IndieEffects: Bringing (almost) AAA quality Post-Process FX to Unity Indie

For those looking for any type of image effect (especially motion blur) for unity free, I present my Indie Effects Package!

This uses Texture2D.ReadPixels to capture the screen and put it in a texture for any script to use (yes, you can use this texture for a buildings billboard!) Then, the main script applies my fixed function alpha-blend shader for fake motion blur, if it is enabled. This also allows any of the other effects included with this package to be "stacked," just like the real image effects package in Unity Pro! This package even comes with a small two-keyword API so you can write your own custom effects!

Included Effects:
* Motion Blur. This one is currently broken... But I have worked out a method of generating velocity buffers, so expect a per-object camera motion-blur soon.
* Fisheye (a port of the Unity Pro fisheye effect)
* Negative Colors (or thermal vision, whatever it looks like to you!)
* Anti-Aliasing (a direct port of the unity pro version)
* God Rays (Deprecated, use radial blur mode if you don't want bloom.) As far as I know, this effect has been removed. FrostBite23 has a new one with proper sunshafts, so look through the thread for the package.
* Vignetting (Written from scratch)
* Color Balance (Courtesy of Tryder.)
* Blurring
* Image Bloom effect. This effect, when used right, will look gorgeous!
* Depth Of Field Effect
* StarBloom (This effect now makes a return!) this one has been removed for now. I wish to add it again later.
* SSAO
* chromatic aberration-type vignetting (more realistic, and faster than vignette fx)
* toon outline. (courtesy of 0tacun)

New Features:

• New re-written Object-oriented API: allowing for split-screen games to work. (also, no more static variables!) see manual for details.
  
• Docs are now updated to the best I can manage, and should hopefully get better.
• whole system mow uses power of two textures, allowing for faster texture upload on slower systems.

Changelog:

• new screen capture method has been implemented. works faster, and looks better. also has a quality slider. The new motion blur fx coming will benefit from this very well.

Current Bugs:

• certain effects don't stack well. I have found the reason for this, and it's because most of my shaders don't use any sort of alpha blending, of which blocks other effects from showing. 3.0 aims to address this issue, and already, several fx (e.g. both DoF and Bloom work really well now!) have been given the ability to stack with others! On a side note: in the current release, the SSAO is stackable with other fx, so at least there's that.
• Using linear color space with these effects makes the screen go dark! if you get this problem, check the color space is set to 'Gamma' instead. no longer relevant as Unity 4.5 disabled linear space in free version.This is now releavnt again with the arrival of Unity 5, as free users now have access to linear space again!
• current POT implementation, from reading user feedback, is very buggy and slow on some computers. Since I have made a new implementation of the texture capture engine, I plan to erase ALL OTHER ENGINES, and only have one, to boost performance, and to clean the code up...
• effects pack still doesn't work on mobile: a lot of people wish this was possible, so I will see what I can do! On a side note: I did actually get some basic post-processing working in another project of mine, (see here for details: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/wip-neodash-a-sci-fi-not-yet-d-arcade-racer-for-android.267972/) and it essentially only captures the texture when it's needed. this allowed the possibility of a radial blur every time the player's car ran over the dash panel!

If you need help, just post your question on this thread or consult the MANUAL.RTF file I have included. If, however, you have written a new effect with this package, go ahead and post it here! (you can notify me if you want it in the base package if you like) Note that the Manual isn't up to date yet, so if something related to an effect is missing, please let me know, and i will add it.

Happy Game-Deving. For the unity package version to work, you will need to update Unity to the latest version. I am investigating ways of getting it to work in 3.5, and the .zip download in the github page may be a viable solution.

-FuzzyQuills

DOWNLOAD MIRROR (Only has JS scripts currently. C# port coming soon) :
LINK

WEBPLAYER :
LINK Webplayer builds no longer work as of NPAPI being removed from the top 3 browsers.

GITHUB REPO:
http://greatarcstudios.github.io/UnityIndieEffects/

 

I tested it and it looks good

 

I missed this when you first posted it. I'm eager to test it out.

 

Change effects on the demo? It says that the blur is already enabled, but the other ones just have numbers next to them.

 

Anti Aliasing?! *drools*

 

Just press that number on the keyboard to see the effect.

 

This is marvellous, really good work. Are you likely to add any more effects in the near future? perhaps bloom, depth of field or sunshafts? really looking forward to seeing how this turns out.

 

Thanks for all the feedback everyone. If anyone wants me to try and port any of the image effects, go ahead and post here what you want ported! just a note though (this may seem obvious...) if it requires a depth texture, i can't do it.

@TheNorthridge: Yes sir, that is Anti-aliasing. EPIC ANTI-ALIASING! I EVEN chose FXAAPresetB (the best looking one) to FUEL your need for smooth edges!

 

@davew_uk: Hmm... You want sunshafts? I am not sure if I could do this, but how does radial blur (or God Rays) sound to you? I am planning on adding this on the next release.

For bloom, There is a color enhance script that you can adjust to give a similar bloom effect. As for depth of field... I will see what i can do, but don't hold your breath - it usually needs a depth texture.

 

Sunshafts/god rays: that sounds great to me

Bloom: I have to say that I don't think you can do proper bloom just by changing colour values, you need an actual glow/bleed around the bloomed area.

Depth of field: I don't know much about how these things work but there is a reference to using Camera.depthTextureMode to render a depth texture in a Unity Answer here. According to the answer, the rendered depth texture should then be available to shaders.

http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/59956/retrieving-depth-buffer-of-a-frame.html

This might be the approach that is used by the new FXLab asset which is (superficially at least) very similar to your code - they have a working DOF implementation.

Kind regards
Dave

BTW - I ported your code to C# this afternoon, PM me if you want a copy.

 

Sorry, disregard what I said about depthTextureMode, its pro only. I found some code online and quickly tested it but the depth buffer is always empty in Unity Indie. Link here for those interested:-

http://chrismflynn.wordpress.com/2012/09/06/fun-with-shaders-and-the-depth-buffer/

So, I wonder how FXLab does it

 

I was just thinking: perhaps a multi-sample type of method could be used for bloom? I have heard that multi-sampling is used in a lot of image effects, including blur and bloom effects. I am also currently working on the sun-shafts/radial blur/god rays effect now. (i found out a little trick a while ago when i was making this package that might work)

And another question: is C# faster than JavaScript? If so, then i might take a look at your code for speed comparisons.

EDIT: the radial blur is almost ready! Here is the original image:
LINK

And the finished result:
LINK

This looks so epic, i could turn this into a VIGNETTE!!!

 

With this particular application the speed seems to be the same as the code is spending nearly all its time in readpixels. The higher the resolution, the bigger the bottleneck for obvious reasons. I ported to C# for compatibility with all my other scripts, it's generally not a good idea to mix C# and javascript in the same project if your scripts need to talk to each other.

As far as I know (and I am by no means an expert) to do the kind of bloom I'm thinking of you'd need to blur the brightest pixels after the colour enhancement pass to make a sort of glow effect.

For post-processing god rays/sunshafts I found a reference here:-
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch13.html

though having said that couldn't the existing Unity Pro effect be ported rather than write something from scratch? if I could code shaders I would surely help

 

I could try porting the unity pro bloom effect, since the Fisheye effect was a port of the Unity Pro one. (And done pretty easily too) But for writing from scratch: is it possible to do something like that in ShaderLab? Or does that need vertex/fragment shader writing? I am not exactly the best Vertex/Fragment shader writer around, so any help would be appreciated!

BTW, the example on the Nvidia website was impressive-looking, and something I can do quite easily. And also, i have finished the Vignette effect (does need a bit of tuning though...)

 

If porting Unity Pro effects is feasible, then I think that is surely the way to go. I'm hopeless at writing shaders, I wouldn't even know where to start, I'm a C++ developer

 

Don't worry, I am not the best shader writer either, but if ever you need a surface shader or a fixed-function shader written, I can help a little bit with that (half the indie effects shaders were ones i wrote myself in ShaderLab) As for porting existing Unity Pro Effects, I am on now to try this.

EDIT: Just looked at the code, it may take a while to port this monstrosity...

EDIT2: Someone offered to try writing a bloom shader, so lets see what happens. (porting the unity pro one resulted in a grey screen, so that's out)

 

Awesome script compilation TheBlur! I whipped up a color balance script/shader to work with your ImageEffects script. You can grab it off of my Google Drive right here:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6BscJ4Cq-K7b3J3Rk1HMkpRVlE/edit?usp=sharing

@TheBlur: Feel free to include my Color Balance script/shader with your default package download if you like.

For comparison purposes here are a couple of shots.

Unbalanced:


Balanced:


P.S. I used the Mecanim tutorial project to create and test this color balance script so if those screens look familiar that's why

P.P.S. Artists should be familiar with how this works. You'll want to experiment with different color combinations to find the balance that best suits your scene, mind you a little balancing goes a long way. For the example shot I used a slight blue lift with a bright of 1.05, white gamma with a bright of 1 and a slight yellow gain with a bright of 1.2.

For reference Lift/Gamma/Gain generally modify your lows/midtones/highlights. The brightness values are clamped between 0.0 and 2.0.

 

Thank you everyone for your kind responses! Now, it is time to look up the top again... THERE ARE NEW EFFECTS COMING SOON! (and that is in the next 24 hours!)

@Tryder: Just tested it this morning, looking good! Just a question: did you write the shader yourself? I do need a little help with fake bloom at the moment since the color enhance effect doesn't bleed the edges yet... With your script, i am going to add it to the base package with the rest of them, to replace the color enhance shader (which will hopefully become bloom in the future!) And thanks for your response to my package. FYI, I am adding your effect and two new ones that are sure to make any Indie Dev's day! (THIS INCLUDES GOD RAYS AND VIGNETTING!!!)

EDIT: For those who haven't seen the recent post, the new effects have arrived!

 

Thank you very much for these effects.

I am having a problem though. When I apply the effects component the screen goes almost completely dark and when I enable motion blur it gets even darker.

Are you really going to be able to put godrays in this pack? That would be incredible.

 

Yep. I'll see about playing around with your color enhance shader to get a bloom effect.

 

@Baldinoboy: Hmm... Could you show me a screenshot? Does the webplayer work for you? Also, try sending me your project or something so i can test it myself. (that is the most effective way of solving a problem, i believe) Please list your system info as well if you can as that could also be why the screen is dark.

EDIT: CHECK THE SHADERS. sometimes, the scripts don't assign the shaders properly, so check that Motion Blur(Alpha-Blended) is in the shader field in IndieEffects.

@Tryder: Thanks man, like to see what you come up with!

 

@Baldinoboy: Yes sir, you heard that correctly! thre isn't just god rays/radial blur - YOU WILL ALSO GET VIGNETTING! (Beware though; it is mind-blowing... and a bit too dark in some scenes)

 

I imported the package into an empty project and it works great.

But for some reason it acts up in another (test) project, which has a lot of assets.

Without effects


With effects

With Blur enabled it gets even darker

Do not have the best internet service so a project upload would take forever. I will do some testing and see what is causing this.
Thanks again for the pack. Really looking forward to the upcoming update. Also thanks Tryder for your work.

Windows 7
AMD Phenom 9850
4.0 GB
AMD 6670 1.0 GB

 

Indie alert! New files being uploaded!

 

@Baldinoboy:Nice specs! Anyway, check if the Color Enhancer is on. sometimes, dark areas get bad if this is on, so turn it off. As for uploading the project: If your internet is bad, don't bother, I have to deal with bad internet at times too!

Oh and by the way, thanks for the feedback! Tryder would be very happy to hear from you! (Oh, and here is a secret:Tryder said he might play around with one of my color enhance shaders, so you might get BLOOM in the next release!)
P.S @Baldinoboy: NICE SCENE!!! I could use some of your skills at terrain building! (I'm actually not that bad, but most terrain projects i come up with end up a tiny island with nothing on it!)

 

ATTENTION EVERYONE: New package (And Webplayer) Uploaded! Enjoy!

 

Great work - I'll port all the scripts to C# a bit later, maybe put them on my Skydrive for people to download if they want them.

Just one tiny thing though - I think there's a misunderstanding about god rays, otherwise known as crepuscular rays, sunshafts etc. They don't really have anything to do with radial blur, that's why I was confused earlier.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crepuscular_rays

They can totally be done in a post-processing effect (as per that Nvidia GPU gems link I mentioned earlier). I remember even Black on PS2 had a great implementation even if it was low res

 

@davew_uk: Thanks again, and thanks for mentioning the god ray/radial blur confusion, the god rays aren't i've made aren't perfect (they are cast from the center at the moment like the radial blur is, not from a light) I might add light-oriented god rays in a next release, or leave it as-is. As for C# porting, go ahead and post a link for the C# version (or you can give me the code so i can upload it if you like) so those who are heavy C# programmers can integrate it easier with their project (I know someone at my school who wouldn't mind a C# version)

 

it's not just a matter of centering the radial blur on a light, I would guess that you also have to do a bright pass, so that only the sun's glow gets the radial blur effect (and only when it is sufficiently bright) and not any part of the background.

One other thing I did notice yesterday which I found odd - I was looking at the performance issues (its understandably very slow at higher resolutions) and I found that some effects (noticeably the negative colour effect) look better and work quicker without the renderTexture.Apply() call in postUpdate(). Most of them don't work without it though.

I'll aim to do the C# port a bit later and will post a link when its done.

 

I have a Bloom script/shader ready, you can grab it from my Google Drive here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6BscJ4Cq-K7LVpUMVpWZzhGbkk/edit?usp=sharing

This shader is awfully slow though. It runs through 7 passes, you can speed it up at the cost of quality by removing a pass or two, but do not remove the first or last pass as these are necessary. The first pass converts all pixels below a specified luminance value to black, the next 5 passes blur this new texture with a 10 pixel wide 4 direction box blur and the last pass adds the blurred image to the unmodified game image.

You could probably increase the quality of the bloom by adding in the 4 diagonal directions in the fragC function, but that's going to double the performance hit. I also tried using a gaussian blur rather than box, and while the bloom had a rounder appearance, the edges didn't fade much. I might revisit this and experiment more with gaussian.

P.S. I had a thought on centering the God Rays to a particular light using ViewportToScreenPoint, with that you could determine the lamp's position in screen space and then convert that to UV coordinates for the shader to work on.

 

@davew_uk: Hmm... I WAS wondering that myself! But when i tried doing this, like you mentioned, half the effects don't work as well.

I did a bit of research a few days ago, since i was bored, and found out that Texture2D.Apply() is the process that is more expensive, not ReadPixels, but ah well, perhaps i could see what else i can do to give a decent speedup.

@Tryder: Hmm... it doesn't seem to work, every time i try to use it, this message appears in the console: "D3D assembly failed" and it appears to be an "if statement causing the problem (and unfortunately, there is no bloom...) Oh, and the idea for the god rays could be done, but i can be a hopeless vert/frag shader writer!

 

Try putting #pragma glsl into all of the passes.

At any rate I'm working on what might turn out to be a better approach.

 

Cool Bananas! I will try glsl instead and see how it goes. meanwhile, good luck and happy coding Tryder!

EDIT: Just failed again, just said it was riddled with errors. Also, what system are you using (if it uses DX11, that won't work on mine, I've only got Intel HD 3000 and that could also explain the shader problem) Oh, and the error was mentioning FragC over and over with a red symbol!

 

The new approach I tried isn't going to work out. The idea was to ignore pixels that were below the luminance threshold and I was able to get twice the speed out of it, but if the screen was filled with pixels at or above the luminance threshold performance dropped to maybe 1 frame per 5 minutes! It was a novel try, but oh well.

I'll keep working on the current approach and see if I can't find what the issue is. My system doesn't support DX11 either, I'm on an ATI Radeon 4100 HD Mobility.

 

Oh, ok then, Don't know why it throws up FragC errors then! Hopefully, we can sort this out.

EDIT: just to let you know, I ALMOST got bloom to work, but all my approach did (porting the unity pro fastBloom) was blur the screen without any kind of bloom at all!

For everyone's info: If you want blur, give me a shout, I got blur by accident when making bloom for this package! (But take note, It's only horizontal at the moment...)

 

Keep it up people! This is looking pretty cool.

 

Go ahead and send me your blur script/shader if you want. My blur shader was the first fragment shader I've ever written, I'm sure the Unity dev's know more about it than I so it might help me fix the D3D error you're receiving, plus their blur algorithm might be faster than mine.

 

Ok then, Tryder, time to port the script again! I shouldn't take too long, and I'll post a link when done! Oh, and by the way, congrats on your first vertex/fragment shader! Here's the secret to mine: I ONLY USED ONE FRAME CAPTURE!

EDIT: Here's the shader the script. The reason why your script may have been slow is because this one only uses one frame capture, whereas yours used several frame captures. only bug is no vertical blur.

Google Drive Link

 

@NextGen: That's not just people sir, IT IS AWESOMENESS!!! And you can also thank Tryder for the color balance script. Tryder and I are also working on fake bloom, so keep your eyes, ears and internet connections OPEN!

 

Tryder, I might be onto something! with the shader, I've been able to get the tiniest bit of edge bleeding possible! Let's see how this turns out!

 

very nice thanks

 

Any Plans On A DoF For Indie?

 

I just finished up a different bloom shader that's much faster than my first one, at the expense of quality. This one can be used for a bloom effect with a lower 'radius' setting and a star/glare effect with higher 'radius' or 'offset' settings.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6BscJ4Cq-K7cHRocmFIYWJrb1k/edit?usp=sharing

I used a lower 'threshold' setting for this image so you can get an idea of what it does. Typically you would probably use a higher threshold setting to isolate only the brightest areas for bloom.

 

Updated the original bloom shader to give a better blurring effect:


https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6BscJ4Cq-K7LUFfb21YbHk5Q28/edit?usp=sharing

 

I went ahead and made a Box Blur based on the Bloom shader:


https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6BscJ4Cq-K7UkxhSXRfZlN3VzQ/edit?usp=sharing

 

@Seth McCumber:Unless i can find a way of calculating depth from script, i am afraid no - most DoF scripts use the pro-only depth textures to blur the background, something not possible on Indie (The depth buffer on indie is usually empty, so that's also out)

 

@Tryder: Impressive, Impressive, AND IMPRESSIVE! I will test this out on my test scene... and hopefully that weird shader error doesn't pop up again! Oh, and by the way, nice box blur! I might integrate this later, so stay tuned

EDIT: That stupid shader error popped up again, so i tried a little trick: change #Pragma target 3.0 to 5.0, but still no bloom...

Oh, and BTW, what version of unity are you using? my unity version could be the problem too.

EDIT2: Just found something cool - the StarBloom shader is the ONLY one working! And it looks AWESOME in my test scene! And BTW, how did you get the star bloom? is it possible to use a different bokeh for the bloom?

EDIT3: Sorry for so many edits! I just realized something: We could use the StarBloom shader as a base for sunshafts!

 

@im: You are welcome. At the moment, Tryder and I are working on a bloom shader, so stay tuned! the only bottleneck is a strange error that keeps popping up with Tryder's shaders on my computer...

 

@Tryder: To give you an idea of what is happening with your shader, here is the error:

Shader error in 'IndieEffects/ShaderDir/Bloom': D3D shader assembly failed with: (18): error X6077: texld/texldb/texldp/dsx/dsy instructions with r# as source cannot be used inside dynamic conditional 'if' blocks, dynamic conditional subroutine calls, or loop/rep with break*.
(24): error X6077: texld/texldb/texldp/dsx/dsy instructions with r# as source cannot be used inside dynamic conditional 'if' blocks, dynamic conditional subroutine calls, or loop/rep with break*.

This happens with EVERY bloom shader of yours on my PC. could it be because i'm using Intel HD 3000?

BTW, don't worry about the smile in the middle; the stupid brackets did that.

edit: brackets are normal again, yay!!!

 

Just want to add my approval to the epicness evolving here, i doff my cap gents.

I can confirm the same error messages theblur experienced on Tryders shaders on my 560ti, which is a shame because some kind of blur effect (not motion or radial type) would be super useful to me.

Also I managed to get a useful performance gain on a scene billboard RT by halving the RT's resolution quadrupling the sampling camera's size aligning it lower left with a scene camera, this may only be of limited use though as i need to blur the result so a lower resolution makes sense for that.

I'll post more on this if/when i can make some bluring happen that dosent suck as bad as using mipmapbias