Official New Post-processing Stack (Pre-Release)

Just a tip I discovered: when using the new post process stack I noticed a lot of color banding. Turning on dithering fixes this... We use linear/deferred rendering path

 

There's a bug in the latest version (1.0.1) available on the Asset Store which can break existing PP chains by disabling depth texture and/or normal support for cameras when set externally to the stack.

A quick dig into the code reveals what's going on. It does not preserve depthTextureMode flags! In my case, I require depth textures, but do not require anything within the stack that requires depth, so it defaults to the base virtual property of None.

The problem exists in PostProcessingComponentBase;

Original:

Code (CSharp):

1. public virtual DepthTextureMode GetCameraFlags()
2. {
3.     return DepthTextureMode.None;
4. }

Fix:

Code (CSharp):

1. public virtual DepthTextureMode GetCameraFlags()
2. {
3.     return context.camera.depthTextureMode;
4. }

 

While this is a cool tip for people who are unaware of it, that's pretty much the main use of dithering and the reason it is there in the first place, especially blue noise dithering like the one that's currently implemented.

 

Did everybody start talking about blue noise and dithering after Playdead's GDC talk about Inside or has it been known for a long time? I feel like right after I watched their talk dithering and blue noise appeared everywhere.

And it feels like if it has no downsides and you just turn it on without settings it could just be enabled in Unity always?

 

I'm getting these pink screen errors with the latest release.

Depth of Field - Shader error in 'Hidden/Post FX/Uber Shader': failed to open source file: 'Bloom.cginc' at line 33 (on d3d11)
Eye Adaptation - Shader error in 'Hidden/Post FX/Eye Adaptation': failed to open source file: 'Common.cginc' at line 14 (on d3d11)
Color Grading -
Shader error in 'Hidden/Post FX/Lut Generator': failed to open source file: 'ACES.cginc' at line 10 (on d3d11)
Chromatic Aberration and Vignette also give a pink screen.

I have to use an older version of the stack before they work.

 

Same here

 

is this stack animatable in the animation tool? for example to chang the focus/ dof?

 

Now, in 5.6 and Post Processing 1.0.1 no eye adaptation in the Editor window, everything is dark and I can't see nothing.

 

Still have this in a fresh 5.6 project, bloom in general looks very low quality at the moment. Small (larger than 1 pixel, we're talking 4-7 pixels) relatively bright (1.8 in standard shader) emissive areas sometimes don't exhibit any bloom at all from some angles/positions.

This is with default bloom settings, and TAA and dithering also enabled:

Note the top right glowstick failing to glow from this angle. In the bottom center glowstick the blockiness of the bloom is also very visible.

(The rest of the blockiness in the floor is just the lightmap, but that's not the issue )

 

Is anti-flicker enabled? I only tried it once, back when the stack was in beta, but I noticed that it seemed to 'miss' more glow, in exchange for less flicker (some some blur on the screen and downsamples it or something, so your 1.8 green stick might be getting averaged with the 0.5 ground around it and is no longer in bloom range).

 

I also find the bloom to be of low quality. Please have a look at how Scion or SE bloom works. That looks much, much better.

 

Dithering has been a big thing for a long, long, while now. Playdead's talk is just a fantastically thurough examination of just how ugly banding is. Blue noise is a bit more recent thing for real time graphics, but it was going around the raytracing world before that, and real-world half-tone printing before that. I remember personally first seeing discussions of blue noise on The Witness blog and Lucas Pope's Obra Dinn dev log, both in mid 2014. Lucas Pope noted he got the idea from the Wikipedia page on dithering, which happens to mention blue noise, and The Witness blog posts by Casey Muratori mention he first heard of it in 2005 from Don Mitchell, who happens to have written a paper specifically talking about the benefits of using blue noise for rendering in 1987! So, yes, it's been around for a while.

The only downside is blue noise is extraordinarily expensive to calculate, so it requires an additional texture lookup to use for realtime applications. GPUs are finally getting fast enough that adding one more texture lookup isn't really worth worrying about for performance, and you can use quite small textures with blue noise so the texture memory isn't an issue either.

 

My main point was that in previous versions of Unity we did not experience banding without dithering, but with latest version we did. I have no idea why we didn't need dithering on earlier versions of Unity, and need it now...

 

Is there any way I can apply some of the effects (in my case a Bloom and some color grading), to only specific objects in the scene, without resorting to multiple cameras?

In my case I'm working on a space sim with a first person cockpit view. I've created some explosions as particle systems, and I've set-up the appropriate Post Processing Stack settings to make the explosions look the way I want. Now, I want ONLY the explosion particles to be influenced by the Post Processing Stack, because my cockpit instruments and displays totally blow out with the settings that make my explosions look the way I want, and the spaceships in the scene (which blow up, via my explosion effect) shouldn't get any of that post processing either.

On the other hand I still want the explosions to be set in the same 3D space as my spaceships and asteroids and what not, with those objects still being able to fly both in front and behind my explosions. Having a second camera for just the explosions would force them to be drawn either ALWAYS in front of or ALWAYS behind my other objects. Also I'd love to have an explosion going off right at the edge of my cockpit to have its bloom effect bleed over the edge of my cockpit geometry, which wouldn't happen if the cockpit would be on an camera layer that ALWAYS gets rendered in front of the explosions.

How would I do this?

 

My guess is you just didn't have similar scenes. You can download any previous version of Unity and test for yourself, but I'm pretty sure you'll experience the same amounts of banding if you have the same visuals in both versions. Personally I haven't seen a need for dithering in any of my scenes so far, but leaving it on has seemingly no downsides so I just left it enabled.

I know how to make some scenes with major banding in them though.

Edit: And I just thought of a scenario where dithering may not be desirable so I guess I perhaps answered my own question with why you have the ability to easily toggle it on/off.

 

That's without anti flicker, enabling it doesn't really make any visible difference (to my eyes, at least), apart from overall brightness being reduced.

 

That might be your usage that has changed. I've always complained in these forums about banding and aliasing since I value visual fidelity more than other next-gen features and the likes. There's been many changes in the past that alleviated the issue (HDR support, some effects eventually using the HDR pipeline, etc) but depending on how you used tonemapping, color grading and stacked particles, banding has always been there as an issue. Especially if you're making a dark/poorly lit game which is common in the horror genre, then that issue is amplified.

I think it was a catalyst, yes. I dabbled in making my own ditherers for the past few years, but the solutions presented by Playdead were (at least for me) gamechangers.

 

After upgrading to 5.6 and lastest git version (cloned to zip) - image effects are not applied to editor window (seems like only screen space reflections are applied, but no bloom and other effects)

 

It's a Editor issue. Image effects doesn't activated in scene view at all.
Report it to unity editor developers.

 

Temporal antialiasing acts weird with transparent objects when changing the field of view.
It dislocates their position...

 

Are you using the latest version?

https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/PostProcessing/releases/tag/1.0.1

 

Hey guys! I just upgraded my project to 5.6, and along with it, i started making the change to the post processing stack. So far, I love its performance. I gained a lot by switching from multiple components to a single one, but it has its downsides.

Quality is one of them, some of the affects are not as high quality as the ones i was using (ssao, amplify bloom), but I'm fine with that, since the performance is so much better, i think it's worth the trade. Hopefully in the future the post processing stack is able to match those tools, but at the moment I'm fine with it.

My main concern right now is the "profile" approach. Its cool to be able to put a profile on any camera, but I feel like I lost some control.

I liked to manipulate post processing effects, like depth of field, with animations using the animation window. I can no longer do that. I can't access the values of my profile, and it feels restrictive to me.

Is it under consideration to have a post processing stack that doesn't use a profile, and has the variables on the monobehavior directly? Is it even possible? or should I just stick to having multiple components if I want to do that?

The other thing is, again, depth of field. It doesn't have the "focus on transform" slot that previous depth of fields had. I tried writing a script that automatically sets the focus distance, but it doesn't give me a good result. I think i could script my way out of this one by making it more complex and not only adjusting the distance, but also the focal length, or aperture.

I think if we were able to have a post processing stack that had its settings on the monobehavior itself, both of these problems could be resolved. Allowing us to have control of our variables with animations, and also the depth of field could have a slot for focus on transform. Of course, I could use depth of field as a separate component, but the cost of performance is a bit noticeable, so I wanted to ask this because of it.

Am I asking for something outrageous? please let me know. Thanks for the tool, I'm very happy with my performance boost.

 

@Alberto-Mastretta I don't think you're asking for something outrageous, but perhaps something unnecessary.

I think it's just lack of knowledge keeping you from doing the things you want. You can write a script like this to get what you want:

Code (csharp):

1. using UnityEngine;
2. using UnityEngine.PostProcessing;
3.  
4. public class PostProcessingController : MonoBehaviour {
5.  
6.     // This value can be animated as any other public inspector value.
7.     public float bloomIntensity;
8.  
9.     float defaultFocusDistance;
10.  
11.     PostProcessingProfile profile;
12.     DepthOfFieldModel.Settings depthSettings;
13.     BloomModel.Settings bloomSettings;
14.  
15.     void Start() {
16.         profile = GetComponent<PostProcessingBehaviour>().profile;
17.  
18.         depthSettings = profile.depthOfField.settings;
19.         defaultFocusDistance = depthSettings.focusDistance;
20.  
21.         bloomSettings = profile.bloom.settings;
22.     }
23.  
24.     void Update() {
25.         // Then we apply the animated bloom intensity to the profile here.
26.         bloomSettings.bloom.intensity = bloomIntensity;
27.         profile.bloom.settings = bloomSettings;
28.  
29.         // This will set the depth of field focus distance to the point we're looking at.
30.         RaycastHit hit;
31.         if (Physics.Raycast(transform.position, transform.forward, out hit)) {
32.             depthSettings.focusDistance = Vector3.Magnitude(transform.position - hit.point);
33.             profile.depthOfField.settings = depthSettings;
34.         }
35.         // Or use the default if we're not looking at anything.
36.         else {
37.             depthSettings.focusDistance = defaultFocusDistance;
38.             profile.depthOfField.settings = depthSettings;
39.         }
40.     }
41. }

You can animate every single setting this way.

And if you want your depth of field to focus on a transform instead then just remove the Raycast and calculate the distance to your transform.

Then you're doing something wrong. Also remember that there's debug views for every effect so you can for example see exactly what your depth of field is doing. And maybe read up a bit on how cameras work because I think they're trying to make a lot of these effects behave realistically with realistic values.

This video is quite effective for explaining a bit about depth of field and motion blur:

You'll see many of the same terms he's using in that video in this asset.

 

Thanks for the help! I can now imagine how i could drive these values on the animation window though, thank you.

The script I wrote does do the same thing as the one you provided, except with transform instead of raycast. It works, but the result is not the same as the focus on transform from the previous depth of field. That because of what you say, the effect is more "Correct" now, which makes it harder to use in my case. I believe I'll need to modify more than just the focus distance.

In my game, a top down racer, the faster you go, the more the camera moves away. The previous depth of field gave a very nice result, I kind of wanted it back. What it did was that it kept a ratio of blurriness in the screen that was very consistent. Regardless of the distance, the amount of screen space out of focus remained similar, which is not the case with the new one. The new one, the object remains focused, but the amount of screen space that gets blurry changes a lot depending on the distance, unlike the old one. Definitely more correct, but it'll need more work to get the same behavior.

I'll post my script if i get something that works like that.

Thanks for replying! Cheers.

 

Very interesting video about cameras in general! Thank you for sharing that one.

I assume this script (with a little modifications) is working to control all the depth of field settings in the post effects used in the project Adam?

 

Hi Twiik.
I´m kind of new to the programming tree i Unity. Where do I put this script? I doesn´t wanna be hooked to a game object. An placing it just anyware does not make beeing read.

 

Forget about it. I just needed to name the script the same as the class...Stupid. Attached it to the camera and simsalabim public variables came up to be animated.

Many thanks for the script. It saved my entire week!!

 

instead of modifying the stack can i switch behaviors completely at runtime?

 

this is what i meant. is there a code example in the api manual? or could you maybe help with an example?
i guess with twiiks code i can fiddle something

 

Did you figure this out? I've been using this asset without issue for a long time, but then I added it to a project just now and got these errors and no matter what I did they remained. The project where it was broken was using the exact same version of the asset and the exact same version of Unity.

Duplicating the project fixed it though.

Edit: Nvm, apparently Chman answered you. I tried copying the supposedly working version of the asset from another project, but that made no difference so I didn't attempt reimporting it. Duplicating the project probably reimported the asset.

 

That worked! Thanks.

Also, will the new Eye Adaptation work with WebGL at some point? It seems like WebGL 2.0 is supposed to support compute shaders.

 

My understanding is that WebGL 2.0 does not come with compute shader support in its present form. However an official extension to WebGL 2.0 that adds compute shader support has been mentioned by Khronos group as being in development. For example this was mentioned in February near the end of this blog post: https://www.khronos.org/blog/webgl-2.0-arrives

Presumably once that extension happens, and assuming it works well and is adopted by browsers, then Unity will also have some work to do to add support, just like they added support for compute shaders to metal in Unity 5.6.

 

In "SSAO" there is a serious minus. The length of the ray is random and varies linearly. Because of this, we see a linear gradient of the shadow. I propose to add a pre-prepared array of numbers to multiply the length of the ray. This will give the effect of soft ambient light. Minus the method - for a good result you will have to increase the number of samples. Plus - even at the lowest quality, it will still look good.
I also suggest making SSAO not black, but color. It should take the color of the surface that it obscures. This will avoid, for example, black shading in the corners on the white walls. In reality, this does not happen.
0. No SSAO

1. Standart SSAO
.
2. Modified SSAO

3. Standart SSAO

4. Modified SSAO


Dropbox LINK: https://www.dropbox.com/s/sjk3f7vnyakiqfi/Postprocessing-modSSAO.unitypackage?dl=0
Just apdate files

P.S. There may be bugs with work in the forward. SSAO becomes too light.

 

I've tried to read this whole thread, apologies if I missed a comment.. but I saw that there was mention that Bloom wasn't working on mobile, has that been tested/fixed for the 5.6 release by any chance? We've highly relied on Bloom for an art style and I've seen bug reports that even the old bloom isn't rendering properly on 5.6, now reading about the bloom here has me worried that we have no viable options to upgrade to 5.6.

I was wondering what the history of this new bloom effect is, as in was this based on the original Bloom and then upgraded/modified. I can see that it almost has the same properties, the blur iterations is gone and replaced with soft knee. The rest seem to have a comparable property. Any info about whether this 'should' work in a similar way to the previous on mobile would be great to know.

I really dig the new workflow and understand there's a lot of feedback for you all to deal with. I don't mind switching to new and much better systems, it's just that if there's feature regression ie. no working bloom on mobile, it's a massive disruption for our game for something thats worked for nearly 4 years in Unity and we can't really just not upgrade to 5.6 for a hundred other reasons. Hopefully we can figure something out, thanks!

 

marggob this is not working for me 5.6 deffered i have no ao at all if i import your package i like the adjustment you did so maybe fix the package?

 

Wasn't the usage of blue noise on the witness for grass distribution though instead of dithering purposes (if I remember correctly)?

 

Bloom does work on mobile.

 

That's good to hear, thanks =) perhaps the report I read in previous pages was for the 5.6 beta. I was just about to build and test it too.

I am having issues with the values of Bloom though. We have hundreds of custom runtime values for our bloom that change depending on each camera closeup and even animate. If I apply the same values for intensity and threshold, the bloom effect in general is massively stronger and washes out the scene. I'd love to know if there's a way to find out what was changed on these new values so I could programmatically adjust all of our values to get something looking like how it used to.

 

Hello @Chman!

Is Post-Processing Stack going to be built inside Unity 2017.1/2017.x so we don't have to download it anymore?

 

I looked again at the files, but I did not find any errors. Fixed only different brightness in forvad and different modes. Just in case, uploaded all the corrections to the dropbox
https://www.dropbox.com/s/i24q7h0t8awqox3/Postprocessing-modSSAO.unitypackage?dl=0

 

I am happy with it. But the effects don't work in Scene window in 5.6.0. It used to work in older Unity versions. Is there something I can do?

 

I have made some references about image effects setup in UE4:
1. Post Processing Stack
2. Realtime or baked reflection probes. (Combine it with SSR in image effects)

 

This is a big problem and it's an editor bug. report it to unity editor developers.

 

Is this your problem?
https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/PostProcessing/issues/139

 

Just improted the package, why I have so many errors? Unity v.5.5