[RELEASED] Deckard Render - Cinematographic Renderer for Unity

You have to play with quality settings (min and max sliders) to tune it for acceptable performance for your scene. Deckard always renders when activated.
New version of Deckard has a more responsive mode of rendering in-editor (but it' is still in beta, and is available on a request). Unfortunately, this new version of Deckard doesn't still work with HDRP because HDRP doesn't support custom post processing effects.
P. s. I don't suggest using HDRP still. HDRP is full of bugs and non implemented features - and isn't production ready.

 

Really cool! Like your chill vibe!

 

Greetings, I've been using this asset for about 7 months and it simply stunning!

But I still got a couple of questions:
Unity 2019.2.17

1) Deckard Soft Light - So basically I need to add this component to any light in the scene to improve my shadows, is it only for directional light? What about other types of lights? What light size I should use?

2) Focus On - When I use different Cinemachine's Virtual Cams I can't use this option since it focuses only on one object, so the alternative way is to create an empty gameobject, place it under focus on and animate it but it can sometimes be very tedious when I want to shoot with 1.2f apperture, so is there any workaround? Like placing different focus on different virtual cameras and use blending option?

3) Use Autofocus - how exactly does this feature works? I mean how this system understands what should be in focus?

4) Shutter Angle - default value is 180 what is your suggestion for best cinematic results? I mean usually in cinema for 24 fps its 48 shutter speed and for 60 fps its 120 shutter speed

5) HDRP - Is there any guide on how to use Deckard with HDRP? I tried a couple of times but nothing happened.

In any case I want to thank u for your hardwork, I am currently working on my music video and it would be impossible without Deckard Renderer.

 

You have to add it to any light. It doesn't impact performance, but improoves shadows if liught size is set to anything larger than 0. Light size for spotlight and point lights should be set to any light size that you wan't to simulate. For spotlight and pint light It's expressed in meters.
For directional light, it's size is expressed in angles (angular diameter). Sunlight has a usual angular diameter of 0.5
More on angular size:
https://www.austincc.edu/jheath/Solar/Hand/Angsize/asize15.htm

No alternatives here. I really don't know how would I even could implement this in a reasonably comprehensive way. Animating dummy object is only solution (and probably most comprehensive). If you have other ides let me know. But blending isn't a solution, as it wouldn't give consistent results.

It understands by casting a ray to a center of screen. You need colliders on your objects for it to work correctly.

180 is a standard used in almost any movie. 180 stutter angle is 48 shutter speed when filming in 24fps. if you change framerate to 60, it becomes 120 shutter speed. Shutter angle is connected with framerate.
180 shutter angle @ 24fps = 48 shutter speed.
360 shutter angle @ 24fps = 24 shutter speed.
180 shutter angle @ 60fps = 120 shutter speed.
360 shutter angle @ 60fps = 60 shutter speed.

Thats why we are using shutter angles in filmography, instead of shutter speed in photography.
More about shutter angle here:
https://www.red.com/red-101/shutter-angle-tutorial

You have to open a Deckard View (/Window/Deckard View) to be able to see results.
Note: I'm not suggesting you to use HDRP yet. HDRP is still in a preview - It isn't stable, it is still full of bugs, missing features and isn't guaranteed to keep compatibility between unity versions. So you might end up having to rewrite shaders or fix things. It also doesn't support custom effects and overall, it isn't production ready.
Deckard can do pretty impressive rendering without a need of HDRP.

I'm happy that you are using it. Let us know when it's finished

 

Hi can you do a small tutorial on how to make it look good. For me final renders doesnt look good. I also seems to have problems with focus

 

"Not looking good" is a pretty vague. I really can't be of much help without seeing a scene.

 

@olix4242 Thank you for detailed response.
Regarding HDRP - I am totally agree with you in terms of Deckard capabilities, I am totally satisfied with the quality but HDRP is the only way we can use Visual Effect Graph (VEG) maybe with Houdini simulation and effects that can be linked via VEG.

 

Heres the scene

 

To me this looks really nice. Some improvements can be probably made. Those cables don't have any shadow. Probably because of position of lights or light settings. I can also see some kind of grill that is projected on a street. Looks like a shadow from some light.
For better shadows, always add Deckard Soft shadows component to your lights, and set their shadow bias to 0 and radius to some value larger than 0. This way they will capture even close shadows without artifacts when setting bias too low.

 

Did a test of comparing deckard with octane.
Anway to improve skin rendering with deckard

 

Hi, now I can tell waht can be improoved.
You have a problem with shadows as they aren't grounded. Be sure to set shadows in Unity quality settings to max resolution, and tune distances so that they meet a scale of your scene. Then be sure to add Deckard Soft light to all of your lights.
It also looks like if there are some lights that don't have any shadow.
-add an ambient occlusion effect. Slight amount.
-add a screen space reflection effect.
I see that Unity scene has much more specular that Octane. Is this Octane for Unity? It looks like Octane has different specular intinsity in rendering, so you have to account for this.

p. s. if you can send me a Unity scene file (in private) a can try to examine and tell you something more.

 

Yes its octane for unity. It takes 10 secs to render octane one. I will have to check size of file if its small enough to send

 

Hi. I've been really wanting to take my animated film project from Maya to Unity for rendering for one reason: Cinemachine. There is nothing like it anywhere else. Unfortunately, the limitations of Unity's renderer have always undermined me. Your product has gotten me the closest I have ever come to making the move and the latest version of Unity may just have been the tipping point, namely, the feature that allows Unity 2019.3 to mimic Arnold materials. So here's my question: Will Deckard respect and enhance Unity's attempt at replicating the Arnold shader? If so, it looks like I'll be using your renderer in production.

 

Deckard will work with any shader in Unity and enhance upon overall lighting, image effects and rendering.
A question. Sorry, but it looks like I'm not informed about any specific Arnold shaders, where can I find more info about this?

 

The Unity Blog outlines new features in 2019.3: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2020/01/28/unity-2019-3-is-now-available/
In the paragraph titled, "Tools for Artists and Designers" it states support for third-party renderer materials. I'm not sure what the scope will be, but I'm using Arnold in Maya and any kind of support for Arnold shaders would save a lot of work for me if I decided to shift to Unity for rendering.

 

Import via Materials Description: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/FBXImporter-Materials.html

 

This is only for the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) not for the built-in renderer. This is because all of these new shaders are made in Shader Graph with an Advanced Master node (StackLit) for HDRP.

New features for the built-in renderer ended with 2017.3. Since 2018.1 every new graphical feature has been for the new pipelines and built-in will only receive bug fixes if necessary.

 

Oh. That's unfortunate. So Deckard doesn't support it yet. I guess I'll just carry on as planned with Arnold in Maya.

 

Deckard supports all shaders that are supported by Unity. And yes, it supports shader graph shaders.

 

@olix4242 Does Deckard work with the latest version of HDRP 7.2.0 with Unity 2019.3 or 8.0.0 with 2020.1 alpha?

 

Hey, this asset looks awesome. Been reading through some of the comments here and had a quick question before I buy the asset.

Can this be used to render a super high-quality screenshot from a build? I want to have a “photo mode” feature that allows players to save their own renders. No need for it to be realtime, it’s acceptable if you have to wait 1-30 seconds for the frame to be exported.

For comparison, Forza Horizon 4 has a similar feature where the photo tool takes a few seconds to render a bunch of frames and post-process them to create higher quality motion blur, DOF, etc.

 

Latest HDRP tested version is 7.16 (latest available via package manager in Unity2019.3) and it works. There are few smaller options that currenlty doesn't work (like exporting 3d images for facebook) r4elated to how HDRP works.
But mostly there shouldn't be any reason why it shouildn't work in new versions. But I really can't give any support for alpha/beta versions of Unity that might and are always buggy.


Note that there are some issues when using it with Raytrace activated. Apparently there are some memory leaks that affect Deckard.
Not sure if this has something to do with Unity, as this might also be a problem with my hardware - drivers. When using Raytrace option (even without Deckard) I get some BSOD-s. With Deckard I have those BSOD-s more frequently (and this is pretty normal, as Deckard forces unity to run more loops and this leads to getting BSOD-s faster)

At this moment there isn't any built in support for this feature and it also isn't planned. But it should be pretty easy to modify scripts so that they can do this.
I'm not planing into implementing it as it could be used to make a standalone app that uses Deckard engine as a renderer for 3d models and scenes, overriding a need for having licence for Deckard Asset. You get a seat licence for using Deckard in Editor, but distributing it's functionality in a standalone app wouldn't be exactly the same, and you would actually require a custom licencing/agreement that can't be done over Assetstore, and you should contact me about that.

 

Ah, alright I'll try it with 7.2.0 and see

That's weird, HDRP for Unity 2019.3 defaults to 7.1.8 as that's the varified package version for 2019.3. You can also get 7.2.0 as it was released after and contains important bug fixes for problems in 7.1.8 such as memory leak with the sky manager.

 

Hello, I got a question, so basically I render my movie in mp4 proxy and PNG, but somehow my png files all black, I tried to import them as the sequence in Premiere Pro, but they are still black, how can I fix it?

Update: Also I just tried Resume from frame in TImeline Settings, but Deckard still renders from first frame

 

Can I get an answer for this? I want to start rendering from a given frame, and not as soon as I enter Play mode. This would be immensely useful for many purposes.

 

I think the solution is in Animation/Timeline settings in the Resume from frame option

 

That would be one way to do it, but I think it'd be ideal to have a function you can call on DeckardRender to start rendering for more versatility.

 

Hm... I'm not sure I follow. Reading the EULA, it seems that all non-restricted assets are covered under clause 2.2.1.

If your goal is to prevent users from using your asset in compiled applications, you should probably talk to a lawyer, because I don't think the current license terms you've chosen would legally prevent that.

Anyways, thanks for the answer, I'll continue looking for alternative solutions.

 

That clouse applies to assets like 3d models, materials and so on, but it doesn't apply to extension assets (assets that are meant to work in editor) and Deckard Render is an extension asset. You will see in its terms that you require a licence per seat.
Here is more about extension assets:
https://answers.unity.com/questions/761744/this-extension-requires-one-license-per-seat.html

 

You can download this patch - it fixes this issue.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/2br0wtel8rt6k01/DeckardRenderResumeFix.unitypackage?dl=0

be sure not to use alpha channel (in premiere disable alpha channel option in Interpret footage settings for your image sequence)

 

Thanks for the fix and for the answer. It worked!

 

3 quick points/questions:
1. would really benefit form a workflow tutorial video , from scratch, showing how you move cameras and animate/focus/timeline/virtual cams - esp when trying to show off vr on 2d screen
2. works with pegasus?
3. with way HDRP is going would it not be better to concentrate on URP for longer term compatibility?

 

1. I'm currently working on that.
2. I really don't know, I didn't test it with Pegasus.. It probably works, but you probably won't get a correct camera motion blur.
3. URP? URP is supported, but I typically wouldn't use it. Idea is that someone uses Deckard to push quality. Well, you can use it if your project/game is already URP, just to add more quality to it. But URP is all about performance and isn't good if you target hi-quality visuals. So I personally, don't even consider in using UDR for my own projects. That said, Deckard works with it.

 

Hi ! I'm a 3D designer and animator veteran (about 35 years of experience !) and I have many demands from my customers to get 'Pixar quality' for my 3D animated video shorts. I know that it's not the main focus for Deckard, but it would be really great to have a pixar-like shader added to it. This is pretty annoying, because regarding to characters, (the famous uncanny valley) the more realistic you get, the uglier is the result. So the 'Pixar look' stays the best solution. Unity team has shown some previews for that kind of stuff (I suppose with a specific shader), but nothing available yet. Is it really out of your skills to develop that shader ?

 

This should be pretty easy to develop for Deckard. But one note: shaders of this type are best when you can provide Subsurface maps for correct subsurface scattering.

 

Ok, I have made a shader with subsurface scattering that should do what you need.
Result is this (when rendered with Deckard):


I'm also attaching a shader file down here.
Note, that to get a good shading, you have to set your lights to meet Pixar's style of lighting. I suggest you to use Deckard Soft Lights set to big radius and set their Bias to 0, use Deckard Environment light (if outdoors) and bake reflection and lighting probes. It's a first time that I'm trying to use deckard with this type of shaders, and I'm pretty impressed how well it works actually.
Only thing with this types of shaders it that they really need to be tuned on a per scene basis as the result varies with different lighting setups.

 

Hi, I have just started working on a new project with unity 2019.3.0 and I am experiencing a bunch of strange timing issues, mainly when attaching objects into a timeline.
Things just behave differently when using deckard.. Of course I've set the correct framerate and set the timeline to "manual". I don't remember having these problems in Unity 2018.
At the moment I cannot track down all the issues but here are a couple:
When I exit the scene with deckard activated, reloading the scene moves my camera away, and I must zero it's position manually every time. Camera is rigged to a gameobject moved by timeline and it's direction is controlled by a lookAt script. Also random numbers behave differently. In my project I have an object shooting out things chosen in a list by a random.range. With deckard activated it choses only the item in the middle of the list unless I pick up a new random seed for each shooting. And also shooting frequency changes depending on the rendering quality setting.

For me Deckard is a must and I just cannot think about offline rendering without it. But these consistency problems are bouncing me off schedule.
Anyone here having the same issues?

 

Yeah, this can happen, and I must admitt that it can be pretty annoying issue. Unfortunately, it looks like Unity has some bugs on scripots execution when opening file - from my tests looks like it doesn't follow correct order of execution of scripts, or that even doesn't execute some scripts as it should (probably editor scripts), or even more likely, that it executes a script before loading variables.
Solution:
Current solution (untill I find a better one): Before saving a scene, deactivate Deckard camera (or Deckard component) and then Reactivate it when a scene is loaded.

This isn't a correct way of setting camera rigs. You should always control your camera directly from a Timeline. The thing is that lookAt script isn't programmed properly to be used with Deckard (as for that, most standard movement scripts that use Update calls aren't suitable to be used with Deckard and timeline, as for correct working Deckard requires calling Update methods more times in a same update cycle). Problems with scripts (or hierarchies) that change Deckard camera position is that Deckard doesn't know what they are doing while it's doing it's own things (camera transforms) and this can lead to different problems: you probably won't get a correct motion blur (or even won't get motion blur), it might interfere with DOF (leading to wrong or no DOF), interfere with antialiasing or even worst, cause an involuntary camera shifting and rotation. Deckard has to use information on interframe movement, but Unity is made to work on a frame basis. This is why Deckard is best when used with Timeline, as timeline provides information on what is happening to a motion between frames, and this is somewhat a must for a correct workflow. For example - a realtime movement script doesn't know what will happen in a next frame of animation, and this type of scripts look into a past to get all neccessary info, but if you have to estimate correct movement interpolation you have to look what will happen in a future of animation. So, ideally a best way is not to use any parent objects for camera, and not to use scripts.

Solution to this problem:
-If you have to use scripts for your camera movement, you should use a help of Unity Recorder, and bake your camera movements into timeline. Recorder (downloadable from package manager) is a tool that works in timeline, you just create a Recorder Clip in timeline, set objects (and their properties) that you want to bake into animation clip, run your scene with recorder activated, and it will bake all camera animations into animation clip. Once done, you can use animation clips in Unity timeline, and reproduce them (or edit). I'm currently finishing one addon for Deckard that will make this job even easier right from a Deckard package.
But anyway, you gave me an idea- I can implement a new field in Deckard that can be used to make Deckard camera follow any other object. While it wouldn't solve all problem cases (like with motion blur), atleast, it could actually solve most of them.

Real Random usage isn't a best bet for offline rendering, where you mostly want to have repeatable random operation (so that your animation is always a same when rendering more than one time). Also, as Deckard Render sets it's random seed needed for rendering, it actually interferes with your random functionality. You might wan't to set your seed on a per frame basis (by using counter in your script) and update it every frame with a new value.
TIP: If you want to use random like functionality, it is better to animate values of your scripts by using timeline. This way you will get completely repeatable behaviour.

 

Thank You Olix, your reply clarified many things to me. It's a matter of approach. A project set up for offline rendering must be approached in a non-procedural way, like a normal 3D package.

But.. uh, I think many of us are adopting Unity in place of traditional 3D software because of it's ease in manipulating objects by script, without the need of setting everything on a timeline.
However, I will keep this in mind while going on with my project.
By the way, I tied my camera to the rig and the follow script just because of the odd camera transform issue. In another scene I had the camera (alone) to rotate 180 ° suddently, and deckard went nuts. In the past I had nasty experiences with quaternions and solved with the follow script!
Quaternions nightmare..

 

New animation made with new Deckard

 

Tha

Thank you for the fast reply and for the shader ! Just one last question : that screenshot was rendered in HDRP ?

 

No, it's a unity standard renderer.

 

Hi,

I installed Deckard Renderer in Unity 2019.3.2f1 and when I tried building one of the scenes I have (not Deckard demo)
I got these errors



I know I can use #if UNITY_EDITOR to avoid these issues, but I'm not sure if this is the right solution since there are some if/else in the code and don't want to miss something out.

Thanks!

 

Sortry, this is my bad. I have should included those tags myself. But, as most users (as myself) use separate projects for Deckard renderings, I have missed it and didn't had any reports on this issue. Will be sure to include this in a next Deckard version.
Simplest way for now is to just move Deckard Render directory out of project before compiling. Sorry for this inconvenience.

 

Hi,

Thanks for the quick reply!

I'll do that for now.
Manage to get it work.

 

I'm trying to create some screenshots of certain areas but I need them to be clear without the DOF in the shots. So how or what do I change to have Deckard create the screenshot with everything it does but without DOF in the shot?

 

I wish author creates some kinda of tutorials on how to get best out of deckard render. My current renders doesnt look that great. Also i got problem of black images sometimes

 

Does Deckard work with TrueSKY?

 

Yes.

 

Change aperture to max.