Graphics H-Trace: Global Illumination and Occlusion [ RELEASED ]

Thank you very much for your support! It means a lot!

 

Also interested in BiRP only

 

Doesn't really seem to work with dynamic time of day.
- Since it relies on reflection probes, you're going to need some kind of dynamic reflection probe which inherently introduces lag spikes (since a reflection probe in HDRP costs at least 10ms no matter what it's rendering).
- Despite having a realtime reflection probe, it's still broken during nighttime. Showing very bright lights while rotating the camera.


The built-in SSGI seems to work fairly well in the same scenario, because it can fallback on the sky when no reflection probes are present and doesn't have the nighttime artifacts.

 

Hi!

First of all, could you please share your Unity and HDRP versions? Also, are you running the patched or the unpatched version?

It needs reflection probes only as a fallback. It can work without them just fine as a screen-space only effect.

I don't know your Unity version, but since 2022.2 there's an option called "time-slicing" which dramatically reduces the cost of rendering a real-time reflection probe and makes having one at the camera position a totally viable solution.

If this is not acceptable for you then there're custom user-made scripts which use two reflection probes baking one at a time with a certain interval and linearly swapping them. Here's an example of such script: https://forum.unity.com/threads/ssg...enoiser-and-performance.1211346/#post-7836549

I tested both approaches myself and found both quite performant.

Could you please share a video of how this looks in motion and in comparison with on / off? That would help me to identify what's wrong.

Also, I have posted a setup that resembles a day / night change with a real-time reflection probe here: https://forum.unity.com/threads/h-t...cclusion-released.1251273/page-5#post-8529137
Maybe it can be of help.

Have you tested the native SSGI without the fallback? Sometimes it has such a limited radius that you get like 10% of SSGI itself and 90% of the fallback and that explains why it holds up so well under rapidly changing camera angles.

Of course there's a possibility that you encountered a bug or some other issue with H-Trace and I will do my best to help you, but providing additional data about your case is crucial here.

If you're sure theat the sky probe fallback is the key difference - I can try to patch a couple of files for you to make it work with H-Trace. We have added it in the next update already, but if you need it now - DM me and we'll see what we can do

 

@Passeridae Let's not waste any further time on my prototype. If dynamic time-of-day is a scenario you want to support then I will be happy to test this asset again when I'm ready to add it to the actual game.

 

H-Trace will go on Flash Deals at 70% off in the next few hours!

Asset Store link: https://assetstore.unity.com/packag...mera-effects/h-trace-gi-occlusion-hdrp-233762


P.S. It will be 70% off for the first 8 hours, 60% off for the next 8, and then 50% off until the end of the sale.

 

@Passeridae Hello! I just bought you awesome asset and i am very impressed with it. But i have i question on this thing:

I am getting some kind of ghosting effect and flickering on the controller while i move. Is it possible to fix this ?
Also i cant get an effect like on your video of this sample scene where you rotate directional light and the light bounces off blue walls and etc. How can i set it up on the demo scene ?

 

Hi and thank you!

This is a denoising issue. To mitigate it (to a certain degree) you can try to lower the "detail preservation" slider. It will blur small details (like contact shadows) but will hopefully produce better noise reduction. Other denoising settings may have impact on this issue as well. Samplecount, Recurrent Blur and Intensity are the most important ones for this case, I think. We are actively working on a new denoiser that will do better in such cases with little to no manual tweaking. It will be included in the upcoming major update.

The key thing there was a real-time (with time slicing) reflection probe that was placed roughly in the center of that room. Have you tried something like this? If this doesn't help I can write a more specific manual with some screenshots

 

I have a question about the realtime reflection probe: won't it be incorrect because the probe doesn't see any diffuse GI?

 

Can you elaborate more on that?

Theoretically, we need the probe to see the direct lighting. So everything should be either lit or not lit. Shadows are supposed to be absolutely black. Realistically, the probe can see something different. Like direct lighting + fake indirect lighting provided by, say, ambient probe (the most typical setup). If this is the case then the incorrectness starts from here. Ideally, we would like a probe to see only the direct lighting, but at the time of baking be able to compute ssgi and have indirect lighting too.

 

Thanks for the answer, i think it is better for me to wait for the new version of HTrace then. When you are planning to release it?

 

How do I setup the probe correctly?

edit: found a workaround, attach a post volume with a tiny sphere trigger to the reflection probe that has the indirect lighting controller on it with the indirect diffuse multiplier set to 0!

 

Soon-ish. Can't promise the exact date, but I hope that it won't take longer than a month. I think, we'll give access to the Beta to anyone who will be willing to test it and already owns the 1.0 version (you'll just need to DM me and attach your invoice from the asset store) so you will not have to wait for the official asset store release this way

Yep, that's a valid approach.

 

Is the 2.0 update and up version coming in the same month.

 

Hi, no, first 2.0 and then URP.

 

Most of these methods use reflection probes as fallbacks. Even in Unreal Lumen, the lumen card is a billboard, but the ambient capture is in 6 directions. The Unity Reflection Probe does not automatically scatter a large amount of lumen cards into screen space like lumens do, but it also has the advantage of being able to adjust performance with OnDemand.
Unlike Unity's default renderer, HDRP updates requestrender. Don't use RenderProbe.

 

Unity's Spring Sale has started and H-Trace is available at 50% off!

Asset Store link: https://assetstore.unity.com/packag...mera-effects/h-trace-gi-occlusion-hdrp-233762