Jove 2.0: DX11 Rendering System (Alpha Release)

We're hoping 2.3, but making no promises

 

You can! A lot of surfaces in the scene i'm working on are intended to use it extensively, should look neat, hopefully

I'd quite like to use the Fluidity volumetric fluid asset in the scene since it's all new gen and wotnot, do you have any notion of how adapting it might go? And I guess TrueSky could get a look in if Fluidity can be managed (wild speculation)

 

I plan to use fluidity too so this will be helpful

 

Also do you plan on implementing volumetric clouds?
https://vine.co/v/Owz3UBad993

 

I too am interested in what support you will have for "effects", like compatibility with particle systems/ volumetrics/ decals/ transparents that "aren't glass" if you catch my drift. A perfect looking interior is all well and good but sooner or later someone will want to shoot something

 

@Aieth, thanks for the detailed explanation!

As about reflectance texture, that's news to me. I take you don't mean that you are changing the standard RGBA attribute map layout, just adding an new option to drive F0 from a custom shader using, if you want to do that, a new single-channel source (maybe albedo alpha, maybe a new map) separate from the main attribute texture.

@LilWiebe, yes, the demo even includes lit volumetric smoke and the package includes compatible versions of all basic particle shaders if I'm not mistaken.

 

I'm a big fan of the lit, shadow-casting particle shaders in Jove. But I couldn't call the example volumetric smoke, since unless I missed something it really isn't volumetric.

Getting Fluidity or equivalent working with Jove is a long-term goal of mine too, though for now I'm more than content to stick to the goodies coming in the new version.

 

There are no volumetric particles, but there is perfectly implemented volumetric system with shadows, texture and animation options that can be easily used for stuff like indoor smoke, fog and such (and would do a much better job at it than a particle system, with consistent coverage and no heavy overdraw).

But yeah there are adapted particle shaders if you want to set up traditional emitters for other effects, and those are not volumetric.

 

Add me to the list of folks who would love to see Fluidity working with Jove.

 

Eventually yes, it is on the list.

Decals are gonna happen soon (though you should be able to use a standard decal system already, just use Jove shader sinstead).

There are transparency shaders too, unless you mean something specific? And I'm not sure what you mean with volumetrics? There is volumetric scattering, do you mean more advanced particle simulations?

About Fludity, does anyone know how it works? Does it use its own shaders or the standard Unity particle shaders? If it is the Unity particle shaders you should be able to swap those out for Joves and it will work out of the box.

 

It's along the lines of the 3D volumetric fluid sims shown by nvidia, which were very detailed and realistically animated fluids within volumes -fluids could be anything from smoke to fire - seen the new nvidia flameworks? it can be alon g those lines. Uses a 3D grid to create a volume texture that can be lit and self shadows. I think it would be a good opportunity to check out if volumetric effects work nicely

Heres a vid with links in descr

Here its integrated into angry bots

 

The creator of fluidity Alex Dunn, actually works for Nvidia so i think it's based on their gpu gems technique.
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch30.html

 

Perhaps I should clarify, I was more interested in how it integrates into Unity Thinking about it I'm guessing it is using unique shaders? Though, is there anything preventing Fluidity from just running its own shaders in Joves forward mode? I mean, it doesn't interact with lighting anyway (I believe)?

 

It is (or can be) lit with a set directional light iirc, lovely shadowing within the volume, it does use unique shaders, im a bit tired to check atm but i can try to look later unless someone beats me. Fluidity is easily one of the most advanced and impressive vfx in the store to my mind, and extremely pretty, well worth a look

 

Fluidity uses compute shaders for the simulation, and the results are rendered using, I believe, a ray marching shader of its own. I've not tried to make it work with Jove in the past, though this will be high on my list of things to do when we get our hands on the next Jove version.

My own dreams for what might be possible in conjunction with Jove go beyond the ways that Fluidity can interact with scene lighting & shadows out of the box. To the best of my knowledge the directional light support it has is limited to reading the rotation of a directional light object in the scene, and using that for self-shadowing of the fluid volume. As such I don't think anything special would be required to make it work with a Jove directional light. In terms of the fluid lighting the rest of the scene, there is a simple attempt to emulate this at the moment, I believe it can control the position, colour & intensity of standard unity point lights as a proxy for the light that a, for example fire, fluid would cast. If other people are like me, they are probably imagining being able to hook these sorts of things into Jove in a far deeper, more 'authentic' manner, but I'm sure its not trivial to implement and should not detract from the main priorities for Jove development

There is a simpler, but freely available example of the same fluid simulation concepts running on DX11 in Unity, available on the excellent scrawkblog. It has many missing features compared to Fluidity, although in at least one or two senses there are ways to get the output prettier than Fluidity, probably down to specific implementations of certain parts of the system.

http://scrawkblog.com/2014/01/09/gpu-gems-to-unity-3d-fluid-simulation/

 

New to Jove here, which looks absolutely fabulous btw!
I'd just like to pitch in with some thoughts:
- does it handle the classic problem of overlapping/intersecting translucent surfaces that give rise to sorting artifacts?
- in the vein of GI(which I understand will come later), is there consideration for (i)reflective/refractive caustics (ii)indirect shadows?

 

I agree it looks pretty awesome. Unfortunately it is the usual situation that I can't really modify Jove to work with other shaders, other shaders have to be modified to work with Jove. If you attempt to patch in compatibility yourself I would be happy to help.

Yeah I'm afraid new advanced features for use with other assets is slightly out of scope for me Sooner or later I am going to get to implementing my own particle solution though, so I guess we'll see if something fancy comes out of that.

The transparency problem is actually more of an issue with rasterization itself than it is an issue of any rendering techniques. It is technically fixable by doing order independent transparency, but that has a very high overhead cost (even if you don't have any visible transparent materials). So no, I'm afraid there is no easy fix here : /

For GI I'm first looking to integrate Jove into Enlighten. Then I've got some ideas of my own that I want to play with for allowing GI without any precomputations, but that is all still very hypothetical I would estimate that indirect shadows are far more likely than caustics though. The issue with caustics is that it requires the pipeline to store and evaluate different materials, instead of just treating everything as the same thing with different normals/colors, so it means a lot of overhead.

 

A silly question about the forthcoming version so I can start to prepare - are the texture slots/channel allocations the same as with the previous version?

And did certain point & spotlight functionality that you talked about in the thread in the past make it into this version?

Cheers

 

It is almost the same The roughness remapping is changing slightly and I am adding an extra texture, a reflectance texture that controls the specular strength (called f0) of non metallics. The texture layout is as follows

Main Texture:
color RGB
reflectance A

Attribute Texture:
Metallic R
AO G
Translucency B
Smoothness A

Normal map
(as usual in Unity)

The reflectance texture is only for dielectrics (non metallics), it controls the specular reflectance (or specular power if you prefer the old school terminology). At 127/255, as in a value of 0.5, it means a specular reflectance of 0.04. This is usually the default value and it is what you get hardcoded in previous versions of Jove. The reflectance texture should generally remain between 50-180 if you are doing standard materials (with cavitys going below and gemstones going over).

There is one AO texture but there are three "proper" ways to supply prebaked occlusion via the textures

For dielectrics (as in not metal):
- AO texture contains medium-large scale occlusion, the kind of stuff you only really see on rough textures like a stone wall or unique maps per object (e.g occlusion on a house or something)
- The main texture RGB can have a cavity map multiplied over it. This is to simulate cracks in say a wooden plank, cracks that are too small to be modelled by geometry and therefore will not receive any shadows from a light source. This is called micro occlusion and affects ambient diffuse and direct light
- Finally you also have specular micro occlusion, this is applied to the reflectance (alpha channel of main texture). This should also be a cavity map.

For metallics you have two ways:
- AO texture just like before (medium-large scale)
- Metallics don't use the reflectance texture, just using the main RGB color. So you take your cavity map and multiply it over the main texture.


As for local lights, everything except shadows made it in. Its one of the first things I'm gonna do after this patch. Sorry for delaying it but I had to cut some stuff to get this patch out the door I could keep adding small to medium sized features forever. So this means that state of the art as correct as possible area lights are in, point, spot, tube and rectangular.

 

Thanks for the detailed info

Great to hear the variety of area lights that made it in.

Shadows for local lights is one of the things I was waiting for, but I don't mind waiting longer. Hopefully you're at a point with this release where you won't end up doing a giant refactoring of the system again soon. Avoiding the sort of thing that perhaps puts your latest developments well out of compatibility range of the version the public has, making it less practical for you to offer users smaller updates, more often. Everything you've been saying on this thread in recent weeks has been music to my ears, and so I hope I'm right in suspecting that we may be treated to more frequent updates that perhaps add new features one piece at a time in future?

 

It's a pity about the shadow thing, i'll have to reconsider my test scene a little - are there alternatives to create realistic lighting in enclosed spaces? Even if it might be slightly challenging i find such things entertaining to do. Would baking things in vray will have to be considered again?

 

Yeah I'm hoping to do it one update at a time. The features in this patch kind of sprouted from finishing several on-going evaluation tests. Going to narrow it down for the future.

I'm gonna try and push that feature out in a small extra patch as soon as possible. It is highly prioritized. As for your test scene, I'm afraid it is gonna be hard to get any good looks before I get Enlighten in, it just isn't possible without lightmaps in enclosed spaces

 

Thanks for the quick informative response!

 

Okay, the new patch is officially entering beta. Took a few days longer than I had hoped, but its done. I'm gonna start sending out PMs with downloads soon to the ones who have signed up for the beta program. Anyone else interested in joining in, PM me your in-voice.
I also added in a very simple water shader. I don't think its going to suit very many needs, but at the very least it can be used as an ok placeholder

 

Wheee! Be watching my inbox eagerly. Also, could you discuss the differences between your deferred rendering and the new Unity deferred pipeline? Guessing it's a lot more similar now that it's not just lighting prepass, just with different GBuffers, use of compute shaders, different lighting system and integrated post processing?

 

He showed the differences a few posts back on the last page.

 

It isn't that similar to be honest. They both share that they use a GBuffer, but everything else is implemented differently. Long story short, Jove is faster on modern hardware but can't run properly on pre DX10.1 hardware. And by faster I mean that it scales better, not that it produces higher FPS in a bare scene There is overhead to Joves approach (the above test scene with the spheres and boxes renders in 2-3ms for me), but it scales better.

As JecoGames said, I posted a lengthier answer here http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/jo...tem-alpha-release.262823/page-18#post-1974944

 

Hi Aieth please send me the beta to test. Have you changed anything to do with how you add lights to the scene or is it still likely to work fine the with proxy gi package that was made to work with the current version ? Also did you say that you have now changed it so that it doesn't have a hard limit to how many lights it will generate ? Am I right in thinking that because Jove is a clustered renderer that the performance impact of using 1800 lights vs 900 shouldn't be that much ?

 

Just in time for the weekend.

 

It is still likely to work with the proxy GI, I have not changed that part.

Your thinking is kind of correct. The performance impact should scale linearly when going from 900 to 1800 lights, if 900 lights is affordable then odds are 1800 are going to be as well, unless those 900 lights were 90% of your frame budget.

EDIT: Sent out a bunch of betas now. If you want to join in, please PM your in-voice number. If you have previously done so (like for the last beta), PM me anyway (but leave out in-voice number, preferably in our old conversation) as it is becoming quite hard to keep track of everything without a red little icon in my inbox

EDIT2: It is entirely possible the beta won't build yet, just so everyone knows. I have not tested it, I wanted to get it sent out before I go to bed now

 

Something else I completely forgot to mention, all those of you in the beta who are running Unity 4 need to go into "Jove/Resources/Shaders/JoveCGSettings.cginc" and change
#define JOVE_UNITY_VERSION JOVE_UNITY_5
to
#define JOVE_UNITY_VERSION JOVE_UNITY_4
or the IBL is going to behave funny. Unity 5 finally supports HDR cubemaps so I added that for Unity 5, but Unity 4 still needs the old RGBM encoded once (this also means that the included cubemaps in the demo need to be rebaked for Unity 4)

 

I've updated the beta version. Same download links as I've sent out, so just redownload.
- Fixed SSR reprojection bug, increased quality
- Fixed cubemap atlas bug
- Fixed a bug where a light would activate itself ingame despite being turned off in editor
- Fixed ambient diffuse multiplier not affecting the fog
- Fixed a bug that caused Jove to work incorrectly in Unity 4
- Added a vertex color height map blend shader
- Fixed a bug where going above 512 point lights would cause the culling thread to crash
- Added a better range setting for the bloom
- Grain is now off by default
- Fixed lights blowing up when luminous power is set to 0 (wops)
- Removed a compute shader related to lightmap baking that was not compiling correctly (it was not supposed to be in the release)

If no other serious bugs show up the coming days I'm going to be pushing to the asset store this week. Just going to add a detail normal shader and update the documentation.

Extra setup instructions for the beta release:
Unity 5: None
Unity 4: Go into Jove/Resources/Shaders/JoveCGSettings.cginc and change
"#define JOVE_UNITY_VERSION JOVE_UNITY_5"
to
"#define JOVE_UNITY_VERSION JOVE_UNITY_4"
and then reimport the shader folder. You are also going to have to rebake the cubemaps in the demo scene (I'm going to setup separate demo scenes for U4 and U5 for the release so this is no longer necessary)


And here is a pretty picture to accompany the post

 

Exciting news! Also, big thumbs up on the detail normal shader, for my aging character models.

Can you confirm the price for Jove following the update? I think it was getting bumped up to $105 before, but it looks like there's a lot more in this update than originally planned.

 

I am going to be bumping it to 105$ for the release of 2.2

 

I reuploaded the package and included a detail normal shader Also added some strength sliders to control the vertex texture blending.

 

View attachment 128900
this picture alone sets an atmosphere that game devs try hard to achieve. Jove is inspiring to do a lot more I previoulsy hoped

 

You're a hero Aieth , too bad my unity pro license is going to end soon

 

Quick question- so when you say that jove is a DX11 renderer and doesn't run on hardware previous to DX10.1, does this mean that it will work with DX10.1+ hardware (noting that Unity itself skipped over DX10 entirely)? Not a big deal if not, I'm mostly curious because according to the most recent steam hardware survey 20% of steam's active users are still running DX10 hardware, which comes out to around 2-3 million people. DX11 has a commanding lead, though- so anybody who's on the fence about buying Jove because it doesn't support DX9 shouldn't worry too much, less than 1% of users are still on hardware that old (in fact a DX9 compatible mode may even be a waste of time in my opinion!)

I haven't pulled the trigger on Jove yet, but I've been watching this thread (and the previous one) for a long time. I'm mostly interested in being able to make a game without really having to finagle anything to get it working, so I may wait until it's out of its beta period before I commit. Has anybody put together a demo or anything that really puts Jove through its paces yet? IE) I'm wondering how well the shadows look with skinned characters moving around an environment, moving from interior to exterior environments, things like that. Basically game-centric stuff (although the more tech-demo-centric shots you've posted have been gorgeous as well).

I'd also like to say that what you've accomplished so far is nothing short of jaw dropping, especially when your highly active presence on the forums is taken into consideration! The technical explanations you've written up have been extremely interesting to read, and one of the reasons why I check this thread every couple of days!

 

Holy crap, this recent announcement on changes to the free version basically means that Jove is now accessible to every Unity user. Get ready for some sales, @Aieth

 

Haha, I was thinking the same thing.

 

One can hope

@testure
The Asset store version (as in 2.1) only runs on DX11, but the new version that I intend to push this week supports DX10.1 and Unity 5. At least, it *should* support DX10.1, if Unity supports compute shaders in its DX10.1. I'm gonna need someone with a DX10.1 only system to test it

 

My laptop is DX10.1 only, with the mighty power of Intel HD 3000 graphics. I can test it on that if you like, is the current 2.2 beta the version you are talking about, or are you still working on the 10.1 compatibility?

 

I've actually got a slightly older quad core desktop PC with a geforce gt 240 in it running windows 7 with 4GB of memory. It's about as close to a min-spec machine as you're going to get i think haha.

if you make a demo I can try to run it, just lemme know.

 

@braaad and @testure
It's almost there in the public beta, there are a few extra changes to make it compatible. It's in my dev version. When I upload it later I would appreciate if you could test it I'm also going to be updated the demo... eventually, soon. Probably soon.

 

To all the beta testers: The beta version has been updated. You can reuse the same link as before.
- Heavily reworked the SSR raymarching logic, it should now provide pixel perfect reflections
- Fixed texture scale and offset in the vertex color multiply shader
- It should now compile properly, although due to shader permutations it takes 40 minutes on my computer. I am going to remove a few keywords (more specifically, removing support for 3 and 5 cascades to get permutations down)

Known bugs:
- If the SSR is activated and deactivated several times during runtime it goes haywire. I have yet to track this one down but it does not cause any errors if the setting is not changed during runtime.

No updated documentation yet.

Upgrade instructions:
Delete the old Jove folder and insert the new one

Extra setup instructions for the beta release:
Unity 5: None
Unity 4: Go into Jove/Resources/Shaders/JoveCGSettings.cginc and change
"#define JOVE_UNITY_VERSION JOVE_UNITY_5"
to
"#define JOVE_UNITY_VERSION JOVE_UNITY_4"
and then reimport the shader folder. You are also going to have to rebake the cubemaps in the demo scene (I'm going to setup separate demo scenes for U4 and U5 for the release so this is no longer necessary)

 

Finally getting the time to play with it, individual objects are working great, will try to set up an interior scene next. Only issue I have noticed is that objects are reset to 1,1,1 scale and 0,0,0 position if assigned a new material in play mode, but I'm not sure if that's Jove related and not Unity 5 related, got to check later.









SSR and the rest of additions are looking great!. I'd say the most important thing on my wishlist is still that one ancient feature request on is some way of improving the camera situation in the editor. Right now you have to keep both scene view and game view open at all times to work with your scenes, with game view being useless for selecting and scene view being useless for previewing. I realize it must be complicated to circumvent, but I think I saw an asset on the store that added image effects and such into the scene view, so vanilla scene view camera might be somehow fetched and murdered after all.

 

Everything is looking great, very impressed w/ the rendering quality and speed. Are the plans to add DoF to the image effects? And how is the Enlighten integration/lightmap baking/etc looking?

 

@bac9-flcl
The material thing should be Unity 5, Jove doesn't touch the material system. Either that, or it is the weirdest bug I have seen yet I've been meaning to look into adding it to the scene camera, it just keeps getting pushed due to other features. I promise it will be one of the things I do next

@niosop2
Yes, DoF is the first image effect I am going to add. I am also considering doing some structure changes to start support third party image effects that require the depth buffer, so that would enable the default DoF effect as well.
As for Enlighten, I am not sure yet. I have not downloaded the final version of Unity 5 yet (still on RC2), but I don't think anything has changed in this regard. Simply put, as of this moment, it does not seem like the Enlighten integration is open enough for me to integrate into it. I could be wrong on this though, I've only looked through the docs. That said, I don't think Unity is anywhere near finished with adding more Enlighten stuff, so I'd say this is likely to change in the future.

Either way, I feel there is a real need for lightmaps. So I am moving ahead with my lightmapper. I've started implementing a production version of my prototype, doing a merge of CPU and GPU operations. I am keeping the expensive ray tracing on the GPU, but moving the light calculations to the CPU for increased flexibility and less memory related issues (reading and writing from the same data feels like such a luxury). I know it isn't as exciting as real time GI, but it is a solid foundation And it should end up superior in quality to the baked variants of Enlighten as the technique approaches ground truth. I've posted a bit about it a few months ago, here's how it looked back then http://forum.unity3d.com/attachments/bakehq4-png.114447/

 

Out of curiosity, how do you plan to set up your DOF? Is it going to be based on physical cameras (IE: f-stops, etc), or are you going the simpler route of specifying a start/end range for blur?

 

I am going to be evaluating a physical camera and see how it works out. I hate to do experimental stuff that might end up to be a waste of time (I can't afford that being a single developer) but this one I have to try. Basically, the exposure system is setup to automatically provide camera values that can be used for a DoF effect. So, in addition to the camera adjusting to light changes (moving indoor to outdoor) the focus would shift as well. At least that is the plan in theory, if it doesn't work out and just ends up cumbersome to control and get desired results from I'll scrap it and go the traditional route.