Official Experimental 2D Lights and Shader Graph support in Universal RP (previously LWRP)

What about using the alpha channel for HDR stuff? CSR 2 devs used the alpha channel for masking out the bloom and we did bloom amplification using the alpha channel in Grand Dad Mania. Perhaps it can be a very good option in cases where true HDR is not needed except for a better bloom or some other effects that otherwise do not use the alpha channel. It's a win-win situation since we'll save performance by not using floating point buffers on highend-ish devices and retain the original colors by not using remapping on lowend devices.

 

Tasty, will fire this up and give it a spin later.

Im currently using spine to do bone based 2D animation due to sprite swapping not being supported in the animation v2 package currently, and I am hoping I can get the included spine shader to work with LWRP so I can leverage the lights.

If not then I will write a replacement and post it here for people to use as I know a number of the community are using spine currently until Anim V2 matures a bit (removal of PSB only support, addition of sprite swapping, FFD etc) as from looking at their shader quickly it doesnt seem to do anything too difficult to recreate using LWRP

 

In a small project of mine i tested this out. It worked fine on my prefabs, but not the non-prefab sprite-renderer components. I fixed this by simply removing the components and adding them again. While it worked fine for me, for bigger projects it might be more tedious.

 

I have just tried this in my project, it works really well.
Shader graph did crawl once and then kinda weirdly crash and cause Unity's text to all garbled. but after a restart it seemed to be fine.

One thing I am really wanting is some form of shadows and maybe ways to mask areas from certain lights (ie. from the global light)

 

What about performance ?
This new system is more faster than the default one ?

 

In my game I build all the sprites in script. Currently I see no access to the 'Target sorting layers' via code in Light2d

 

What also would be good is a direction for the global light, (just like the global 3d light) couple that with normal maps and a shadow and you have a top down day/night cycles.

 

Is there any possibility of supporting Light2D while also rendering a "3D" directional light?

Currently it seems it's not possible to get both types of lights. That's unfortunate, but it seems I need to choose between my sprites being tilted up like a pop-up book to get real shadows from the "sun" directional light, or put them back for regular 2D spot lights but no shadows.

 

There's still the issue with the black camera feed (background) using LWRP and AR Foundation. Any ideas when this might be fixed?

 

EDIT; Scratch that, seems fine in the beta build 4

Hey @Chris_Chu ,
I think there is a bug with 360 point light. If you turn on Volume Opacity, there is a gap between 360 and 0 degrees. Looks like this:

 

I think Freeform Lights would benefit a lot also from having the option to set a parallel direction like some kind of parallel light. One use that I've been applying a lot for freeform lights is kind of semiglobal light, where every room in a scene can have its own global/ambient color temperature without a lot of complications. So I've been finding myself using Freeform Lights a lot more than Global Lights for that reason. The way they handle normal maps when used as a semiglobal light doesn't fit well though; the light direction should be parallel when used like this, not coming from the origin point.

If it helps, I can think of three ways to make this available:

One is to have the option in both Freeform Lights and Global Lights to toggle between the default way they handle normals and a parallel direction. I think it's important to keep the current ways they work available, because they are both also useful. To be honest, this would be enough for me. There is a problem with this though: when global lights can have direction, it makes sense to be able to have more than one per layer and blend style.

A second way to make this available would be to add a Parallel Light and then add the option to limit it to a freeform Area. Then you could replace Global Lights with an option to change ambient light in a window, the same way it works on 3D. You could have an ambien color for each Layer and Blend Style. Or you could just put an ambient light option directly on the sprites, I think it would be easier to think about, and I haven't really found a use for having different global lights for different blend styles. You could also collapse Parametric Lights and Freeform Lights into Point Lights, specially Parametric Lights, because Point Lights could replace them easily if they had the options of Sides, Angle Offset and maybe Fallof offset.

A third way is to simply add Parallel Light and a Freeform Parallel Light. I still think it could be better to replace Global Lights with an ambient light panel in a special window, or an ambient light option in the sprites.

Any other way I can think of is really a convination of this three. Anyway, it's awesome to finally have 2d Lights integrated in Unity, I'd love to have some kind of freeform parallel lights, and thank you very much for everything.

 

That would be awesome! We are using Spine as well and would really like to leverage the 2D lights. Really appreciate it

 

Actually I was happy to see that the LWRP shaders work with spine without me needing to update them.

I had messaged the spine devs and they said their shader does nothing special, any sprite shader will work So you actaully have everything you need to do this already Can confirm the included 2D shadergraph shaders work

 

@Chris_Chu @rustum

Any ETA for isometric support ?

 

Indeed, I have will have my own sorting system because unity sorting doesn't fit at all with my requirement so waiting for that thread with pleasure

 

I haven't worked with Unity 2D yet and wonder what makes the lwrp 2d renderer better than the built-in one? Some sort of comparison table would be very useful as well.

 

Is it me or there's a huge problem with that when you use Tile Palette?
Tiles don't want to show up in palette and I guess this is because it works like a scene but as there is no light source, user cannot see a thing at all.

P.S. You can see that I chose a bunch of tiles and I can also put them at scene. Though I can't see them in tile palette.
Also, I used Global Lightning to make a scene look ok.

 

Well, in my eyes the issues are tied to being a top-down game.

The goal would be to have a single source of light drive the overall brightness of the scene, like the new global light, but be able to cast shadows off buildings/objects/characters etc. in a way that simulates a day/night cycle.

In my project, for lighting it seems I'm limited to a few options, neither of which allow me to achieve this goal:

I can make my project mostly 3D, and tilt character/object sprites up similar to a popup book. I then can use a 3D directional light to get nice accurate shadows with the light acting as a sun. This is easy to achieve using a quad and custom shader, and I don't have any issues creating this. However, I can't use much else for point lights or any other lights as 3D point lights will behave strangely when behind a tilted up sprite.

The other option is to go pure 2D and have regular sprites, and use these new lights. However, even when the shadows are implemented I can only imagine they will be collider-based. This means character animations won't really work out unless they are cast from a simple collider that won't match the characters sprite. Solutions like 2DDL pro and other lighting assets work well for simple characters or only on walls, but none offer the ability to have a global light cast shadows all at the same angle, like you would expect a global sun to behave.

The perfect solution, in my eyes for top down games, would be a 2D global light that uses a heightmap for each sprite to calculate directional shadows, imitating a "sun". The heightmap could be attached similar to how normal maps are to be attached as a secondary texture, or similar I believe.

I don't necessarily have to have real time shadows for every light. But a global light that can cast "fake" shadows from sprites for a day/night cycle would be amazing.

Edit: https://www.mattgreer.org/articles/dynamic-lighting-and-shadows/

Maybe something like described here in part 2?

One more smaller request would be the ability to have two 2D lights overlap without increasing brightness, or the ability to specify a ceiling so overlapping lights wouldn't increase past a certain brightness. Currently if I have multiple characters that are able to cast light, I can't have too many close together or things become blown out.

 

Does this package have any problems with Post-processing stack compatibility?
Is this a bug, or should it be so?
-Here is a screenshot with the standard bloom effect from the standard post-processing profile -I could not find the settings in the 2D LWRP asset that would remove these creepy "steps" instead of the smooth gradient of the bloom.

Yes, turning on the HDR checkbox on the quality tab makes the gradient smooth, but what to do without HDR?
At the lower intensity of the effect, the “steps” are less visible, but they are still present.

P.S. Sorry for google-translate.

 

But I can not! -All my attempts to send a report end with this error when packing the attached project!
This has never happened before.

Why is it not indicated reading which file exactly caused an error - I do not understand!
- This software is not for housewives - why hide the "extra" information from us?
If I had more information about the problem encountered during data collection, I would understand and correct it, but ...
-How I now send a report about the bug if the "Automation" that should collect the data -does not work, and neither the reboot Win, nor the cleaning of the Unity temporary directories (which I know, but not the fact that about all) does not help!
Cut from the project Lib directories, etc. - also did not help.

I sent bugreports many times before - this is not the case until now, but this time - I just do not know what the matter is.

 

Here is a clean project, without folders and files created by Unity. When I unpack it and open it in Unity - everything I wrote about bloom and “steps” earlier - I see it in this project, again.

I do not know if it will help you,
but it looks like this is all I can do now... (((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((

 

Will it be possible to access some of the lighting data through Shader Graph in the future? The possibility to create custom lights and behaviors would be great.

 

Hello !
I Have a problem with the 2D light. In my scene, i see the light but my camera don't renderer the light.

 

Hi. I'm Finding that none of the LWRP particle shaders work with the experimental 2d renderer type. When I change it back to the Forward Renderer, they work again. Is that to be expected?

 

Hi @rustum I'm trying to understand the lwrp use cases, we are creating an open world 2d game, this game is NOT intended for mobiles but for pc/mac. Do you think there is benefit of using the lwrp for this ?
If so why and what will we lose by using it ?

 

It seems that in my case the reason is not in the visual studio. -After restarting the operating system, launching the Unity without any additional launches of other programs, trying to send a bug report, I again received a similar message.
Unity version 2019.2.0b3
I will check later after upgrading to last beta

 

Hii, is there any plans on adding reflection ? currently the only way I know of doing this is render the screen to a texture

 

Tried the package, works great. I have a question. For a sprite renderer to be affected by the light it has to contain the sprite-lit-default material. Given a sprite renderers can contain only a single material, how can I use the light with my custom effect created in shader graph?

 

Indeed! Using the master node works, thank you very much.

 

This package is amazing. Could it be used in the light module of the particle system? because I tried to do it creating a prefab with component light 2d of the LWRP, but i noticed that was not compatible when i dragged the prefab into the light module in the particle system.

 

Amm good to hear, Guess we'll do it old school for now ^^
The package looks awesome right now, any public roadmap available ?

 

Hi, with 2d Lights: is there a way to give the darkness a tiled texture? Right now when I turn of the lights, all turns black of course but I would like to give the darkness some kind of roughness (like a fog of war) . Is that possible or do I have to work with masks?

 

Hi and thanks for the answer. I try to explain what I want to achieve, but if it does not work, I will setup a sample to explain it further.

Once I set the LWRP with 2D Rendering everything turns black (which is perfect) and then I add for example a Point light where things get rendered inside the radius. I have moving objects that move from A to B to X and I only want it to be seen inside the light radius.
So far so good and with the current lights it works perfect.
Now I want to go a little further. I dont want to have the black shadow for the unlit parts, I would like to have a texture for the black (for example some kind of noise). In that way the unlit parts of the level would have some kind of structure instead of being totally black.

What I have tried so far:
I tried to set a global 2D light, that affects only the background with very low intensity. But unlit sprites are also seeable in black but what I would like is them to be transperent.

What I want to try next:
I would add a radial Mask to the light source itself so the sprites will only be rendered inside the light and not be seen outside its radius. I would need to use Alpha Mask Asset to achieve a nice fade out at the mask border.

My question is, if there is a way with the 2D lights to achieve that without an additional mask it would be easier to do.
1. Is there a way to give the black (unlit areas) a texture
2. Is there a way to tell the sprite-shader that unlit pixels of an sprite should be not rendered, in that way I would keep my current setup with the slightly lit background and set the moving elements to the adjusted sprite shader.

Hope that explains what I want to achieve.

Best,
Markus

 

Is the 2D renderer improving performances for 2D games in any way ? (I'm not using lights in unity)

 

ETA for fixing the bug with isometric tilemaps?