[Next-Gen Soft-Shadows 2] Sophisticated dynamic penumbra Shadows for Unity

Forgot to remove some dependencies of my game. I've replaced the file with the correct one in my previous post but also attached here in case.

 

If you render it to a RT that has a depth bind to it, you can read it or copy it (depending on the platform, Windows = blit to copy it, most consoles you can just read it directly).
Worth mention that im not reading the depth buffer, im just rendering scene color and depth to temporary RTs and using it.

 

OOOOOOoooooohh....
That's a super neat trick!
I was under the impression that consoles would behave like PC and force you to blit.
Do you know if this works on GLES3 and Metal too?

 

I've never tried on powerVR (tiled deferred and the likes) GPUs tbh. Give it a go?

 

I only do PC and GLES3 on the Nvidia Shield, which uses the Tegra like the Switch, but I'll tell you if I find out on other GPUs

 

wow, is it hard to convert this to Single Instance for VR? Depth buffer is very buggy on oculus quest and having this working in VR would be great because I need it to calculate water depth. I'm basically trying to replace the "grabpass" from Unity since it seems to fail a lot in vr

 

I don't have a VR device sorry. But this should be compatible with VR, all this script do is set color/depth buffers where the camera will render and set the depth texture globally (to replace _CameraDepthTexture). Maybe I miss a rendertarget argument to be compatible with VR? I'm not sure, will check it out soon. Head to my discord if you want to discuss more about this.

 

yeah the problem with VR is that you need to retrieve it per eye. Unity has built-in functions to do that math and they are open source so they should be easily adaptable.

 

How's the URP version looking? Haven't been able to buy since I don't use the built-in renderer for projects anymore.

 

Not looking at all sadly, I've been waiting since last year when I got told it's coming soon and still no info on it

 

Hi, as a new user to NGSS I got a small question, so if I wanted to add an option to switch NGSS on/off as a performance option (just in case), is there a way to do it for the local component? It seems to work for the directional component but disabling local doesn't seem to fall back to default shadows for local lights.

If it can't be done this way then it'd be wonderful if a future version supported something like this. Though if it's too complex to implement it's totally understandable. Thank you for reading!

 

Hi,
Unfortunately since NGSS changes internal shader files for local lights, is not possible to fall back to a hard shadows. However you can just reduce the number of samplers to 4 and it will behave as default soft-shadows. NGSS auto detect if the shadows are not supported (Shader Model < 3.0) and falls back to hard shadows.

 

You can follow live updates and support about NGSS (including upcoming URP port) in my discord.
PS: I rarely use the forums, im on discord 24/24 7/7.

 

Dude don't you sleep?

 

When I said 24/24 i meant 48/24! :V

 

yeah, while in discord lol

 

Thank you so much for the help!

I forgot to add one more bit of a question to my previous post if you wouldn't mind looking into it.
One of my biggest most far into development projects is stuck in Unity 2019.2 due to big changes in PhysX ruining a lot of mechanics using physics checks. Since NGSS only goes 2019.3 up, it is unfortunate that it's not available for this one project I work on the most.

Although when importing the package to the project in 2019.2, it seems to work as indended for the most part, only thing that doesn't seem to work at all is essentially the sampler option mentioned for the local component; so in conclusion, local lights are stuck looking like soft shadows.

No idea how hard this would be to fix or make a quickfix for, it's not a big deal in the end, but it'd be amazing if there was a possible way to make those parameters work. Again thank you for reading!

 

Hi,
The 2019.3 limit was imposed by Unity, you should be able to use the package even on Unity 2017.4. Just import to an empty 2019.3+ project and copy the Psychose Interactive folder into any project Asset/ folder.
As for local lights, not having parameters to work. First, make sure you have only one instance of NGSS_Local in your scene (you can't have more than one as is a global manager for all local light shadows). Then to change individual softness/shadows type use the Light component shadows strenght and shadows type.

 

off topic but I can't wait to play Forgotten Memories!
I have a Silent Hill 2 crave and Blooper Team's remake isn't gonna cut it, I know it.

 

*Bloober Team (I can't edit on mobile)

 

Hello Georges Paz,

i have purchased NGSS2 and have the following problem: i have a scene with deffered camera, a "desert" terrain on ground, some localized high mountains and at end of horizon standard cubemap sky. when i look with the camera on which frustum shadow is attached, towards a directiion that the sun (directional light source) would be aprox visible on screen, i get this strange pattern artifacts on frustum shadow:



if i turn away (other direction) the frustum shadows seem to work (more or less well, i am still learning to tune the parameters, not sure if have usual quality / artifacts or anything else unusual).

have you seen such artifacts, any idea what i should / can do?
currently it is unuseable to me :-(

 

That's called Shadow Acne. Fix it adjusting the Shadows Bias in the Frustum Shadows Script.

 

Thanks, but that isnt solving it.

Shadow Bias 0.0



Shadow Bias 1.0


All Values in between do also not solve the Problem.

It happens in Editor (Scene View, with any fov or near or far clipping plane settings) as well as Game View (Camera with any fov and any near or far clipping plane settings.

This is my scene depth visualized, so the resolution seems fine and not be the reason for these strange banding effects:

 

Is this actually happening in the game camera or only in the editor's scene view?
The scene view in the editor has a variable render depth and can cause depth precision issues.
If it happens in the in-game camera view, try reducing the maximum render distance.

edit:
Oh! and more importantly, try to set a larger close clipping distance: making the camera near distance to low will give lots of depth issues.

 

As I wrote above: both. Fixed depth. All already tried.

I have tried from 0.3 to 10000, to 1000. From 3. The visual Artifact is not changing at all.

 

That looks like a lack of depht precision, could you please get into my discord so we can take a look at that issue (without spamming the forums thread)?
PS: Discord link on my signature:

 

I think is related to an issue someone else reported last week. If we confirm is the same issue, I will submit an update tonight. If you can get onto my discord so we can quickly test (I know what to do) to double confirm is the same issue.
Cheers,

 

I can confirm is a bug and it just got fixed.
I'm also doing other minor improvements to Frustum Shadows, will submit the update in a day or two.

 

Great, thanks for the dedicated time you invested with me, very appreciated!

 

Just to let you know that i've finish update 2.4.0 which has lot of improvements (performance and QoL).
Features and Changes:
- This update has major changes to NGSS, so is important to uninstall NGSS libraries before upgrading to this version
- Overall improvements to all NGSS shadows, both quality and performance
- Frustum shadows now fully support both forward and deferred rendering with cascades on or off
- Removed the frustum shadows clipping pass
- Removed frustum shadows temporal filtering. Instead a jittering is implemented to leverage projects own temporal filtering
- Added support for spherical and linear early out for frustum shadows start distance to match directional shadows projection
- Added multi-blur iterations for frustum shadows, allows more blurry shadows
- Added frustum shadows resolution change
- You don't need to install directional libraries for cascaded shadows anymore (still need to install directional libraries for non-cascaded shadows or frustum shadows)
- Directional denoiser is now applied directly to the screen space shadows (aka cascaded shadows)
- Added the ability to switch between hard and soft shadows without having to remove NGSS libraries, for all shadows types
- Bias improvement for point shadows, you can now lower the bias even more (you might need to adjust your bias values if you see artifacts)
- Shadow screen position moved to the vertex shader, less fragment computations
- Removed shadow bias button from the installer as it creates issues with shaders that has custom ShadowCaster passes (you can still manually replace the file in the CGIncludes folder if you want)
- Added namespace PI.NGSS as required by Unity submission guidelines. Make sure to include that namespace if you access NGSS components in your code
- Updated documentation

Couple of images (less samplers, smoother shadows and does not require install any directional library):

Upclose (default settings):

Upclose (lowest possible settings, cheaper than default Unity shadows, only 8spp):

 

great work!
could you please tell for these 3 screenshots which are frustum SSS and which are visible when overwriting unitys defaults.

 

None, that's directional shadows, also FrustumShadows does not overwrite anything in Unity.
Here's frustum with extra blur:

Now downgraded(quarter ress):

 

Great work! Excited to put my hands on the new version!

 

NGSS v2.4.0 is live on the store!

 

Cries in craving URP support
Is URP that much of a pain to get some early version working? Genuinely curious about what the main roadblock is with it. I am scouting the discord almost bi-daily since a year nonstop. Pleas let my suffering end.

 

Oh man im really sorry, I had to put it aside because i got late on my scheduled with my game, so working non stop on it and only providing support for current NGSS version. But I should be okay sometime by December (Christmas vacations) to finalize port of NGSS on URP.

 

@tatoforever, great asset and used it again in our AD4 video. Thanks for the great tool and making it so easy to use!

 

Beautiful,
I saw all Apollo's parts. Wonder what you will do next? And how you'll use NGSS in your next creations?

 

Thank you!
We are working on ideas, but haven't found one that sticks yet. But we are not going to quit, we are having too much fun!

 

That's the spirit! Keep it up!

 

Hi @tatoforever
Just wanted to check in to see if there's been any progress on a URP version of NGSS?

 

Soon (Christmas)

 

Oh boy! It will be a merry Christmas after all!

 

It seems like there's some major issues with the latest versions of this. It used to look the same as Unity's shadows, just blurred.

Unity shadows and then NGSS defaults. Denoiser on creates a gap on right of brown cubes and between green and brown.
[Unity] [NGSS]


Denoiser off shows pixelation clearer:


Distance shadows are very blurred, even when all softness is off. Only the denoiser is on.
[Unity] [NGSS - Shadow softness 0, PCSS off]



The Quality Settings option for Shadow Resolution doesn't work.

Cascades blending doesn't disable. Blending 2 and Softness 0 seems a better quality default.

 

Hi,
There's no gap in the demo scenes, so it might be an old setting you inherited which doesn't behave the same way in the latest version. You need to tweak the denoiser settings. Try default and see how it looks.
Unity default shadows and NGSS default shadows softness will look different that's for sure, one has a very small kernel size, the other is a lot bigger. You need to tweak the settings to make it look the way you want, it won't look the same by default.
In any case, if you still have any gap or can't make it look the way you want, you can reach me on discord with a test project and I will make sure any problem/settings issue is fixed.

 

There are no inherited settings. It's a new 2022.2 project.

The demo scene has gaps if you rotate the light.


When I install my old HD I'll have access to some older projects to compare to older versions of NGSS.

 

Will look into that.
Thanks,

 

After further investigation, I broke the denoiser in v2.4.1 (in v2.4.0 was fine). Working on a minor patch to fix it, sorry for the inconvenience.

 

Please prioritize SRP. It's probably not easy, but the "Next Gen" in the name should be next-gen rendering pipeline friendly.

 

My goal is to make NGSS as core as possible, but since shadows is not part of SRP core library, both URP and HDRP have different implementations, there's no way to support SRP, it's more of a mod for URP/HDRP. If you hav a custom SRP renderer, you can always try to port it, I can provide some extra docs for that.