HDRP 5x-6x + V3 post + stylised visuals no longer possible?

Hi,

I noticed on discord that it was mentioned that the bloom is moving away from glows and so on. We use bloom for glows. Not for physically accurate camera bloom (and I suspect 9 out of 10 devs will want to do that too).

So that's a concern - can we have some options - flexibility still possible?

Asking because the vast majority of Unity's customers are in fact making stylised games because it's too expensive to go for realism and HDRP has beautiful quality for stylised "pixar" visuals too.

I merely ask that Unity doesn't design out the ability to make stylised visuals because we're actually only making stylised games (like pixar, or modern gamified realism).

We appreciate the work being done for automotive industries and all that, but at the end of the day we're doing high-end nintendo style visuals and want to be able to still do that while using HDRP.

Really quite concerned if you're going to start removing options that we use for style... (bloom etc).

We can't raise emissive without smashing GI and lighting...


Please let us know what is happening so we can take the right steps.

 

Agreed.

But how hard is it to write your own post processing filter that plays well with the V3 post?

Because otherwise, writing a more old school style bloom/glow filter is relatively easy.

 

There is a danger Unity will remove a lot of options you can work with because to design out authoring bad PBR is more performant than preventing bad PBR.

Pixar are fully PBR so it's possible to be very stylised. If you're not on 5x then you probably don't know what I refer to, so for readers that are not there yet: it's still possible but we have to alter everything else in pipeline a little bit instead of having some kind of "boost" or stylised value foldout so it will be perhaps a thing for shader graph to tackle.

So long as things aren't aggressively clamped internally we should be fine with graph?

If we have options to control how much emission goes to GI vs buffers.

 

I get the concern but have you tried the PPv3 Bloom on your project directly? I was pretty worried first (as seen elsewhere) but you can still make things glow a lot by tweaking the materials emissive options new(?) exposure control. It will help make things glow a lot if you need something more unrealistic. I wasn't aware of this at first and that's kinda why struggled to get this kind of effect without absurd emissive intensity values when I initially tried it.

 

A major issue for me is that raising emission on material will also break GI. So it's still breaking things. We can't compensate for it.

 

This is our current concern too. We relied / still do rely on bloom for a lot more than just physically accurate bloom, and as hippo has said most people (us definately) are making stylized games, or at least most normal users who are not using this in the industry for their AAA day job will be as lets be honest, how realistic visuals will you achieve as a 2-3 man micro-studio like most of us are?

Right now we are having to choose between GI and the effect we want. Problem is the final visuals we want do not look correct without GI, nor do they without bloom based glow.

I am sure we can author one ourselves but given the lovely pixarish demo they gave of the girl under the tree in HDRP that also shows off the fabric shader, it would be nice to have as much enthusiasm and focus on stylized visuals for HDRP as realistic visuals.

 

Stylize visuals should be possible with the new Post processing/lighting setup. First you will have to know how it works though and then you can tweak it to your liking. Problem is that it forces you to know how to do realistic lighting before being able to do stylized. It's the "know the rules before breaking them" way of working.

 

Sure, we are very good at photorealism, correct values etc - I'm the first to come forward with many examples like how you can emulate even cartoons in real life with the correct lighting and materials.

What you miss however, is that all films break PBR. Pixar breaks PBR. Some things are utterly incorrect in pixar and marvel. Iron man's suit. Monsters Inc fur lighting. I could go on, but ultimately without tweaks you're going to add a hell of a lot of dev time for absolutely no reason.

Now I'm not saying "Unity, add all these mysterious tweaks to native UI" I'm saying "Unity, please don't block us from tweaking in script or graph".

 

Have you tried adding volumetric fog? That should give you the glow effect you're after.

 

I fully admit to not having played with 5.x at all, but can't you write custom shaders with your own Meta pass? (so you can pretty much decouple the GI representation of a material from the actual visible material)

 

I think it'll be resolved tbh, I'm just making a stand here so that we're not prevented, rather than it being asked for. In 2019.1 it marks the start of having less options and so on, which will continue if I'm not mistaken.

Regarding emission, the internal team for Unity are already knowledgable about it (VFX is all broken with new bloom so they need to add more emission controls for that - I just want to make sure the baby is not thrown out with the bath water)

 

That's... somewhat worrying.

I mean the point of the SRPs that Unity gives us was always to be slightly more specialised than the "I MUST DO EVERYTHING" built-in renderer, but I sincerely hope the HDRP doesn't become a one trick pony.

 

New Bloom is one example for this, it only has few options even after you enable advanced options for it. But also PPv3's AA options are now just "none, "fxaa" and "taa". There's no SMAA anymore and you can't tweak FXAA or TAA settings at all anymore, it's all hardcoded.

 

There is no danger of this. We can do everything we want in PBR land (imagine, the right lighting conditions can create any kind of fantasy look really). The only thing I wanted to draw attention to was to ask for script-side not to limit it. I don't mind if the UI does not show these things, so long as the advanced dev can go in and save themselves more work than necessary without editing the original package source.

I don't really want to edit SRP

 

Heeeeey! My sweet custom effects like sharpness and streak not working anymore! How can I using it now?!

 

Hey @hippocoder you should see it https://forum.unity.com/threads/tha...t-that-many-bugs-anymore.622726/#post-4171015

 

Here is gif of what I'm seeing on 2018.3.4f1, HDRP 4.9.0-preview and PP 2.1.2 (zoomed in 5x so aliasing is more visible):

https://www.dropbox.com/s/vnaefhrpgbihlmr/hdrp_smaa.gif?raw=1

I believe you it hasn't been officially supported but it has worked (or at least seemed to work) on every HDRP version I've tried (before PPv3).

I've tried looking all over them and can't find them. These settings don't seem to be exposed on code either. I mean these (and fast mode for FXAA):

Basically that motion blending is what I'm missing the most on PPv3. If that is somewhere else now, would love to hear where

Thanks for the bloom explanation