PopcornFX - Optimized Particle Effects Plugin

Are there any real world performance comparisons between identical heavy effect running through Shuriken versus Popcorn? I'd be curious to see how the performance differs when you start getting into heavy performance heavy effects.

thanks

 

I can only give anecdotal evidence, but the closest you get to advanced particle control in unity is slower than you're likely to get with Particle Playground unless you devote some decent time to a dedicated solution... And Particle Playground is noticeably less performant than Popcorn FX's solution.

 

Is there any reason why image effects (edge detection for example) cause PopcornFX to render particles without using ZBuffer?

 

@ironbelly : We have a performance comparison app available for iOS and Android, we are looking into adapting it for desktop.

@blejd : Care to elaborate on that? We never had such an issue before and I can't seem to reproduce it.

 

I created new project to test that issue and everything was working fine (as you said earlier), so I narrow the problem to one of our custom shaders for glass rendering and remove "Queue"="Transparent" from Tags of subshader.

 

@blejd : Ok, thanks for the report. So did that fix it? We'll look into it.
Also, you'll be glad to hear the sound layers are now implemented and will be available in the next update.

 

Hello! I have a couple more questions about this interesting asset.

1. do you have a performance comparison with shuriken? What do you do that makes it perform better?
2. I haven't seen any sign of PS4 compatibility and that's our number one priority for now.

Thanks

 

@hippocoder : 1. Yes, on mobile only at this time. I edited the original post with the links :

As for why we perform better, well we don't know how shuriken is done so I'm not sure how we compare, but we're implemented natively, which allows fine tuning of platform-specific low-level optimizations (think memory efficiency, SIMD and multi-threading).
Also, we batch all compatible particles together to reduce the number of draw calls. Things like that.

2. We are currently looking into it. We do have a port of the PopcornFX runtime libraries for PS4 but we're not sure about the Unity-side of things. Apparently native plugins are supported on PS4 now so there's hope, but whether it's possible to natively render stuff still isn't quite clear.

 

Well I love what you guys are doing (not interested in mobile though) - and will certainly keep an eye on things. Noticed on trello you're having a look at GPU particles - does that mean compute shader?

 

Thanks! We're putting a version of this app together for desktop, at the moment. I'll update when it's ready.
Yes, it does mean compute shaders.

 

It's working now. Strange thing is that I tested an old version of the shader (which was causing the issue) and everything was fine then (maybe Unity didn't recompile or refresh something, it's hard to say).

EDIT: I tested it again and now it's not working with the old shader. Really strange

EDIT 2: Tomorrow I will send you a small scene (new project with only PopcornFX imported) with a box and a flame thrower behind it. You will see that flames are rendered in front of the box (check Standard Transparent Unity shader).

 

Here is an image of the test scene. Four cubes next to each other with Standard Shader material (in sequence: Opaque, Cutout, Fade, Transparent). As you can see flames (which are behind cubes) are rendered correctly only on the first two.

 

I was also wondering if lit particles are possible or shadowed particles?

 

There's only one image attached to your message.
What you're saying makes sense, though. I'm not familiar with Fade but Transparent shaders don't write in the Z-buffer because what's behind it still needs to be rendered in the solid pass.
We can't interact with those well because of the native plugin interface. We still need to look into the new command buffers but basically, there's no way that I'm aware of so far that would allow us to render between the solid and blending pass.

@hippocoder : Lit particles and shadowed particles are not possible right now. They were impossible to achieve in an even remotely efficient way in Unity 4.X because of the native plugin interface limitations, but it may change once we look into the command buffers.

 

Sounds like great news. Keeping a close eye on this thread for further news ie ps4 support, general lighting/shadowing

 

I was talking about cubes, not images

 

@blejd : Ah yes, I read too fast, my bad. I understand what I'm looking at, now. ^^
So, yeah. What I said still stands.
What's happening in the picture is the first 2 cubes do write in the Z-Buffer, so the particles are masked when we get to draw them. The 2 last ones don't, so that Unity can render what's behind and blend afterwards, but the blending already occurred when we get to draw our particles, so the depth test succeeds when it should not.

 

First time I'm seeing this. Looked exactly like what I needed, watched a few videos, was about to hit purchase and then I found out the editor is Windows only. Looks like I just can't get rid of Shuriken.

 

Sorry to hear that. You may want to keep an eye on our updates, though.
We currently have a new multi-platform editor in the works, but it's still in its very early stage and will require several months of development before it can reach a production-ready state.

I can't give you a time estimate just yet, but you're not alone in that case so I'm confident we will bump the priority of this task soon.

I'll update the first post to make all that clearer, thanks.

 

Hello booyah,

I just purchased the iOS and Desktop Plugin. Everything works fine on desktop, but i've stuck with an problem on iOS.
I tried to get rid of the .png problem by following the faq (moving the "libPK-Plugin_CodecImage_PNG_r" up to the top of the list), but there is a linker error following.:

"ld: warning: directory not found for option '-L"/Projects/Builds/PopcornFX/Libraries"'
ld: warning: directory not found for option '-L"/Projects/Builds/PopcornFX/Libraries/Plugins/iOS"'
ld: library not found for -liPhone-lib
clang: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)"

Linking is finde when not moving the "libPK-Plugin_CodecImage_PNG_r" in the list.

Xcode 6.2
Unity 5.0.0f4

Do you have any ideas?

 

@Batzer4042 : Hi, well, that's a new one.
Did you somehow delete libiPhone-lib.a from the list? Is it still in there?

This library is Unity's, not ours. It should be automatically copied in your Xcode project. Can you find the file libiPhone-lib.a in the Libraries folder in your Xcode solution?

 

Do you think y'all could update the Trello roadmap to get an idea of what's coming next from the editor/runtime?

 

@booyah:
I figured it out, you gave the right hint. After moving the libiPhone-lib.a one Position in the List all went fine and no errors while linking occurred. Strange behavior nevertheless.

 

@mittense : Yes, we will do this shortly.

@Batzer4042 : Ok, great! Glad to hear it's solved.

 

yay

 

Hey,
I just began to learn what is this Popcorn stuff, I downloaded the editor and some examples (GDC 2015), and... uhh... among the demos, I found one of my effects, that was done in Shuriken.

Popcorn:


my effect from the Shuriken Magic package (background is lighter, but otherwise the same):


Even the texture names are the same. I also found an other copied effect, but that is less noticeable. And my package is from 2013 or so, so far before the 2015 GDC.

Now I don't plan to do anything besides writing here (actually it is a bit heartwarming that my mediocre effects are among such great ones), but why? How? I mean, my impression was that the usual pipeline is making the effect in the Popcorn desktop editor, then importing it into unity with the help of the unity popcorn integration tool (sorry details are a bit hazy to me, I just began learning this today), but it can be done on the opposite way too? Or it was recreated in Popcorn?

Also what does this do among the popcorn examples? I mean it isn't that good. Used as a negative example, like "you can create effects better than this", or something?

cheers,
Kalamona

 

Hi @kalamona ,
Well, thanks for checking out PopcornFX!

We originally used your effects for the needs of our mobile benchmark application (here and there).
To show the possible performance gain, we re-made your effects with Popcorn. Not to display as a negative example at all, but rather to have a common ground to compare Shuriken and PopcornFX.

Turns out the re-made effects got added in our GDC15 pack in case we wanted to show them in the editor while we were at GDC this year.

There was no harm intended from our part, we used your effects because of their popularity on the store.

Otherwise, yes. The usual pipeline is indeed what you described.

Cheers,

 

Heh, thanks for explaining. Popcorn seems wonderful by the way, I really like that you try to make an unified "effect engine" so that effect artists don't have to re-learn everything when changing engines.

 

@kalamona : Would you like us to remove the remade effects from our public GDC15 pack, then?
Also, thanks for the kind words.

 

Nah, don't bother. I was just surprised and puzzled, how and why and all that

 

@PopcornFX.
Don't works for me..

I have just buy the plugin for Unity Android,iOS
I am using Unity 4.6.3p4 and using PopcornFX_Samples for test. It displayed no effect.
In editor, has error:

DllNotFoundException: HH-UnityPlugin
PKFxManager.Startup ()
PKFxFXEditor.OnEnable ()

I have also seen this post http://wiki.popcornfx.com/index.php/Unity but no help.
Help me plz, i need fix it now.
Sorry for my English

 

Hi @sukoshi,
I'm guessing you're trying to play in editor mode on your desktop machine.
You need the desktop plugin for that. The iOS and Android plugins only provide the platform-specific libraries.

If you don't plan on releasing on any Desktop platform, please contact us on support@popcornfx.com and we'll see how we can provide you with development-only libraries.

Cheers,

 

Hi @booyah
Thank you for replying so quickly.
As you suggested, I contacted to support@popcornfx.com and got development-only libraries.

Thank god, It work like a charm on Android.
But it still not work on iOS.
Ex on sample_menu, it displayed black screen.
And so strange in Sample_Teleporter


There was some error log on Xcode:
Could not add /private/var/mobile/Containers/Bundle/Application/84F144D6-5AD0-48E7-BEF3-2B3105C820C4/xxxxxxx.app/Data/Raw/PackFx for watching because no file watcher.

[ERR1][GE_SHAPES]> shape descriptor: failed loading mesh resource "Meshes/Telepod.pkmm"
[ERR1][GE_SHAPES]> failed creating shape

[WARN][HH_PARTICLES]> Unsupported renderer found : "no more renderer" ! INCOMPLETE RENDERER
[ERR1][HH_PARTICLES]> Particle Renderer : runtime object creation failed for renderer

Thank you for supporting !!!

 

@sukoshi : Well, that's a new one. It seems the distortion setup failed. Can you take a look at your iOS player settings and tell me what is set for the "Scripting Backend" and "Graphics API" settings?

 

@booyah
This is my setting.

Is there something wrong?

 

@sukoshi
No, that looks fine.
Ok, that's most likely a case of Unity's arm64 libpng doing weird things with our texture loading code.
You can fix this easily in you XCode project.

In the project's "Build Phases", under "Link Binary With Libraries", locate the item "libPK-Plugin_CodecImage_PNG_r.a" and move it all the way up in the list.

 

yeahhhhhhhhhhhh !!!!
It worked !!!!
Thank you so much !

 

@booyah
It work almost fine but in Sample_Teleporter has a bit strange

And i found some error log:

Can you explain to me ?

 

@sukoshi : Erm.. Did you change anything in the Player Settings or in the effect itself?

Something must have happened to the effect or the binaries between your "It worked!!!" and those errors...

 

Hi all,

Just a quick message to notify that we updated our free so-called Discovery Pack.
It now includes a free version of the Desktop Plugin, limited to effects signed by us (only the effects in this pack as of now).

So now you can try out the actual effects before you decide whether you want to buy the full plugin or not!
I'll update the first post.

Also, we have an update of the iOS benchmark app coming up, the performance were crippled (yet still better than Shuriken) because of some multi-threading mismanagement.

The v2.5 of the desktop and mobile plugins is coming too, I'll post an update with the changelog when it's validated on the asset store.

Cheers,

 

Like button.

 

Also I forgot to add, in addition to our online documentation and this thread, we just launched our own answerhub!
It's primarily intended for editor-related questions and it's monitored by the PopcornFX devs, but feel free to ask and answer questions there.

Cheers,

 

Update time (paging @mittense )!
2.5 is finally here, available on the store!

So, what's new?

Fixes:
- Fixed a crash when deleting hot-reloaded effects.
- Fixed a crash when calling StopEffect in OnDisable.
- Fixed a crash when getting in and out of a scene with effects using spacial layers.
- Fixed race-condition issues that would cause seemingly random crashes and errors.
- Fixed a bug where localspace effects and attributes were 1 frame behind.
- Fixed iOS multi-threading performance.

Features :
- Added an Alive() method to the PKFxFX component that returns true as long as an effect is spawning particles.
It's considered safe to destroy the GameObject holding the PKFxFX component when this returns false, but don't poll this every frame, as native calls have a bit of overhead.
- Added the possibility to enable the killing of individual effects.
- Added a main conf file for settings (holds the "log in file" and "effects killing" settings so far).
- Added support of PopcornFX's sound layers (see here) (paging @blejd).
- Added support for audio waveform sampling.
In addition to the spectrum sampling, already implemented and showcased in the Jukeball sample.
- Added support for audio sampling (waveform and spectrum) for iOS.
This wasn't available for iOS, it now is.
- Added PKFxManager.UnloadEffect(string path);
To actually unload an effect and the associated resources (shaders, textures, meshes and so on...), see here.

In the upcoming days, I'll be updating the online docs with the new features, so keep an eye out for that.

Cheers,

 

Hi,

I'm working on a 'desert-sand-planet-windows-desktop-project'. What i need exactly do to this? :

 

Hi @ZJP, since this is more of a PopcornFX editor-specific question, I suggest you go and ask it over at http://answers.popcornfx.com

 

YAY UPDATE DAY.

What does this mean, exactly? I can already destroy the gameobject associated with PKFxFX which kills them, is this a different sort of functionality or?

 

@mittense : Yeah, it needs to be enabled (project-wise) via "Edit>PopcornFX Settings>Enable Individual Effects Killing" and it allows you to instantly kill all the particles spawned by a PKFxFX component instead of waiting for them to die out.

It has to be manually enabled because it requires us to store a spawner ID for every particle and keep a reference on a lot of stuff that needs updating, which as you can imagine is not exactly the cheapest of processes.

When PKFxFX.Kill() is called, we iterate through all live particles to individually kill those matching the killed spawnerID.

So that feature is there, but depending on your effects it can be quite taxing on the performances and if you don't absolutely need it, it's better not to use it.

 

Couple of questions:

Are you planning to support dynamic primitive colliders? When?
Can the "scene mesh" built run-time? Think of content generated at start.
Can we receive event ticked with 'broadcast' from Popcorn to Unity?
Have (dynamic) arrays of attributes?

Thanks.

 

I have popcorn since some time now, but i got discouraged a little bit. Since i am learning to script in C# in unity at the same time, i decided to come back to popcorn later on, with the hope that i would find more "unity related" tutorials.
So... here i am now, my game prototype is almost done. I am at the stage where i have to do the visual effects...
But... still the same unity tutorials... the fire/smoke thingy.
I need moooaaarrrr.
Like : is there a way to switch between local and worldspace emission ?
I have a cannon energy projectile i need to make : The shoot, the projectile itself and the impact. Can i do that in one effect and "triggers" from within unity via code ?
i have a "time based" Spawn system, x unit takes 5 sec to spawn, y unit takes 10 sec, ect... can i do that in one effect ? the initial effect, the looping , and the end of the spawning. Again, is there a way to trigger all that via code ?

If you could point me out as to where i can find all those informations, that would be great ! thanks.

 

Hi,

side note:
a part of the team is in Amsterdam for Unite Europe! If you have the chance to attend this event, you can meet us at the booth A14 tomorrow!

@pexoid
- not yet, there is several ways to provide dynamic primitive colliders, can't tell you when right now but we'll explore the options and try to bring this feature asap. (card added in the Trello: https://trello.com/b/Z1q9xz72/popcornfx-roadmap you can vote for it!)
- changing the scene mesh at runtime will require a rebuild of the KdTree so it can take a significant amount of time, but if you can afford it during a loading, mesh handling could be added
- "Can we receive event ticked with 'broadcast' from Popcorn to Unity?" can you explain this, not sure to understand ?
- no we can't provide arrays of attributes, this won't fit well with the architecture of popcorn. You'll be able to use the upcoming attributes samplers (curve or texture) to pass complex datasets.

@Feydwin
You're right we are very conscious about the tutorials needs and this is the top priority for our tech art team right now!
Meanwhile, please have a look at http://wiki.popcornfx.com/index.php/Unity/Animating_Effects_Attributes , this should answer most of your questions.
And please don't hesitate to check answers.popcornfx.com and ask for help on specific subjects if needed!

Regards,