX12 mode wasn't so terrible. So. i'm looking for more performant solutions and wondering if yours can be the one

Thanks!

 

Hi there,

Reducing the framerate of the reflection itself may make the reflection look slightly jittery if the camera or the objects are moving very fast, but otherwise the effect will be mostly unnoticeable. You can however limit the framerate to any value you want from 1 to 60 FPS, which should give you a good deal of control to balance between performance and quality.

However, since all planar reflection solutions have to re-draw all the reflected items (working in general terms as adding a new camera to the scene) the performance impact is always there and something that has to be considered. .
Regarding compatibility with future HDRP versions :

We are updating our product as often as we can every time a new verified SRP version releases (either Universal RP or HDRP) for a new Stable Unity release. If, once Unity 2020.1 is marked as stable, there are any incompatibilities between our system and Unity 2020 version of SRP we will release a patch addressing it usually within a few days.

Right now the asset has a specific package for Unity 2017.1, 2018.1 and 2019.1. Once 2020.1 is marked as stable we will upload a package for it as well to ensure maximum compatibility.

A license to our package grants you access to free updates and support during the whole version cycle (in this case for the whole 3.x cycle) and will receive updates to work with all stable unity releases that happen during that time. This has been the case since our first release in 2017.

Let's expand on this with an example case :

Let's pretend that a newer PIDI Planar Reflections 4 is released in July 2021 right on time for Unity 2021.1 and HDRP 12.x. In this case, PIDI Planar Reflections 3 will NOT receive the same patches nor updates and you would need to upgrade to version 4 in order to continue receiving support and updates for those Unity and HDRP versions. PIDI Planar Reflections 3 may still work with those newer versions, but it would no longer receive patches nor updates to ensure full compatibility.

In short, you can be sure that you will keep receiving updates to support newer HDRP versions as well as newer URP versions for as long as PIDI Planar Reflections 3 is still available. Each cycle of our assets lasts at the very least 12-14 months, to guarantee that all our users receive a robust, highly compatible and efficient product whether they decide to upgrade or not at the end of it, and we always offer several deals to ensure that if they decide to upgrade the process is easy and they receive a fair pricing.

Since it is highly likely that HDRP / URP versions 8 and 9 will be released within this 3.x cycle of our asset, it is certain that they will be fully supported by us.

We hope this helps, please let us know if anything we said was not clear enough, and have a great weekend !

 

v 3.35 has been released :

• More control over the reflection settings, including how the internal reflection texture is generated (can set up mip-map and antialiasing settings on each reflection to reduce shimmering).
• Greatly improved performance on both Universal RP and HDRP thanks to a now working fixed framerate option as well as some internal optimizations. Early tests show performance improvements of up to 50% in our demo scenes by limiting the framerate of the reflection to 30 FPS, which may be very useful for mobile games.
• Improvements to Water Shaders (Advanced Water Shader) in Universal RP

Have a great day !

 

A small patch for Unity 2019.4 will be released next week. This patch will fix a bug for projects that import our asset for the first time in Unity 2019.4 (projects migrating to Unity 2019.4 are unaffected) regarding automatic Gizmos creation. If you are seeing errors upon importing our package regarding EncodeToPNG functions, please contact us to our support email with your invoice number and we will provide you with the updated version.

NOTE : This error is not present in all projects, but the fix will still be provided early next week as well as a general update for the Lite edition and all its add ons

 

Patch has been approved and PIDI Planar Reflections Lite as well as its Water add on have been updated too. The update for the LWRP add on is still on review but will be approved and ready to download soon.

 

URP add on and all Lite edition modules have been updated to version 3.35

 

still no recursive reflections ?!

p.s. : https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/urp-lwrp-mirror-shaders-135215

 

Hi there,

Thanks for your feedback.

Each product is tailored to solve different requirements and target different use cases. For our asset, we have always focused on what is most practical and performance efficient for most users, which in most cases is fast and easy to use mirrors / water reflections rather than visual effects. However, as I said before, different products meet different project needs and you should always try to find the asset that better suits yours, since there is rarely a one size fits all kind of solution. If a different asset fits your project better than ours, then that should be your pick

While we may consider adding more of these specific use case features in the future, for the time being we will keep focusing on what our asset does best and what most of our customers need

Again, thanks for your feedback, and have a great day!

 

Hi @IrrSoft. I'm not sure what I am doing wrong, but I cannot get the reflections to work with post effects enabled in Unity 2019.3.6f1. I followed the manual, and whenever I run the scene I get the following:

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object

UnityEngine.Rendering.PostProcessing.PostProcessLayer.OnDisable () (at Library/PackageCache/com.unity.postprocessing@2.3.0/PostProcessing/Runtime/PostProcessLayer.cs:386)

UnityEngine.Object:DestroyImmediate(Object)

PlanarReflections3.PlanarReflectionsRenderer:OnEnable() (at Assets/PIDI Game Development Framework/Planar Reflections 3/Source/PlanarReflectionsRenderer.cs:264)

 

Hi there,

From the error you send it seems that the issue is happening within the Post Process package rather than our tool. Going through the code of the PostProcessLayer.cs file at line 386, which is the actual error (the line in PlanarReflectionsRenderer.cs 264 being a line that is only starting the disable process on the PostProcessLayer class ) it seems that it is an error with the LogHistogram of the PostProcess layer not being properly assigned / created at the time it is being called.

In order to properly assist you and try to find out more about this issue (for example if it is being caused by incompatible / corrupted packages ) we need additional information that you should send to our support email in order for us to follow up this more efficiently :

- Your Invoice number / proof of purchase
- Exact version of Unity and our tool that you are using
- If you are using Universal RP or HDRP, tell us which one and on which version.
- The version of the PostProcess Stack package you are using.

On our end there is an error shown in the console indeed, but the reflections work with the PostFX as expected (the error is shown only once in the first frame but does not prevent the functionality of the tool in any way).



Scene with PostFX enabled for the reflection only, hue shift to green.

We have already developed a small fix (that will be sent for approval to the store within the next 48 hours and should be available by Monday) but if you need the patch already please contact us with the information requested above and we will get back to you as soon aspossible with a copy of the patch.

We hope this helps !

 

redacted

 

Hi there,

We ask you to please send this information to our support email as requested and to remove your invoice number from any public post like the one you just made. We use the invoice numbers to verify ownership and any invoice numbers publicly available on the internet are rejected by our system.


Please send us an email to our support email as requested, with your invoice / proof of purchase, in PDF format as you got it from the store since the invoice number you provided is now publicly available and may be flagged by our system, otherwise additional information to verify your license may be requested.

Again, please send your inquiry with the above information to our support email, otherwise it will not be processed.

We hope this helps

 

Hi!
Is it possible to use your asset with HDRP in 2020.1 at the current moment? And is it possible to create transparent reflections (on window glass, for example) with it?

 

Hi there,

The HDRP shaders for this package are currently in Beta, so we recommend you to have some caution as there may be some issues especially if you are updating your HDRP version frequently. However, in the current release, the shaders do work without issues on Unity 2020.1 with HDRP 8.x and yes, you can use them in transparent reflections.

Furthermore, you can use the included shaders as a starting point to create your own shader graphs and mix the reflections rendered by our system in any way you see fit with your materials



We hope this helps !

Note : The demo included with the package does not look exactly like the scene above, the scene above was modified in order to show you an example of a transparent material with reflections

 

A small bug-fixing patch will be released shortly. It fixes some errors found when working Unity 2019.4+ with resources not being properly disposed of in those versions and spamming the console with errors.

If you need the fix already, please contact us to our support email with your invoice number.

[ EDIT ] This bug has been already fixed

 

This asset is on sale at 50% off right now, and you can get its standard edition with all features and support for all rendering pipelines for only 20 USD! The sale finishes on September 8

 

Will there be Amplify Shader Editor nodes also for URP/HDRP soon?
Thanks!

 

Hi there,

Unfortunately we do not have plans at this moment to offer shaders made with Amplify for HDRP and URP. ShaderGraph will remain the default editor for those pipelines.

That said, the actual function nodes for Amplify included with the asset (the ones you would use for custom shaders) should work just fine on any pipeline already since they don't use any pipeline specific features, but rather they use mostly math and simple shader operation nodes

We hope this helps!

 

Cool plugin! Just bought it because finally you added HDRP support. Works very well in Unity 2020.
Waiting for HDRP LIT support...maybe blur option in future?

 

Hi there,

Regarding HDRP LIT support we guess you are referring to shader samples using HDRP Lit. There will be a few samples coming soon but the current implementation should already compatible with HDRP Lit shaders if you wish to make your own

EDIT : The HDRP/Lit shader included with Unity cannot be fully recreated with ShaderGraph, which means that there will not be a 1:1 equivalent included with our asset. However, integrating our reflections system to any HDRP shader made with ShaderGraph is entirely possible and the recommended workflow for more complex HDRP materials (translucent, clear-coated, etc), since it is the easiest way to achieve any required results. We will provide further HDRP sample shaders to cover a wider range of material types but for anything more advanced / complex it is recommended to integrate the reflection texture generated by our asset into your shaders.

Regarding blur : We are currently exploring some options to add blur as an additional ( and fully optional ) pass within the script itself rather than in the shader to ensure it is compatible with HDRP / Universal RP. This blur effect should be available in late September along some further updates and improvements to both SRPs.

Thank you for your purchase and for your review, we are very glad to hear you like our product and find it useful

Have a great day!

 

Hi!
Thanks, actually your plugin is best solution for mirror "issue" in UNITY. Soon I will start testing your plugin in DXR system because there also is not clean solution for mirror surfaces. Will give you soon some renders. Meanwhile you can follow also our (and my) progress on DXR sub-forum or on my channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCehsma95SoqnYjgfnX3x6Qw/featured

 

...and here it is:

 

Great work and the mirror looks impressive. Maybe the video should be a little better shot.

 

cybersoft this is just technical shoot to see it works in DXR.

 

It looks impressive! I'm glad to see our asset has been working well in your project even with experimental features such as DXR

Looking forward to seeing how it keeps progressing!

 

The discount for PIDI Planar Reflections 3 is now officially over, but a new update is on its way for late September with some additional shaders and materials for HDRP / URP as well as some new rendering features for the reflections across all pipelines.

Have a great day!

 

We have an HDRP project. What is the difference between buying and using this asset vs. HDRP's Planar Reflection Probe?

 

Hi there,

The main difference is in workflow and control. The Planar Reflections probe in HDRP is very similar to the standard Reflections Probe in the sense that it affects and interacts with the materials in their PBR workflow. They are blended across objects within their influence radius just as the reflection probes do and even have similar projections.

Our system offers a lot more control over how the reflection is rendered, updated and managed. They can be assigned to specific materials on specific renderers and shared across multiple objects, they are a fully independent of the PBR workflow and stored as an easily accessible texture meaning that they can be integrated to your game through custom shaders in a way that is not possible (in a practical way) with Planar probes.

They can also have completely custom resolutions or have a dynamic resolution / downscale based on the current screen resolution, render to an external texture or generate and manage their resources dynamically.

We are also currently adding a "Blur Pass" to the reflections to ensure that they more closely resemble the behavior of realistic PBR reflections when used with materials of variable smoothness. This update should be available between the end of this month and the first week of October.

The tradeoff is that Planar Probes, being a system built into the pipeline, has a slightly better performance (less than 2-4% difference in most cases). Choosing which one is best for your project depends entirely on its requirements and what you intend to achieve with the reflections.

We hope this helps!

 

Thank you for the informative answer

 

A considerably large update is coming before the end of September, with version 3.5. It includes the following new features and improvements :

New features :

• Blur Pass - The Reflections Caster component can now blur the reflection before assigning it to a material. This blur pass is configurable on a per-material basis and can be applied to the final reflection or as a separate _BlurReflectionTex parameter. Its performance impact is quite reduced and it can be integrated easily into any existing materials, including the provided water shaders. Furthermore, since it is applied internally, surfaces sharing the same material but with different Reflections Caster components can have different blur values.

​

• Revamped shaders - All shaders that supported Blur have been updated to work with the new Blur workflow, making them more lightweight for the GPU. This blur can be used to more accurately simulate PBR materials of varying roughness / smoothness.
• Revamped URP / HDRP shaders - URP and HDRP will also support this new Blur technique.
• New URP / HDRP shaders

Notice : The old shaders ( prior to the v.3.5 update ) will now be marked as "Legacy Shader Pack 3", and they will still be distributed with the tool. However, after upgrading to this release, the existing shaders in the project will be overwritten by the new versions so some adjustments may be required. If you do not plan to use the new Blur features or prefer the older shaders, simply unpack the Legacy Shader Pack 3 unitypackage file included with this release.


Improvements :

• Internal changes to highly increase performance and reduce GC (Garbage Collection) calls to a minimum. This is an improvement in all pipelines and platforms.

This update is currently in development and some of the new features are being documented. It will be available around the end of September.

 

The new Blur Pass feature working on the Universal Rendering Pipeline :

 

And here is the new blur feature working within the Universal Rendering Pipeline in one of the included shaders (unmodified from the last released version 3.4 ) :

 

Version 3.5 has been approved !

Here is the changelog :

Notice : The new and updated HDRP / Universal RP shaders require Unity 2019.4+ to work

New features and improvements :

• New Blur-Pass feature, adding blurred reflections support in all pipelines
• New HDRP shader sample (Lit Basic)
• Updated HDRP samples to use the new Blur Pass for PBR accurate reflections
• Updated Universal RP samples to use the new Blur Pass for PBR accurate reflections
• Updated all Standard Pipeline shaders to use the new Blur Pass for PBR accurate reflection (old shaders still provided as the Legacy Shaders Pack 3, included with the asset as a unitypackage file)

Fixes :

• Fixed internal resources management to reduce GC calls and improve performance in all pipelines
• Fixed error with reflective surfaces rendering inaccurately within other reflections in HDRP and Universal RP