Marmoset Skyshop - Image-Based Lighting Tools [RELEASED]

Hello Unity people. I am Joe Wilson from Marmoset, the guy who made the Camera and Vepsa models in the Skyshop demos. Also EarthQuake from polycount if anyone hangs out over there.

First off, Specular and Gloss maps are not something that you can really use a tool to "produce" or "generate". Ideally you will create these textures along side of your diffuse and normal maps (the relationships of the various textures are very important for convincing, dynamic materials). Quixel's dDo is a great tool for creating textures, but again it will not automatically generate textures for you, you will need to tell it what sort of reflectance values you want for various materials, ie: wood, metal, cloth, etc will need very different diffuse, spec and gloss content.

I wrote a material tutorial for the camera asset that explains how to set up various different material types in Marmoset Toolbag, the same principles apply for Skyshop as the rendering system and shaders are very similar. Check that tutorial out here:

Marmoset Toolbag Material Setup Tutorial

 

Great LarryGary!!!

Many thanks for the info.

 

Hey EarthQuake... it's great to see you on these forums... and that tutorial is very helpful... the only part that kinda messed things up is the RGB masking in which xNormal generates random colour IDs if colour is not present on the model... and it is good to know that the texture work i did for marmoset works perfectly in skyshop. And I am needing an answer with this... are there any issues with this when Unity is in Deferred Lighting? I have heard about a bug in some shaders when deferred lighting is used, specifically in skin shaders when tessellation is used... would love to get an answer to this? Thx.

 

Creating from scratch not so much, but if you start from the get go using quixel dDo it's just a minor change in the work you have that is heavily compensated by how useful and quick dDo makes texturing certain things.

 

Yeah, I'm not a fan of the way Xnormal handles color mask baking. The RGB masks for the camera were baked out of Maya. I assign my color masks per-face in Modo, which exports perfectly to Max or Maya where I generally bake. Xnormal's process is a bit more convoluted and requires you to split up mesh chunks, which I don't like as sometimes I only want a partial face selection and splitting the objects means breaking the vertex normals.

Sorry, I'm just an artist so I can't help with your Deferred Lighting question.

 

I know... I have seen your work over the years... ... so I guess I better learn how to bake my models in Modo

EDIT: Actually, I can just bake those colours in Zbrush and export it as a mask...

 

May I know if the other shaders are going to be implemented?
Specifically the skin and the anisotropic shader?

 

Just a little sneak peek of what is coming up in the next point-release




Besides a laundry-list of bug fixes, full shader source-code, and tweaks, the next version of Skyshop will feature cubemap probes!

Cubemaps can be captured from the origin of any selected object. The captured cubemap is saved to your project and you can do anything you want with it, including process it for image-based lighting.

This added tech is going to be the foundation of many things to come.

 

Yay!
With that it will be an instant buy.

 

There are no known issues with Unity's deferred rendering path. Is there a Unity-specific tessellation feature you are concerned about?

 

What a TEASE! And I am going to be ALL over Skyshop this weekend ... I bet you saw the Killzone 4 demo Now when you say the origin of the selected object, will this object be hidden during the baking to prevent the object from being drawn into the cubemap?

 

Mainly issues involving SSS shaders not working in Deferred rendering... I have a bunch of them and they are forced to render in forward mode due to some bugs that were discovered. Also the same issues with the Unity light probes happen on the other skin shaders

 

Now this looks very nice indeed!... think I need a lay down....

 

I've been really interested and following image based lighting information in games, mostly because it looks like a lot of games are starting to use it.

A lot of people on the forums seem to have the question, "this looks really good for lighting an asset, but how is it going to work in my game?"

I saw the Marmoset guys offer some suggestions, like a very generic sky box for a golf game, which would work well. But a lot of games would need cubemap blending, which isn't a simple solution. So I figured I'd list some tech talks from different games, and show how they deal with those issues.

• Youtube demo of Local Image-based Lighting With Parallax-corrected Cubemap. There's for tech information in the video description
  
  
• Remember Me, read under the reflection system section, it's an interesting example because it is a current gen game and uses the Unreal Engine.
  
  
• Killzone: Shadow Fall lighting and rendering tech talk It's long, but he's constantly talking about lighting, how reflections work in the defered lighting system, how to build assets for the new lighting, etc.
  
  
• Fox Engine, the engine for Metal Gear Solid 5, they use a similar system to the Killzone engine, with light probes.

I'm just an artist so I've been just absorbing the information as I can, I can't give you much technical information about how it works.

 

Cool, this opens many possibilities for the future of skyshop. Will you have a box projected option for indoor cubemap probes?

 

There have been some talk before about skin shader, is it implemented in Skyshop?

 

It's coming...

 

Hi,

Does Toolbag include skyshop? It says it does:

"...Toolbag includes several of these lighting environments, or you may create your own using the included Sky Tool..."

But I can't see toolbag for sale in the asset store, only skyshop. Is toolbag a stand alone application then?

Lastly if I buy skyshop today, will I have access to the point release you mentioned previously or do I need to repurchase?

Excuse my stupidity

Thanks

 

You are misunderstanding, skyshop and toolbag are very different things, and sky tools are in fact tools to make skies in toolbag (more precisely skies and their lighting), they have nothing to do with skyshop.

Toolbag is a separate application completely outside of unity, it's more or less something to visualize your model, take screenshots of it and show it of, while skyshop is a unity addon/asset/extension (what ever one wants to call it), that brings image based lighting into unity.

As for buying skyshop and getting upgrades, as a general rule every developer offers minor updates for free (as in 1.X updates, not major new versions) like say what unity does if you buy a unity license now you will get all 4.x versions for free, OFC you will have to wait for confirmation from monkeyscience on this, since I have nothing to do with skyshop, but they would pretty much be shooting themselfs if they intended on charging for every update.

 

Hi, I don't want to sound impatient but do you have an ETA for this update?

We're working a lot curently replacing our old set of shaders with skyshop shaders even though we are presenting our game end of next month.
Can we expect to have it within the next 30 days or is this out of question?

Oh and thank you for those shaders, they look amazing in our game ^^.

Here's our game's logo rendered right in Unity ^^ (open in new tab to see it in HD)

 

I have modified Bumped Specular IBL to use additional alpha-test mask from my texture.
Here is a piece of code in surface shader function MarmosetSurf:

Code (csharp):

1. half4 mytexture = tex2D(_mytexture, IN.uv_MainTex);
2. OUT.Alpha = diff.a * mytexture.a;

The problem is mask from mytexture alpha channel do not work with Receive shadow = ON from Directional light.
If turn Receive shadow off then my mask works fine.

Is it possible to fix this? Thank you.

 

*Just started playing with this, so I may have missed it in the docs or something.

Do shadows only work with Directional lights?

I made a quick scene of just Unity Boxes and Spheres, 1 Point Light, 1 Directional Light.
*Dark box/sphere = Unity Diffuse shader
*Lighter box/sphere = Marmoset Bumped Spec

in the image, shadows only show for the directional light on the cubes with the marmoset shader. (unity shader, both shadows show)

Also, the sky gizmo icon shows as white block.

*This is a new project, imported Marmoset, added cubes/sheres/lights
*Unity 4.1.3f3


http://img.ctrlv.in/img/51b1f1e29d5fd.jpg

 

Is your player set to Forward Rendering? If so then yes, shadows will only work with Direction lights. You have to change it to Deferred to get shadows from other lights.

 

Love the toolset! Being a Mac user, I was always envious of the folks able to use the Marmoset tools. This is the player's character from an upcoming mobile game I am working on now. Here is my first test with the tools.

RAINDROP - link to web player

 

Oh yes, definitely within the next 30 days. There are fixes in here I want to get out asap.

 

Garyhaus thats so nice! A little skinning problem with tail that should be fixed but overall really like the character. Eye blinking is certainly nice detail too

 

This looks EPIC!! I love the detail...

 

No, it is set to Deferred...screenshot confirms shadows are working for the pointlight (ie using deferred mode), but they don't show up on objects with a marmoset shader.
*Same for spotlights

keep in mind that is not a checkerboard texture...just cubes with and without the marmoset shader, so the darker ones don't have the IBL added.

 

Once you buy Skyshop through the Asset Store, any future 1.xx updates to it will be available to you for free, just redownload the Package. It is how the Asset Store is set up and we think this is very fair. We have every intention of growing Skyshop and its feature-set incrementally in the months to come, and we would not want to double-charge our faithful early adopters .

If we ever do a complete rewrite or roll it into a larger suite of rendering tools, we might do a Skyshop 2.0 as a new asset in the store.

 

Janpec,

Thanks. Fixed that skinning issue near the top of the tail and dorsal fin. Thanks for pointing that out. This was a quickie so skinning and animation were all done fast! Started as a voxel sculpt in 3d-coat, meshed/retopo right in 3d-coat sent it to Modo unwrapped and and setup animation. Sculpting and texturing done in Mudbox and Photoshop. The rest is Unity and SkyShop! LOVE the Skyshop toolset! Can't wait to see whats in future updates!

Thanks guys.

 

I bought it yesterday and, I have one question:

Can it work with the Unity terrain?

 

Can somebody explain how this can be used in an actual game scene? This looks awesome but I just don't understand the workflow for this making great looking objects in game scenes, do you have to bake the lighting into a lightmap? Or can this method work with a scene of textured objects instead of a panorama image?

 

It takes a cubemap as input, so what I did was render a cubemap from the center of my scene to include all of the objects present. Then used that cubemap as the skyshop input.

Once added to the scene, I just replaced the skybox cubemap in the sky object with the original skybox.

 

Oh awesome. Does that yield the same great results as the vespa picture, but in realtime?

 

Because mine was an interior scene I didn't get quite as much effect from the lighting, and my models weren't fully set up for it. I had no gloss/specular maps, and only one or two even had normal maps.

In the screenshots below the left is an older version before I got Skyshop, and the right is after adding the Skyshop materials in and making a new lightmap. A few other things unrelated changed as well, such as the colour of the fridge in the scene. But overall the colours came out much warmer with the addition of some blue/orange light coming from the Skyshop skybox.

 

Unfortunately there is no terrain shader bundled with Skyshop... yet. It's high up on my list of shaders to add, as IBL is so useful for outdoor rendering. Unity's terrain shaders are complicated, multi-pass things and I haven't figured out how to write them properly yet.

 

Don't know if this has been asked yet: Can I turn off the cube map and still get the lighting from it? I would like to Not see the HDR image while in game, but get the benefits from it.

Also: I sell 3D Models in the asset store, Would I be allowed to set the models up with your shaders and sell them?

And: Will the Light Probe update work in Unity Free?

Thanks and Congratz!!! It's the first time I have seen Unity scenes truly match up visually to the competition....

 

Do you plan to fix the deferred shadows?
Point, Spot Lights etc don't receive shadow on objects with your shaders.

I believe this is because these shaders are run in Forward mode which is limited to a single Directional Light, from the unity docs:
"Objects with shaders that can't handle deferred lighting are rendered after this process is complete, using the forward rendering path."

Again, Directional Light works...(However only 1, which also indicates Forward Renderer)

 

Would it be possible to publish some outdoor game scenes with and without Skyshop, just like ottoelite published indoor scenes.

 

This is great, thank you!

 

A dynamic IBL support would be really interresting, we could make a good use of skyshop's shader for game environnements.

 

I def see PBR rendering coming to Skyshop...this is just the beginning.

 

I love it, now I need the pro version to get some shadows at least

http://www.francopizzani.com/unity/aps_dropbox/

 

A quick rendering using the Bootcamp soldier and a custom panorama. Would customers of Skyshop be interested in hi resolution, seamless, photoreal panoramas in the asset store? I've a number of them in interesting lighting situations that look excellent.

 

Very nice! You don't get shadows in standard?

 

Holy S***!! This is WICKED cool!! Have you tried Skyshop with beast yet?

 

Holy moly!! Yes I'm interested! Please have my PayPal account... Lol... That looks amazingly well lit! Top stuff

 

I thought you could but you were restricted to directional lights.

 

So this does only work with one directional light?