Linear color space no longer available in Unity Free 4.5

With Unity 4.5, the "Linear Color" space option seems to have been removed from the free version. This option has been available for as long as I can remember and I've designed my entire game with this in mind.

Looking back at the license comparison, it appears that this features was never meant to be included in Unity Free. And yet it was available for several versions, which lead me to believe it was safe to use.

I understand that it may have been an oversight to have it be available it the free version, but to be honest it does feel kind of petty to remove it after all this time. It's not like anyone is going to purchase a license of Pro just for that feature.

Of course it may be silly of me to complain about this considering I am not a paying customer, but I am quite disappointed that a feature I've become accustomed to gets removed just like that. Seeing as it's been available in the free version all this time I don't think it was unreasonable of me to expect it to continue to be available.

Oh well, guess it's back to the drawing board for me...

 

Try paying for a Unity pro license until your game is finished?

 

If your entire game relies on this feature, why not just build it in 4.3?

 

I've made do with the free version's feature set since I started the project more than a year ago. I'm not going to pay $1.500 for a single minor feature now, especially if it's one that's been available for free up til now.

I suppose that'll be my only option moving forward.

Though I do wonder how they're going to support the PBR workflow in Unity 5 without a linear rendering pipeline...

 

Thanks, that would be interesting to know as I really don't see how it would be possible to have a physically based shading pipeline without also having a linear workflow.

Yes, all my assets and custom shaders are designed for linear workflow. The entire look dev, which took months, was prepared in linear space.
In particular the game makes use of a lot of textures that contain numeric data instead of actual images. All that data is invalid in a non-linear system and will need to be regenerated...

 

Any word on this? Can we expect the free version of Unity 5 to ship without support for proper linear workflow?

 

I would guess that Unity 5 does put linear space back in the free version, since PBR doesn't really work in gamma space.

 

I can totally see Unity Tech making PBR a pro only feature.

 

I'd agree, except UT have already said that it's in free:

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/03/20/physically-based-shading-upcoming-in-unity-5-0/

 

You should just convert back to unity 4.3 or whatever.

 

That would be a dumb thing to do, since it would hurt the Free->Pro conversion rate. After all, you have to set up all your textures and materials differently for PBR and non-PBR, so a Free project would never be portable to Pro without a lot of additional effort.

 

Revert prior to 4.5.x