[LEGACY] PIDI - Planar Reflections 2. Real-time reflections with Lightweight SRP+Mobile support

Glad to hear it is working again!

 

OK but I'm confused why it no longer works in a fresh project with just PIDI in it, even the demos do not work.

 

Hi there,

I just tested creating a brand new project (Unity 2018.2) and a fresh download from the asset store and I can confirm that it does work without any issues whatsoever. If it is not working for you, there might be other reasons but all of them are completely unrelated to the tool itself :

Corrupted download from the Asset Store
Corrupted installation of Unity 2018.2
Using a Beta version of Unity 2018.2 instead of an official release (only official releases are supported)

I hope this helps!

 

I see you're using PC, it works fine on PC but no longer on iOS or Android in a new project.

 

I did both tests on android and PC.

After testing on Android, same brand new project on Unity 2018.2.1f and 2018.2.0f (should work the same with other 2018.2 branches) I can confirm that it still works without any issues whatsoever, both in the editor and on a build directly on an Android device. Please check your Unity installation and that the new project is being set up correctly.

On my end, everything is working without issue on Unity 2018.1, 2018.2 and 2018.3. Again, if you can use the extension on an existing project but not in a brand new one then the issue is not the tool itself. It may be the Unity installation, the new project settings, the version of the Java and Android Developer Kits you are using (or their iOS equivalent) or any other combination of settings specific to your setup and projects. I hope this helps!

 

Hello!

First of all, awesome plugin! I've been trying to get something custom to work for a project, but I haven't been able to get it to work properly. I have an environment and some Aura volumetric lighting in the scene, and I'm trying to fade out a reflective material through a property over time until it's completely gone. I'm not a shader person, but I've messed around with the shaders a bit and got it half working.

I'm setting the alpha through:

Code (CSharp):

1. o.Alpha = _Opacity;

I can completely fade out the material if I set the Tag and #pragma to

Code (CSharp):

1. "Queue" = "Transparent" "RenderType" = "Transparent" "IgnoreProjector"="True"
2. #pragma surface surf Standard alpha

But the reflection would draw over the Volumetric Lighting.

If I set the Tag and #pragma to this, the reflection would show correctly behind the Volumetric Lighting but then I'm not able to fully fade out the material.

Code (CSharp):

1. "Queue"="AlphaTest" "RenderType"="TransparentCutout" "IgnoreProjector"="True"
2. #pragma surface surf Standard alpha

I've tried messing around with "Mirror/Simple", "Generic/Depth+Blur", "Mirror/Fog Only", "Mirror/Fog + Blur", and I'm doing a lot of trial and error but no luck Any ideas how I can get the material to reflect properly with Volumetric Lighting and have it able to fade out completely?

Thanks!

 

This is what happens when I create a new project, install pidi and run your demo scene, then switch to Android.

 

On android, unity disables all depth processing by default (thus the water becomes invisible). In your video I can still see the reflections working as expected in two of the mirrors. Some other objects will probably not render as expected since, as you can see in the documentation, not all shaders included with the package are mobile compatible. What you are experiencing (at least what I can see from the video) is the demo scene working completely fine, just the settings of your project being set up incorrectly and producing some graphical issues due to attempting to run a desktop-oriented demo in a mobile-limited project.

On PC, if I set the quality settings to low or very low, the water disappears as well :



I want to make clear that the tool is designed to render reflections, and not all the shaders are designed to work on mobile without some changes to the project (in this case, using a script to enable depth on your camera). As seen in your video, the reflections are working which means that any other issue present in the video is entirely related to the project settings you are using, the limits of the devices you are targeting (which would make some shaders incompatible with them) but not with any error on the tool. As I told you before, the tool does work on Android projects (as you can clearly see on your video) and the apparent issues you show (the only one so far being that the water disappears) is due to Android projects not handling depth textures by default.

If I enable depth calculations on the main camera through a script that does :

GetComponent<Camera>.depthTextureMode = DepthTextureMode.Depth;

the water is visible on Android as well



All these things I mentioned before are settings that should be set up on a project-by-project basis since depth is expensive to compute in mobile and not all developers will want it on their games.

In short : The tool is working without any issues on your video (all reflections are showing as expected) but some shaders like the water one are not made for mobile. It wont work without manually enabling depth textures on the main camera which, since may be expensive, is something that each developer should decide on their own. Some other shaders will not work at all on older mobile devices. This is not an error, it is just a normal limitation of the targeted hardware

I hope this helps!

 

I would suggest that you look into "dithering transparency". It seems that, with the way Aura is built, you wont be able to render a fully transparent shader behind it, only an alpha tested one. While Alpha tested shaders cannot have semi-transparencies in them (they can't "fade") but instead only go from fully transparent to fully opaque, I think looking into "dithering transparency" is worth a try.

Basically, you would render your object with an alpha tested shader but using a dot-based grid with different spacing between the dots to simulate semi-transparent areas :
https://github.com/gkjohnson/unity-dithered-transparency-shader & https://ocias.com/blog/unity-stipple-transparency-shader/
which could help you achieve the effect you want

It's not the perfect solution nor it will give you the most amazing results, but fading effects + volumetric lighting or post-FX are usually a difficult mix to get right and this might take you in the right direction.

Hope this helps!

 

Great! Thank you so much for your help! That's something I can work with. I was able to get the fade out effect to work with the "dithering transparency" together with the reflection. However, I can't see the Volumetric Lighting through the faded material. Is this another limitation or do you have any suggestions?

 

Hi there. I was interesting in purchasing the asset. Do you have support for Single-Pass Instanced rendering (also known as multi-view)? If not, do you plan on supporting it?

 

This might be, unfortunately, a limitation from the Volumetric lighting system itself. Volumetric Lighting and semi-transparencies do not mix up easily, unfortunately. I will however try to research more on my own as well to see if there are possible solutions

 

Hi there, and apologies for the late reply. I never received the notification about your comment. There is no support for Single Pass Instanced VR yet ( only for the standard Single Pass mode ) but once the feature is fully finished and production ready ( at the moment, it is still in preview mode ) we will considering implementing support for it. Currently, no preview/beta/experimental features are supported outside of the current level of support for Lightweight SRP.

I hope this helps!

 

Coming in late February as a new update :

• A few improvements on the reflections' projections and performance
• New ASE (Amplify Shader Editor) versions of the standard shaders for learning and ease of use purposes
• New shader variants ( cutout, sprite like ) for precision transparencies on reflective materials.
• Between late February and early March, video demonstrations on how to set up mirrors, water shaders, shared reflections and other features of the tool

 

NOTE : This update will be sent for approval before the end of the day ( Feb. 18 ) and should be available before the end of this week.

 

Hi IrrSoft,

I'm back with some trouble to get the Alpha blended shaders to work on the "Game" window.
Right now, they do work only in the Editor view and I can't see why... Any idea?

Your help would be very appreciated

 

Hi there!
I would need to see the settings on your camera, since it may be a layer related issue ( main camera may not be rendering the layer of the reflection ) or its settings ( especially if you are using other render plugins that may be obscuring alpha blended shaders ).

Under normal circumstances, since it is just a shader, you should see the same results on both windows.

I hope this helps!


Regarding the update that was to be sent to the store last night:

The newest update has been slightly delayed as we are testing out a potential fix for Single Pass Stereo VR on Unity 2017+ which may help with getting more accurate reflections in all supported VR devices. Since this could improve development on a large amount of projects we have decided to push tests with this potential fix and, if viable, include it with this update.

Besides this, we have made upgrades to our development equipment (as well as a new laptop as a testing machine ) so both our support response time and development time will be slightly slower for a couple of days as we get everything working again. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the delay in the update but we hope that with it the final update will provide even more content and improvements for your projects

Have a great day!

 

Thanks IrrSoft for your prompt response.
The camera settings are the following (Could it be the Postprocessing Stack v2?)


I have no other plugin that would have an impact on rendering.

 

Hi there,

I'm finishing with the current update which will include a potential fix for Single-Pass VR on Unity 2018+ and should solve this issue as well. If you need to solve it and can't wait for the update, please select your material / materials and change their Render Queue to values above or equal to 3000 (Transparent) and this should solve the issue as well. Hope it helps!

 

There is an update coming in March with some interesting new features, including the ability to change the chain of components attached to the reflection's renderer which could, in theory, allow the reflections to use external rendering systems, postprocess effects etc. (think having a mirror use a different set of post process effects than the main camera to produce hallucination effects or just to reflect some other basic extension plugins ).

While support for third party rendering assets WILL NOT be guaranteed since their rendering methods may cause many (and even unsolvable ) conflicts with this tool, its main purpose at the moment (for which is being tested with a great amount of success ) is to have full support for the PostProcessing stacks v1 and v2 with little to no setup required on the part of the user, just attach your components to the mirror / reflective surface and they will be copied to the reflection's renderer.

Rendering post process effects in the mirrors themselves will not be compatible with VR as they introduce many modifications to the reflections rendering and could cause conflicts with the already heavily modified VR rendering pass.

More information will be available soon

 

New update to PIDI Planar Reflections is coming soon (around mid march ) :

• [Beta] Support for Post process stack v2 and custom component chains rendered directlly on the reflection itself ( Post process stack v2 is NOT supported on VR )
• Improved Stereo projection
• General bug fixes for VR
• Support for more complex plugins such as Aura ( v1 ) and other rendering plugins is not guaranteed, but some early experiments are being made to see the limits of our new custom components chain and prepare enough documentation.

 

Hi,
First thanks for the update, it did the job fixing the reflection working with alpha shaders.

Now, I'm interested to know how do I setup my project and PIDI Planar Reflections to use the PPS v2 (beta) that you mention in your latest release notes?

Thanks

 

Hi there!
The PPS v2 support mentioned above is coming mid march, it hasn't been released yet. It should be available around the weekend / next Monday

At the moment, I am still testing the new behavior so there is not a 100% official workflow but, so far, the only thing you would need to do is to 1) Import the PPS v2 to your project and 2) Add the same Post Process component you would add to your main camera to the mirror itself. This way, the mirror will add the required components to the rendering process and the reflection itself will render its own post process pipeline, independently from the main camera.

This way if you want, for example, have a mirror that reflects the environment with a special look up color correction texture you can do it, or if you want the reflections to display antialiasing / ambient occlusion you could do it as well.

I hope this helps and sorry for any misunderstandings!

 

Sounds amazing! Can't wait! Did you see potential large performance issues with it so far? I could imagine having a double cost adding PPS to the project... :/

 

Hi again!

There is a performance impact but this impact is exactly the same as adding the post process stack to a normal camera. This means that if, for example, adding SSAO to your main camera drops the framerate by 20 FPS adding it to the reflection itself will drop the FPS count in more or less the same 20 FPS.

There are no inherent changes to the performance of the reflections in any other way and, if you keep your scene optimized and the amount of effects added to the reflections under control, the extra quality added ( especially for people who wanted to have SSAO / Antialiasing / DOF / Bloom effects reflected clearly on the mirrors ) might be worth it

The new workflow itself allows you to add any component to the reflection object and have the certainty that it will be added to the reflection itself. Compatibility is only tested ( and officially supported! ) for both versions of the post process stack but it might just work as well with other graphics plugins such as those used for volumetric lighting which depend on components being added to the main camera. With this new workflow, they can be added easily to the reflections as well without any additional code, modifications or any complex setup

Hope this helps!

 

Hi @IrrSoft
I'm interested to your asset but I've something to ask you.

Consider this scenario: a custom standard shader, made using Amplify Shader, used to show different road materials (asphalt, grass, gravel, dirt and so on).
In this scenario, how your asset should work?
In order to have reflections on the different road materials I've to use your shader for road losing our customization?
I've read about an integration with Amplify Shader Editor, is it compatible just with LWRP?
If it's compatible both with legacy Unity shader and with ASE, should I add your shader to our ones and benefit f your asset?

This asset is suitable and works well when applied to not perfect flat surfaces? I mean surfaces like rally roads/ paths.

Thanks in advance

 

Hi there,

This asset does not depend on any specific shaders to work, it renders a reflection into a render texture and that texture is then sampled by the included shaders. However, this sampling process can be implemented into any custom shader and the tool will automatically send the texture to the material as long as it has a "ReflectionTex" proprety.

There are several ASE shaders included for the Standard pipeline as well, designed as examples and starting point for your own custom shader. You could study the included shaders and add the necessary sections to your own shaders to make them fully compatible with our tool. There should be no problem with this

While the tool is designed for mostly flat surfaces and it will work better the flatter the surface is, it can work without issues with some slight variations on the surface. I hope this helps!

 

looking to your examples and looking trought the posts I can't see a clear example about reflections blurriness according to the physical properties.

I'd like to see something like this (the wet asphalt) where glossiness (or smoothness) drives the bluriness of the reflections




Have you some examples like this?

 

Hi there,

Thank you for your interest in this asset

With the update coming this weekend we are making several improvements to all shaders to allow for better control and a more realistic PBR behavior, here is a small example of it that might be similar enough to what you want to achieve :



However, the tool is very flexible and while there are plenty of shaders provided as examples you can also make your own shaders compatible with the tool easily and make them support any effects you need

I hope this helps!

 

New update for the tool coming around the weekend / next Tuesday including the following features :

- Improved PBR look with blurred reflections following more accurately the glossiness of the surfaces
- Fixed a few shader bugs regarding glossiness on specular shaders
- BETA support for Post Process Stack v2 rendered inside the reflections. Has some limitations and some performance impact due to the effects themselves.
- BETA support for custom components on the reflections. This is VERY LIMITED and is just a basic implementation for basic needs ( such as the above mentioned Post Process Stack v2 ). There is not (nor will be any ) guarantee of compatibility with any third party tools.
- Performance improvements for ForceUpdate component
- Some additional VR improvements
- Additional clipping planes fixes for some console errors and clipping glitches
- Readjusted clipping parameters now accept negative values for Clipping offset and near clip plane, which may help to solve some issues found by a few users.

 

Seems better but there some many distortions on that surface that I can't understand if the change of resulting smoothness is due to the normal maps or due the respect of the smoothness map.
Starting from that scene, could you post an image with just a color as albedo and a smoothness map (no normal maps or any other distortions maps)?

I'm sorry to bother you with these requests but I'd like to be sure to buy an asset that will satisfy my needs instead of leaving it in a digital shelf taking dust.

thank you in advance for you collaboration.

 

Hi there,

Here is another screenshot of the scene this time just with smoothness / Specularity maps. Please remember that these effects will be available at this quality only after this weekend's update (which should be available for download next week)





I hope this helps!

 

I would like to know, through your asset, if I can extract "reflection only" pass as one of a layer for compositing multiple images. Thanks.

 

Hi there,

I am not sure if I understand exactly what you want to do, but this tool allows you to render the reflection itself to a Render Texture asset which can then be assigned as a normal texture to any shader and, with your own custom shader code, you can do whatever you want with it. I hope this helps!

 

Good. It really seems what I'm looking for.

thank you for your reply.

 

PIDI Planar Reflections v2.3 will be available this week ( probably as soon as tomorrow ). Here are a few considerations that you need to take into account for this version :

- Material properties for PBR reflections have been slightly changed to make the materials more realistic. Some material re-adjustment may be needed.
- The new Custom components chain ( used for Post Process Support ) is in BETA but it has some restrictions in place already : It will most likely NOT WORK on VR ( nor is it designed for VR ) and compatibility with 3rd party tools is NOT guaranteed. It has not been tested yet on Lightweight SRP
- The new features are already documented in the manual, so please read carefully the updated documentation before using the new features.
- Custom components chains use Reflection ( as in System.Reflection ) so please make sure your device supports it and take it into account when budgeting performance.

Hope this helps!

 

Hi there

Thank you for your prompt reply. Since I am a CG rendering guy, therefore I may not able to use proper wording to explain my question. For better communication, please see the picture below. I need a "reflection pass only" image for a chromakey project.

Additionally, from the spec of Planer Reflections, I found this "Chroma-keyed shaders that mix static and real-time reflections ". I think this may be the answer to my question.

Would you mind to tell me more about "Chroma-keyed shaders that mix static and real-time reflections " ? Many thanks.

 

Hi there,

The chroma key shader renders a reflection clearing to a specific color, but this shader is intended to be used as part of a material and not on its own. The reflections produced by this tool always have a background and, in the case of the chroma keyed reflections shader, this background is dynamically removed by the material itself. There could be some workarounds for what you want to do but you would need to implement your own chroma key shader to process the output reflection as this workflow is not supported out of the box.

I hope this helps, please feel free to ask further questions if you still have more doubts !

 

PIDI Planar Reflections 2.3 is now available for download with a good deal of new features. However, this is the last release of Planar Reflections that will ship with support for Unity 5x. Starting with any upcoming updates and patches we will move to Unity 2017.1 as the lowest version supported and by August-September our lowest supported version will be Unity 2017.4 (LTS).

This is in part due to recommendations by the Asset Store team and in part due to the technical difficulties of developing these assets for Unity versions that have grown quite different in their internal APIs and in some cases requiring complex workarounds for older versions of Unity. If you have any reason for which your project is locked to Unity 5x please contact us, we are interested in hearing from you and trying to find a solution for this that allows you to keep using our tools.

 

A rewrite of the LWRP implementation of Planar Reflections will be sent to the store this weekend. Again, as always, support for SRPs is still in Beta but starting with this patch the minimum version required to use LWRP with planar reflections will be LWRP 4.1 and Unity 2018.3.0

I hope this helps!

 

Thank you, Sir.

I still don't quite follow you. Would you mind to show me some images that referring to your explanation about the appearance of an image has chroma key shader in it?

Thanks.

 

New LWRP Patch will be sent later today for approval around Wednesday

Hi there,

Here is a small example of what I mean :



Original reflection



Chroma Key + scene's cubemap



Chroma key + another scene's cubemap

Basically, what this means, is that our Chroma Key reflection shaders are designed to allow you to mix a static, cubemap based reflection with the dynamic part of it. There is no way with this asset to render the reflection pass by itself.

The Chroma key shader included works by removing a specific color in the reflection, and the reflection is rendered with the equivalent of a green screen when using this shader.

If you want to have the reflection pass only then you would need to render the reflection with a green/blue background acting as a green screen and use your very own chroma key implementation to remove this color, leaving you with the reflection pass by itself.

The included chroma key shaders are not designed for this. The materials and shaders included with the package cover the most common uses ( reflective PBR materials, glass, floors, water, etc ) but are provided mostly as learning materials and foundations for users to create their own shaders if they need more complex / unique uses for the reflection textures rendered by this tool.

I hope this helps!

 

This is an important notice. With the release of Unity 2019 and the official release of LWRP as a production ready pipeline there will be many changes coming to PIDI Planar Reflections. Some of them will be available in the short term while some of them will be ready through 2019 up till August-September.

However, here are some important changes coming during May-July :

• LWRP Support will be greatly extended and developed to match everything offered in the main version. This means a new dedicated water shader, new performance improvements for this pipeline, support for newer LWRP versions
• New tutorials and improved workflow, to make handling reflections much easier.
• New improved workflow for mobile, to optimize performance on lower end devices.

I hope this helps, if you have any questions please reply to this post or send us a PM and we will be happy to answer

Have a great day and a great weekend!

 

As part of the May Madness sale, we are happy to announce that you can get PIDI Planar Reflections 2 with a 50% OFF, only 17.50 dollars!
This offer will be available until May 15.

Have a great weekend!

 

This is an important notice :
We will be away from our main workplace during the rest of May and the first weeks of June, which means that our replies to support requests might be slower than usual. Please be patient, as we will keep doing everything we can to reply to them all.

During this week however, we will be unable to reply to any support requests after Wednesday (May 15) and won't be able to resume the support service until next Monday / Tuesday (May 20-21). We apologize for any inconveniences this causes.

Thanks for reading!

 

This is a small update to let you know that due to the summer vacations we will be away from work from June 30 to July 22.

During this period, our support service will be unavailable except for a few news updates here on the forums.

We apologize for any inconveniences this may cause, but as soon as we are back we will be fast to reply to all your emails and support requests, as well as some important news for this tool!

Have a great day!

 

Hello, I'd like to use this asset in my (mobile) VR game, i want to use this for my car mirrors. Is this still possible (i read on your store page that you do not support VR devices anymore)?

 

That's right. Unfortunately, VR devices are no longer officially supported. While Google VR worked without issues in all versions of this tool and the components for VR compatibility are still included with the package, they are no longer supported nor are there plans to provide any additional fixes nor updates for VR.

I hope this helps!

 

Hello, can you further explain what is not quite supported yet with LWRP? We're using 2019 with LWRP 5.7.2. Our biggest concern would be having the reflections work with PP.