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Feedback I'd like this GI solution in Unity, thanks a lot :)

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by hippocoder, Apr 6, 2019.

?

Would you like this?

  1. Yes

    93.8%
  2. Yes

    67.9%
  3. Yes

    66.7%
Multiple votes are allowed.
  1. Zarconis

    Zarconis

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    SSGI seems rather noisy.
     
  2. konsic

    konsic

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    It's good for static lighting, not dynamic.
    If it solves dynamic lighting denoising, it is competitor for unicorn GI.
     
  3. AndersMalmgren

    AndersMalmgren

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    It's interesting that enlighten is deprecated and soon removed before they introduce a replacement Realtime solution.
     
  4. OCASM

    OCASM

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    Except for the artifacts inherent to screen space techniques. A screen-space pre-trace followed by real ray tracing is the way to go as demonstrated in Metro Exodus.
     
  5. Murgilod

    Murgilod

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    It's not that interesting at all. They have to license Enlighten.
     
  6. Acissathar

    Acissathar

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    The blog post said it's because Geometrics is shutting it down as a product. Still no deeper "conspiracy", it's just their hand was forced a little early.
     
  7. Murgilod

    Murgilod

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    They're discontinuing the version Unity is using, I'm pretty sure. They still talk about the updates they're giving to UE4 on their blog.
     
  8. AcidArrow

    AcidArrow

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    I personally do not care about Enlighten being deprecated, I do not use it any more, but the way Unity discontinued it without much warning and screwed everyone that had built their games around it is giving me "dropping Beast without warning" PTSD like flashbacks.

    And for clarity, it was Unity that dropped it. Their hand was not forced, if they really wanted to, they could keep having Enlighten for the foreseeable future.

    image.png

    Now that we settled this, let's hope the new stuff comes quickly and is decent.
     
    Last edited: Nov 17, 2019
    chadfranklin47 likes this.
  9. konsic

    konsic

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    That is understandable then.
    Unity already has DXR in SRP for Nvidia. I would imagine enlighten with raytracing would cost more.
    DDGI was working since early 2019.2 so it's in testing phase. They aim to expand for AMD.

    I think that is better to have everything within SRP than 3rd party solution which will require additional maintenance on top of everything.

    Unity should create hardware agnostic raytracing and DDGI.
     
    Last edited: Nov 17, 2019
    iamthwee likes this.
  10. iamthwee

    iamthwee

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    RTX Lightprobes FTW
     
  11. Murgilod

    Murgilod

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    I've dealt with enough stuff like this comment to notice exactly what's not being said. He mentions continued support. He does not mention cost.
     
  12. AcidArrow

    AcidArrow

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    Sure, maybe, I don’t know. I also feel like Unity wasn’t feeling like paying anything at all really after the S***show Enlighten was in 5.x. And I can’t blame them too much for that.

    The problem is that they announced the deprecation without a replacement ready and they demonstrably have known for a while. Ever since Silicon Studio bought Enlighten I asked what it meant for the Unity integration but was met with silence. Even though they knew.

    They could have a solution ready, like now, or told us much earlier, or they could take one for the team and pay silicon studio whatever they wanted for a few more years, I mean Unity recently had a price hike for no benefit to us users at all and we’re paying. It’s business.

    Maybe Silicon Studio was being unreasonable, but seeing how Unity ended up handling things, I am not really willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they handled this in a way that even remotely prioritized their users’ well being.

    Which is “fine”, because corporations, especially big ones, like money and are assholes, and Unity is a corporation, just so we’re all on the same page.
     
  13. konsic

    konsic

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    It's not that simple. There was a study some time ago and if I remember only 27%-30% of Unity developers use enlighten.
    How many of those are paid subscribers?

    Unity is changing. SRP is still experimental.
    Integrating it now with SRP and knowing it'll change with 3.10 SDK in summer, plain and simple is not a good strategy.

    Enlighten is in 2019.4.LTS.

    RTXGI is very close.
     
    Last edited: Nov 18, 2019
  14. AcidArrow

    AcidArrow

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    If 30% isn't enough usage for Unity to bother to maintain a feature, I... I really don't know what to say any more.

    I wonder how popular Collaborate is.

    Or Umbra. That's licensed too.

    And I doubt 30% uses HDRP.
     
  15. OCASM

    OCASM

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    People use Enlighten mostly for the lightmapping. The progressive lightmapper takes care of that. For the rest there's always the asset store.

    Does anybody know of released games that actually use the real-time GI feature of Enlighten?
     
  16. AcidArrow

    AcidArrow

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    P.A.M.E.L.A.
    Wayward Sky
    Possibly tons more but it’s hard to know which game actually uses Enlighten and which not.
     
  17. Murgilod

    Murgilod

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    HDRP only recently stopped being an experimental feature and is being developed in-house.
     
  18. OCASM

    OCASM

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    Can't be too many since the complaints about Enlighten's removal are few.
     
  19. iamthwee

    iamthwee

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    Taking a moment out to remember our fallen comrades, enlighten and LM'ing in general. Gonna miss ya.

    l2.jpg bb.jpg hh.jpg testig2.jpg testig3.jpg

    Also update on the poll results shows 130% in favour of yes, 68% yes and 67% yes.

    *Poll kinda reminds me of a Russian Polling Station.
     
    Last edited: Nov 18, 2019
  20. AcidArrow

    AcidArrow

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    So? Maintaining a team is probably as expensive. Again if 30% is how much a feature needs to used for Unity to maintain it, we are doomed. That’s not a game engine then, it will quickly morph into like a very fancy Facebook client.
     
  21. Murgilod

    Murgilod

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    Maintaining a team is generally something that happens as part of running a business, which is a sharp contrast to Enlighten, which I wager was only being used because it was in the engine due to the license.

    People generally don't like Enlighten. I know a good amount of people who wish Unity was still using Beast.
     
    OCASM likes this.
  22. AcidArrow

    AcidArrow

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    And I am one of them. But I bet less than 30% used that too, since the GI features were Pro only, huh... Maybe that’s why they removed it without a second thought.
     
  23. Murgilod

    Murgilod

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    Actually it's because Beast was outright completely discontinued in 2017, but the writing was on the wall before 5.x even came out
     
  24. AcidArrow

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    I know. The writing was on the wall for years, and they replaced it with the most broken implementation on Enlighten ever, which I guess is more than good enough for a feature that was used by less than 30%

    I am trying to argue that the 30% argument is horrible, since game engines should be tools that give you the freedom to do all kinds of things and as such should have a ton of features that only small percentages use. It's a tool and a feature that I use once, but really helps me that one time, is a useful feature. There's a place for the "it wasn't very popular" argument in software, but it's not in game engines or OSes.

    That is the argument I am trying to make but you are arguing about everything around that.

    I mean, really, if HDRP was final and was used by 20% of people it would obviously be a useful feature to have.
     
  25. jcarpay

    jcarpay

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    30% is actually a lot and definitely not a number where depreciation should be considered.
     
  26. elbows

    elbows

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    Yeah, 20 or 30% use of a feature would be considered a huge success in many areas.

    Nvidias website gives a general availability date of 2020 for RTXGI.
     
  27. konsic

    konsic

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    Lex4art likes this.
  28. OCASM

    OCASM

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    And what percent of that uses the real-time features of Enlighten vs just the lightmapping?
     
  29. AndersMalmgren

    AndersMalmgren

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    I just saw the picture on the first page again. The contrast is so low in that picture, must be worse than enlightens precomputed GI? I wonder how many f-stops enlighten Realtime GI has, the human eye have around 10 to 14. I'm guessing Realtime GI is below a cell phone camera even
     
  30. newguy123

    newguy123

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    What ever happened to DDGI? was it canned?
     
  31. SunnySunshine

    SunnySunshine

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    wdym lol. DDGI as a tech is used in plenty of games and game engines. Or you mean Unity, specifically? Don't think it was ever in development?

    Unity has been very quiet about their next realtime GI solution. So quiet, in fact, that there isn't even anything about it on their roadmap. Tbf I don't even know if they're working on anything.

    They backtracked a few years back, re-implementing Enlighten. As you might imagine, it caused a quite a stir considering how they just a few months earlier had said Enlighten was being removed entirely.
     
  32. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    I believe it's scheduled for removal soon again in 2023 or something.
     
  33. neoshaman

    neoshaman

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    Apv is their gi solution, it's a mix of ddgi but with layered probe resolutions volume and depth probe deactivated, and a solution similar to lumen screen space tracing. They also showed a local baked resolutions of gi at hpg 2022, that use fundamental awfully close to my low end experiment.

    IMHO they won't have a dedicated gi solution per see, because it will simply be rolled into their lighting rig, no need to call it out separately. Given that ddgi is mostly just probe but updated async with any solution, and apv is just that in some way, I can see why they would go that way. Also new extensions of ddgi trace ray directly into the probe array, sampling probe close to hit, which unity told their solution do for out of screen resolutions. That's what they were showcasing with enemy, which had real time resolutions of light bounce.

    It make sense to go that way, probe are a solution that work on all hardware, but with memory pressure to get good results, having nested resolutions allow to spread that pressure, and updating the probe is trivial on high end for good results. The solution are additive instead of having to maintain a different one for each machine.

    Now just have that but not tied to worldspace and we are Gucci Gucci.
     
  34. SunnySunshine

    SunnySunshine

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    APV does not react to light changes though. It's a replacement of light probes and LPPV, not Enlighten.
     
    KRGraphics likes this.
  35. neoshaman

    neoshaman

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    I'm referring ro what I have read in the apv thread, I'll check again. But lightprobe are basically just huge light cache anyway. If the api allows it, it might be possible to update them manually. I need to see if we can update in such a way the old solution, that would be cool, especially for low low end.
     
  36. neoshaman

    neoshaman

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    Oh yeah you are right about light change, now I checked the thread again, I was confused by their ssgi description, which, while seemingly resolving in real time, seems more like a support for small scale details.

    That said, everything is here to make a legit solution.

    I have been thinking too if there is a way to get sparse gi cache like the old tetrahedral solution but per pixel instead of object based. For example having sh bricks instead of singular at node to interpolate In empty space.
     
  37. newguy123

    newguy123

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    Yeah I'm talking about Unity and specifically they have a script in here that is called "DDGI"

     
  38. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    That stuff was cancelled.
     
  39. neoshaman

    neoshaman

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    BTW @hippocoder perdon my intrusion, while re reading the APV thread, I had seen you think you can render shadow on cubemap relighting? If you have the cubemap position and the depth, you can reconstruct fragment position, which is all you need to test against a shadowmap (assuming you can access a shadow map).
     
    hippocoder likes this.
  40. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    That sounds like a lot of tricky work. I had thought about an approach like that but in the end I've decided it's more trouble than it's worth. I imagine it's really Unity's job to do tech now, unless I'm shooting for a switch or something...
     
    neoshaman likes this.
  41. neoshaman

    neoshaman

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    Yeah the hard part is access a shadowmap in unity, I was supposed to do it for my solution but figured out I'll best go with an approximation of shadow to proof it first after reading about hack people pulled off...

    I recently had to freshen my matrix knowledge because I couldn't rely on unity even for that, because I had to access raw mesh data outside of objects, to unwrap data to texture, and that breaks the shader syntax sugar unity did automatically to pass matrix, and that mean normal aren't working properly (no transformation). It doesn't even use the proper import scale and coordinates basis... I still don't have a proper intuition about the inverse matrix, choking at the determinant part, even though I can apply nit (and computer is supposed to do it anyway).
     
    hippocoder likes this.
  42. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    I think really for me, Unity's burned me out both doing tech and doing tools. These are actually sold as benefits of the Unity platform, but I think it burns everyone out in the end. It's a bad idea to keep chasing it AND do a game. If you're just doing one or the other, then have at it.

    The reason it's a bad idea is because if you're a solo dev and still want to keep console compatibility, you need to keep up with the changes Unity makes and the forced upgrades, so at some point you're doing upgrades to unfinished code and that's just a little too insane for me.
     
  43. neoshaman

    neoshaman

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    Yeah I mostly doing that as tech demo to learn on down time and decoupled from game making. I had to re evaluate how to use unity and what kind of game I can do. I was just not ready yet because I had to start from scratch and figure out what game I want to do given the constraints, since the type of game I wanted wasn't possible at the quality I wanted anymore. I'm going to embrace cheap and quantity oriented derivative works a bit more, sadly.