Marmoset Skyshop - Image-Based Lighting Tools [RELEASED]

Thank you for finally answering my post from months ago. Your answers make it unusable for just about everyone, including me. But even if it did work for me, I would never buy a product from someone with such unresponsive forum support. You might say that I should just e-mail your support, but if you provide a forum then you should monitor it and respond in a timely fashion.

 

Mobile performance is always a tricky question to answer. There are many variables to a game's performance. Best I can tell you is the performance is going to be comparable to Unity's built-in shaders, it is limited by fill rate (how many pixels you ask your device to draw), and that Skyshop's IBL system is tunable. You can for example omit drawing with local skies improving the CPU overhead greatly. We also ship with light weight shaders intended for mobile, even some vertex-lit ones.

Skyshop has also been around for several years now and was originally tuned for much older hardware.

 

Hey everyone,

Today marks the 4th anniversary of the conception of Skyshop! Cheers to the long, dark nights of December that inspired dreams of a well-lit Unity.

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On this occasion we would like to announce a few changes, along with a sparkling new Skyshop support page!

We have heard your concerns over development support in the past few weeks and decided to refocus our efforts on creating a comprehensive, one-stop learning resource for all Skyshop users.

As such, we will no longer be managing this forum thread.

We will continue to provide email support to anyone and everyone. If you have licensing or feature questions, bug reports, or even just a cool Skyshop project you would like to show off, please drop us a line at support@marmoset.co.

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Let's take a closer look at this new tome of Skyshop knowledge:

Frequently Asked Questions
If you have questions about Skyshop performance and platform support, version requirements, or need help upgrading to a newer version, give our FAQ a read:
https://www.marmoset.co/support/?page=skyshop

Tutorials
If you are getting started with Skyshop and looking for a step-by-step guide, check out our comprehensive YouTube channel of video tutorials:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGF3H3--dgDhX-ABS9rxwXQ1Dfty6f_nX

The Skyshop Quick Reference
Check out the quick reference page to brush up on the day-to-day of using Skyshop. Here you'll find a step-by-step guide to creating skies and probes, as well as a technical overview of Skyshop's new API and sky management system.
https://www.marmoset.co/skyshop/reference/

The quick reference also contains information on using Shader Forge and tips for upgrading older projects.

E-mail Support
Have a not-so-quick question or a bug to report? Our support staff is ready to help!

E-mail us at: support@marmoset.co

Be sure to include as many details as you can about your project, platform, and any screenshots of what you're up against. We'll help you get it sorted.

Change Log
If you are looking for a detailed list of the latest bug fixes or need to see which features were added when, we keep an up-to-date change log here:
https://www.marmoset.co/skyshop/history/

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Is Skyshop really 4 years old?
Just about. Development started in December 2012 and version 1.0 shipped the following spring.

Is Skyshop still useful?
Skyshop remains fully supported with the latest public builds of Unity 5, and future updates will be mostly important bug fixes and performance cleanup as needed with each Unity update. Skyshop is the only way to get image-based lighting into Unity 4, and while Unity 5 has implemented a lot of what Skyshop does, a few key differences do remain between Unity 5's native IBL tools and what Skyshop can still provide in regards to performance, image quality, and art workflow.

Comparing to Unity 5's IBL tools, Skyshop provides a more thorough utility for processing raw HDR images and panoramas into lighting cubemaps. You can:

• Re-expose HDR cubemaps
• Blur HDR cubemaps
• Control the size/resolution of the specular mip chain
• Create higher quality spherical harmonics for diffuse lighting

The local reflection probe system in Unity 5 works a lot like Skyshop does with box shaped triggers, box projected distortion, and blending. But in addition, Skyshop also lets you:

• Apply custom skies to individual game objects
• Disable expensive features like blending and box projection
• Disable local skies all together (great performance booster for mobile apps)
  • Note: For mobile dev, disabling local skies can be especially useful. It prevents Unity from spawning material instances and creating render batching problems.