[PREVIEW] dynamic GI v0.7 web player demo

one ligne of comment every month is a bit frustrating ... I mean, it's your thread and it feel that you don't even read it ...

 

Because this system uses a post effect to add the indirect light you don't have to change your custom shaders at all, you only have to edit the unlit (color) shader if you change something like geometry (vertex / tesselation) or alpha affecting shaders.

@ everyone who is still interested:

The Good news, I managed to increase performance, because I'm using gpu particles now for the shadow generation. (works on dx9 base)
I also could increase the performance by changing the cone ratio in the ray tracing process to a higher level. That means the cone tracing angles (of 5 cones per voxel) getting bigger and the light is more scattered around making it less accurate, but still looks good. A nice side effect is, that the light looks smoother because it's more blended together.
All in all, it's three times faster than before.

The Bad news, I can't afford working like this any longer, I have to focus on projects where I actually get money for living, even if I release v0.7 now, I have to give support for it and I don't have this extra time anymore. I'm working on a big project now and the plan is to finish it in two month. In this time I will put the asset from the asset store, that doesn't mean I will stop working on the GI system but pausing it. I will continue after that when my financial situation is hopefully better.

Kind Regards,
Chris

 

well its good to hear you found a way to make it faster but ...

I hope you can understand my asking for a refund.
One more month with no usable product is unacceptable, nevermind two!
And these are not two months you need to finish working on it, this is two months you won't even be working on it, so really it will be even longer.

 

The only reason i have not bought it yet was the lack of DX9 support, so the coming dx9 is great news

 

unusable right now with paused support...
i hope the pause will not be forever and we didn't waste our money.

 

Sorry, but there is no real reason for a refund, you didn't buy v0.7, you bought v0.6 and I have many other people who say that they are using it, I have posted a demo version (from another customer) which is working fine with good fps using a 32 grid. If you have trouble with the usage, I'm happy to support you, but I can't give everyone a refund just because they can't wait for the update. I can send you a beta version of v0.7, if you like, but you can't expect to get any support for the beta right now. I'm not obligated to release updates each month or week, that is just your opinion.

Btw, there are many other people who are buying unity 5 for 600$ right now because of Enlighten and they won't get it in 2 months either. I think they will have to wait for 3-5 months or even longer. And I don't think unity will get updates for enlighten in the future (as it was with beast and physX). Unity Tech. is buying a version of enlighten and sticking to it until the next unity comes out, which you have to buy again to get the update (like it is with physX v3.3).
My approach is different. In order to satisfy customers who have already bought my product, the upcoming updates are provided for free! At the moment however I have temporarily stopped working on the tool and thus further updates will take some time.

 

I'm taking down this post at the request of the author, to see if negotiations go anywhere. It may be back, it may not.

 

I'm very sorry about that legal stuff, I didn't mean to offend you. After I thought about it, I want to take it back, but I can't edit the private message. I know that was not very professional of me and I will be more customer friendly if you give me another chance.

 

I knew this was going to happen to this product.

 

Big LOL. Remenber this???....

 

Well I didn't. And I am quite disappointed.

 

Sorry guys, voxel cone tracing is a very complex topic and without the right financial support, I can't work full time on this and give proper support.
However, I'm going to prepare a version today with the promised features of v0.7 including the full source code.
Just send me an email (some of you already did) and ask for the update with your invoice number. You should get an answer in the next 24 hours.

 

I dont understand why unity dont support you!

 

The Folks asking refund, come on, lets help this guy, this solution is really great ! we need this, and you know how development is !

 

The only reason we bought it too early is to support him.

 

The problem is there are only a few unity users like you, who want to make next-gen games with unity, most of them are working on moblie and indie games.
But, thank you for your support, I'm trying very hard to get this working and I don't want you to waste your money, so I will keep working on this after my break, I will also focus on more efficient ways to produce GI, because voxel cone tracing is a very expensive technique. Epic included a realtime GI technique in unreal4 which is based on LPV (but even this is currently in a beta phase), maybe that's the right way to go, I will figure it out. Currently, VCT only makes sense on very high end gpu hardware.

 

Includes all the promised features plus SSR, SimpleGI and the full source code!
You can modify/change/optimize it by yourself. (I think, that's worth the money)
No errors occurred so far!
(tested with OpenGL/DX9 and DX11 build, on a windows pc with gtx 770, 32GB RAM, Intel i7 3.60 GHz)

Known Issues:
- still not optimized
- slow performance with high voxel grid (but not bad for voxel cone tracing)
- some shadow problems with point and sun light (mostly in the dx9/openGL version)
- light leaking through walls
- some minor bugs

These features I want to add (after my break):
- shadow generation with gpu particles.
(still in wip, improves performance, because scene doesn't get rendered by shadow cams anymore)
- add RVGI as an alternative to VCT's GI. (better performance)
- improve SSR with blended cubemap reflections as an alternative to VCT's specular reflections.

I asked unity support, to remove my asset for the time I'm not working on it, so don't wonder if it's gone from the store, I also will update my website (finally), so you can get access to the latest versions via login.

 

I just want to say that I'm very sorry for pausing this, I hope I can continue soon! Thank you for the support!

 

Thank you chris
the main issue right now is light flicking and performance
on the paper published on 2011 using the same technique i presume was able to push from 25-70 FPS on GTX480 with no flicking.
is unity itself limiting you?

 

Honestly I don't see any reason to take this down from the Asset Store. You never know who's going to be trawling the store for stuff and may decide to check it out.

Just put a disclaimer stating its very early software and that development will be slow (which is true since you're taking a temporary break).

 

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Assets are technically a transaction between the asset author and the customer, so if that goes wrong, it's between the two of you. In any case I have to ask that personal attacks like 'douchebag' and similar be edited out of any complaint posts. If an asset is not performing as expected, leave a review. If you are unable to come to a resolution with the author, and you have very good grounds for complaint, contact Unity - but again - no personal attacks are tolerated.

 

You're right, sorry, I will remove the word from my post. Just very frustrated with this.

 

Hrothvitnir did you request the 0.7 beta with your invoice number like the post says ? If so haven't you now got 0.7 anyway ? I'm sure both you and the developer of this are frustrated that it's taking longer to make than anticipated but that's not grounds for a refund. No game engine out their has a viable voxel cone tracing GI engine yet. Even unreal took theirs out because they couldn't get it to run fast enough on the ps4 and xbox one.

Hopefully at some stage with advances in compute shaders with either directx 12 or opengles3.1 along with the average spec of graphics hardware increasing it will become viable on PC and this plugin might be the one that gets there first.

If you need to release something soon though purchasing a beta of an experimental voxel cone tracer probably wasn't a smart purchase by you and you should have purchased a different asset, but you did get what you were promised which was a beta of a product.

Don't take your frustration out on a developer just because you chose the wrong asset for your situation. The only guaranty you have is the quality of an asset you purchase at the time, not the quality it will be in the future or any guarantees of updates.

 

Ian, a bit out of context of this thread but as it seems it might be quiet for a while, i have noticed you quoting opengl es 3.1 as a major compute landmark rather than the most recent OpenGL specification or OpenCL even, regarding gpu computing support across all desktop platforms (Certainly rather than directx 12). I know it's a random question, but i'm curious and under-educated on the subject, and it could very well be relevant to me

 

Lazygunn Opengles 3.1 is the first cross platform agreed spec that can run a compute shader kernel entirely on a graphics chip. It has also been signed off as the basis for web gl as well. For years at least on PC's in general graphics drivers have been the most common cause of crashes on computers. That is why Apple have made all the drivers for macs and pretty much used the most basic shader platforms they can.get away with. Microsoft instead took a different approach and added more advanced shader support but made the requests managed by the windows kernel. If a graphics card crashes on windows it can be restarted without taking windows down with it. It means windows is more reliable than it used to be but you are loosing compute performance because the graphics card can't access things directly.

Apple also developed Opencl which is a compute standard that can be used on both cpu's and gpu's together. There was a lot of promise but the kernel efficiency was always far lower than the expected. Apple released the open spec and I think they assumed if they kept working at the kernel drivers efficiency would increase but it never really happened.

In the latest version of Mac OS there is actually an experimental version of Opencl that finally solves the problem , if you have a mac you can enable it with luxrender for blender if you want to test it. It turns out the reason for the poor efficiency of opencl was the interface between the cpu and gpu. The experimental version basically gets rid of this link and runs the kernel driver on the gpu instead of the cpu. There are major trade offs in that you can then only use the graphics card memory for compute and some opencl functions won't operate but the compute performance can easily be 10 times faster for some functions.

Many of the graphics vendors haven't signed up to this new Opencl spec or are delaying driver support though because they don't want Apple to control it and they probably don't want Microsoft to control with Directx either. Instead the first standard that has been agreed is over the mobile spec opengl es 3.1 .

The reason that a non obvious standard has been signed is probably largely political. CPU vendors wouldn't be keen on a new opencl standard that removed support for the cpu and no vendor would want to support a standard that gave a competitor an advantage. They probably didn't want Apple to have too much control over the spec as they do with opencl and so instead proposed an update to opengles which is more open and which apple already use on the iphone anyway.

With opengl es3.1 the graphics driver is run on the gpu just like the proposed version of Opencl. The next version of the desktop version of OpenGl will also be based on it. Even directx 12 will have to be somewhat compatible with it as well since Microsoft has signed up to support webgl.

I'm assuming that Unity 5 is using the opengles3.1 spec as the basic for it's compute shaders which is why they have also anounced that they are supporting web gl. I think that both Unreal and Unity are trying to support and get web gl established because then microsoft will have to make Directx 12 very compatible with it. Really they just want one efficient standard across all platforms that no one company has total control of.

 

@Hrothvitnir:
sorry I didn't reply to you, I also waited for your response a few days, but didn't get any answer... check you private messages please. Btw, I also wrote an email to unity-support two weeks ago and haven't got any answer yet, but I'm not complaining because I know they are busy too... and they have more people in the support, I have to do it all by my own.

I'm not checking this forum post or my private messages very often, so if it's important write me an email to support@next4unity.com or chriskahler@gmx.com

 

by the way - 0.7 has less light flikering.

 

This project is dead? are we going to get any update?

 

No, I'm currently working on the new approach, based on this http://hd-prg.com/glossyReflections.html
I want to release it when it's stable and production ready.

 

bump
still waiting for a progress

 

Sorry, but I'm not working on this full time. However I got a great article about "The Tomorrow Children", they using the vct technique, but with only a 32 voxel grid...and for near details DDAO and contact shadows.

 

Would invest to see this done.
Keep up the work please.

 

So that's it?

 

Any update on this?