Feedback Wanted: Visual Effect Graph

Indeed, exposure weight is missing, seems broken. Using any kind of exposure in your project makes particles invisible with additive or black with alpha. Bug? Tested with latest Unity VFX sample (glowing UnityLogo example is invisible unless exposure is disabled in HDRP)

 

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Hi @VladVNeykov this does not work well with HDRP exposure and HDRP sky exposure. It only works well on scene without exposure (tested with Unity's own samples).

So I can get things to bloom fine providing there is no Unity exposure control. So I have to set Sky volume Exposure to 1 and regular volume Exposure to 1 to reproduce your results.

Regular materials work fine with my current setup including Shuriken so I believe VFX to be broken in any scenario where volume exposure deviates from the default.

Should we remove exposure from the project and use artificial

 

.... one million? :/ I have a light that's correct sunlight lux and so forth. I think we need some proper pre-exposure going on because any more than this I head to float limitations.

While a nearby standard material with emission slider requires no effort to get the correct lighting for the scene.

So I can't accept this is a working thing. Is it known and tested at Unity with correctly exposed scenes with real LUX values?

 

Brilliant; I couldn't find any proper explanation of how to utilize target position but it's incredibly intuitive once looking at the example. Thank you *so* much for this!

 

OK, thank you for clearing that up. I'll do exactly what you said - and wait for a future update, this is perfect

 

Hi,

Is the trail renderer availble in 2019.2a ?

 

Following up on this. Any chance there's a way to make the latest version compatible w/legacy?

the use case is basically *everything* that relies on Single Pass Instancing - namely, all recent XR. Since there hasn't been word about compatibilty timelines, for now, legacy fallback (instead of HRDP/LWRP) would be one workaround. Unity folks - any thoughts would be appreciated!

(EDIT: it might already be? Creating a standard project with the 3D template, importing the latest package and setting the pipeline path under VFX settings to "legacy" doesn't seem to do the trick.)

 

sorry if this is a dumb question... getting back into VEG after six months off... does HDRP-VEG combo support motion blur? i don't see it happening on any of the the sample effects (ideal use case would be something like "Portal")

https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/VisualEffectGraph-Samples

is there a way to force the VEG renderer to write into the velocity buffer so that HDRP motion blur works?

 

Oh boy...
today i tried to have another look into this... seems rather broken at the moment.
On a MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2017) with Radeon Pro 555 2048 MB
with Mac Os Mojave and Unity3d 2019.1

- i tried to have a look at the refreshed examples. Updated to hdrp 5.13 and VFXG 5.13
- the older examples (Volumetric and Butterfly) don't render at all or everything is green.
- newly setup VFX render particles black (conflict in exposure)
- 2x times the macbook completely froze. One time just so, second time showing funny colorful artefacts on the garbled screen

 

@VladVNeykov thanks! speaking of graphics things in general, (like trails), i have written custom force nodes for VEG (just different flavors of curl noise) but is it possible to write a custom output block (like "Lit Output")? i would like to try my hand at a ribbon renderer!

 

oh badass! no worries on the lack of documentation or portability, this is a strictly curiosity-driven side project... excited to dive in, thanks again for the notes!

 

@racarate Please share your progress. I too wanted to write a custom output block but was put off by the potential complexity and brittleness. (really hoping there will be an official way to do this!)

Mind me asking what you plan to make? I wanted to make a triangle renderer where each vertex was controllable. The idea was to render exploding/morphing meshes and the like.

 

i'd like to try a ribbon renderer (triangle strips) and a volume renderer (treating the particles as spheres of density and ray-marching them)... how far did you get?

 

This is very cool, I was playing around with the connect target and I ran into two questions.

First if I am using the Trigger Event Always but only want to do it once, can I do some sort of INT subtract count to switch the count from 1 to 0 in the graph editor? Or is it possible to get a Trigger Event Only Once option that isn't based on the particle death?

Second, unrelated to Events and Trails, as I build more complex graphs I do a lot of trial stuff to see various art I can make. A lot of times finding interesting new things I wasn't even planning on. I find that my blackboard will have a lot of different testing variables when all is said and done. So I was wondering if adding some sort of count in the Blackboard UI based on how many times a variable is actually connected to a Context Container would be useful. For me I could then tell if a variable is no longer being used (Or how many times I've used it) and go ahead and simplify/delete without searching around to see if I am using it still and worrying I might break something. Just a thought.

 

I didn't really get started. Instead I played around with custom blocks instead (The custom SDF block here: https://github.com/IxxyXR/Parametric-VFX )

It was a fairly simple hack of the inbuilt Conform to SDF block to accept code definitions of SDFs.

 

Greetings, guys, I am very interested in Visual Effect Graph, but all this new variables and words are confusing to me, is there any documents or manuals about all these terms and blocks?

 

https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/ScriptableRenderPipeline/wiki/VFX-Systems-Contexts-and-Blocks

I suspect there might be more up to date docs somewhere but I'm buggered if I can find them.

EDIT fixed the url...

 

I just upgraded my HDRP pet project from 2018 to 2019.1.2f1 and now my VFX does not render. I have already rebuild all visual effect graphs. Both HDRP and Visual Effect Graph are running 5.13 preview. Are there any other upgrade steps I am missing?

 

Oh that's nice! I really like the Conform to SDF node, I actually ported it to Houdini! I'd like to go the other way around (the Houdini Curl Noise VOP has an input for an SDF but the actual motion feels different... unfortunately source is not available).

Related, does anybody know if Unity's mesh-to-SDF generator was ever released? Would love to play with it, thought it would be out by now (maybe I am looking wrong place):

https://twitter.com/robertcupisz/status/1058079181412687872?lang=en

 

Not sure but did you see this?

https://github.com/xraxra/SDFr

I'm also looking into modifying this so it can feed directly into the VFX Graph: https://github.com/Amarcolina/NativeSDF/

 

As of the last time I spoke to him around 3 weeks ago, he still needed to find a few days to finish polishing it and publish it, but still hoped to do so soon.

 

Can anyone explain this? Same here, it's really hard to conform to text because all points not directly spawned inside the SDF are conforming to the mid point of the Distance Field.

 

Hi @VladVNeykov - you mentioned that trail rendering isn't included yet. Is this type of thing simply not possible in VFX graph currently? I have experimented with "dropping particles behind" but it looks a bit off.

Thanks!

Edit: Source is 0:30 into the VFX demo video

 

That looks sick, "dropping particles off" is basically a growth system!

@andybak thanks for the recs, I'll take a look.

 

Spoiler

Looks more like Keijiros KvantSwarm

 

Hello, I'm having a hard time figuring out how I can check 'current position' realtime simulation values from an external script. It generally seems there is no output for these kinds of values?

I'm basically trying to map audio volume to the Y axis of the particle, so as they move up, the volume goes up, but I need to retrieve the y axis position for this. Any clues?

Thanks!

 

That's fantastic and has given me loads to work with. This will be fun with the parametric vector field block I've been looking for an excuse to work on.

One thing I don't understand - How is "Connect Target" working when you're setting it to the same value as the original position (as far as I can see).

And a small fix - the normal map wasn't completely smooth in the green channel which led to visible segmentation when you looked closely. See attached for a fixed version. (Incidentally - .tga files? Wow. That takes me way back. I'll see your .tga and raise you a .pcx and a couple of .iff's ;-)

 

This works by setting the original position, but not moving the particle after that.

 

Sorry. I still don't follow. The spawned particle - at the point it's rendered seems to have the same value for both position and target position.

1. Is this correct or have I got this part wrong?
2. Assuming the answer to the above is "yes that's correct" = what does "connect target" do when you feed it two identical positions?

 

OK. I understand a lot better now. I think there's a lot of stuff about when properties are updated that isn't terribly clear and the hidden implicit integrations probably contribute to this.

With "Get property (source)" nodes - what does "source" refer to? Is it only relevant when spawning particles via GPU events or does it have other uses?

(on a related topic - I seem to have to add angular euler integration manually if I want to use angular velocity. It never seems to work automatically?)

 

@VladVNeykov Thank you so much for this, much appreciated!

 

> What's your setup? Seems to work fine:

Damn. Can't recreate it now. And I just deleted the scene where it last happened.

Another question - I'm having lots of issues with lit output in VR. VR and HDRP are pretty fussy anyway but even when I've made the right offerings to the gods to get it working in general, I find that lit output is still unreliable. At the moment on a minimal test project (2018.2.0b1 and 6.5.3) only lit quad and mesh work. I get nothing rendering with lit spheres and cubes.

 

Forgive me if this is a dumb question, but I can't seem to apply a normal map to my lit quad output. I don't have the option - is there a setting I need to enable to expose it?


@coldpizzapunk Doh, inspector. Thanks

 

@Vaspra When you click on the entire Lit Quad Output box in the graph, the standard Unity Inspector showcases a lot of features you can turn on and off, such as normal map.

 

@VladVNeykov Hi, in the Shuriken particle system where we can select "Custom Space" in addition to "Local" and "World". With "Custom Space", we can define a specific transform for the effect to be local to. This is useful if we want effects to be in world space, but we also need to shift the world (and the effects) when using floating origin. We can then make the effect local to the shifting origin.

In the beginning of the thread, it was mentioned by Unity that this is possible, but not straightforward. Would it be possible to post an example graph of how to achieve this? Thanks.

 

I've search the thread and don't find anything...
Maybe I'm missing something, but it woul'd be nice to have an "active toggle" for any context. Especially for output contexts.
If you deactivate a context that change the output data (ie initialize context), all subsequent contexts will be deactivated also.
Just an idea....

 

I really appreciate you taking the time to provide the example and the notes in the graph. It really helped in understanding. Perhaps it could be added to the VFX Samples for others to see how it's done.

After playing around with it a lot, I noticed a little oddness in the VFX behavior compared to Shuriken when moving the transforms in Edit mode (existing VFX velocities getting multiplied more so than Shuriken), but that issue didn't exist anymore after entering into Play mode once.

Some feedback: would it be possible to streamline the custom space option workflow in the graph UI? As of now, that's quite a lot of nodes and connections to add to every single effect in a floating origin setup, whereas with Shuriken, it's a simple dropdown and reference. Thanks for listening.

 

Is it possible to get access to mesh UVs? And for pixel/vertex positions of particles?

 

Hi, quick question,
Can I make an effect using Visual Effect Graph and save it as texture atlas for use in 2d games (with transparency, etc.)

 

Record it by Unity Recoder?