Assets [Unity Awards 2018 - BEST ARTISTIC TOOL Winner] Aura - Volumetric Lighting

Preview of Light Probes support for Volumetric Global Illumination

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That really adds what was missing. Looks fantastic.

 

Oh yeah that's the good stuff.

 

By request, moving preview of Light Probes support for Volumetric Global Illumination

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Improving Light Probes Support for Volumetric Global Illumination

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How does this work with anisotropy? Can you post some shots of a point light moving up/down the hall?

 

Well handling anisotropy would require some deconstruction/modify/reconstruction of the spherical harmonics, as far as I understand. technically it would be possible but more expensive. it not the case now.

I am not familiar with real time light probes if there is such a thing. I'll have a shot if you provide me with a scene. [Edit: I meant a scene with such a self-illum sphere moving and realtime probes]

 

I'm still experiencing aura scripts being automatically disabled every now and then, like reported earlier on in this thread. Any ideas how to avoid that?

And oh, the asset and the features are just lovely. Thank you very much for releasing this!

 

Make sure the camera exists before the other assets load. This will be fixed in the next version

 

Hi Guys, sorry to ask, maybe I missed it, is the multi camera option available yet?

 

It will be in the update yes : https://twitter.com/RaphErnaelsten/status/1037274732876447745

 

Real-time Volumetric Global Illumination in update 1.1

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(is this what you asked for @Jesus ?)

 

This looks amazing. I cant wait for update 1.1. Fantastic work.

 

Hi, this means that AURA now will take Enlighten real time GI into consideration and it is not something you are implementing in regards to GI !?

 

Indeed, it's enlighten real-time GI

 

this is exactly what I was after. Well done!

 

Ah ok, no probs, I was not sure if it was released yet

 

Hello everyone, I don't know the correct place to ask about this but I figured I would ask here. I have an issue on a couple of the example scenes, the directional light scene and the point light scene. If I view the game window or play the scene with the Aura point light/directional light components enabled, I get this error "Graphics.CopyTexture can only copy between same texture format groups (d3d11 base formats: src=27 dst=1) "

and the volumetrics don't work, but if I disable it while editing, then get in play mode, then re-enable it, it works just fine. And it will even work fine if I get off of play mode and then go back to editing, but then when I hit play again, it throws the error again and the volumetric lighting dies. I tried putting directional lights into my own scene but that didn't work either, it threw this error

ArgumentNullException: Argument cannot be null.
Parameter name: shader
UnityEngine.Material..ctor (UnityEngine.Shader shader) (at C:/buildslave/unity/build/Runtime/Export/Shader.bindings.cs:104)
AuraAPI.AuraLight.Initialize () (at Assets/Aura/Classes/AuraLight.cs:405)
AuraAPI.AuraLight.OnEnable () (at Assets/Aura/Classes/AuraLight.cs:224)
UnityEngine.GameObject:AddComponent()
AuraAPI.AuraLight:CreateGameObject(MenuCommand, String, LightType) (at Assets/Aura/Classes/AuraLight.cs:752)
AuraAPI.AuraLight:CreateDirectionalGameObject(MenuCommand) (at Assets/Aura/Classes/AuraLight.cs:764)
UnityEditor.GenericMenu:CatchMenu(Object, String[], Int32)

and it also threw a similar error for point lights when trying to create them.
The funny thing is that I get zero errors when using spot lights. I'm not a graphics programmer by any means so I have no idea what is going on here.

EDIT: I don't guess I remembered right sorry, I am not getting any errors in the point light scene, the only error that I get at runtime is with a directional light and it is that Graphics.CopyTexture can only copy between same texture format groups (d3d11 base formats: src=27 dst=1) error.

 

Hi this problem will be fixed within the process of the deep refactor made for the next big update. If I remember correctly, this happens when you newly create a directional aura light then never again on that light

 

Thank you!
It is not a problem really because I was just doing some testing for maybe a future game but I am so glad to see this kind of support. So I will be waiting for the update, and thank you again.

 

Not sure what is going on but after loading a new project in 2017.2, 2017.4 , 2018.2 and loading example scenes...I get the following results...any reason why this is happening?
Thanks for any support.

 

Did you leave the compute shader compile?

 

yes

 

Please file a bug report on Github ;-)

 

Hi, I would like to ask if there is any workaround that I can try for the multi camera option / issue currently, or do we need to wait for your next update? Apologies to ask, I am eager to make it work properly in my game.

 

You can't currently do anything in Aura pre 1.1 sorry

 

Can't wait for update 1.1!

 

Stop teasing me!
I need this

 

This is pretty exciting to see! How did you accomplish such a distance increase? Cascades? Is the performance comparable? Can't wait to try it!

 

Am I allowed to ask how long the 1.1 update might be coming, e.g. month or 6 or a year from now? I'd like to try plan the release of my game in time

 

Hi everyone! I fell in love with the demo where the corridor is lit up by fire particles and a spotlight.

I feel stupid for not finding it in documentation but can you bake the smaller lights if they are Aura-ed?

I have a scene that’s a Japanese night festival, basically a river park at night with almost no directional light but illuminated with many colored lamps. I’d love to make them bloom and glow with Aura but there are a lot of them.

There is also fog (I was going to replace it with Aura’s because I want it to catch illumination and glow) and particle effects and lights reflected in the river. Some of the fog is also particle effects because I needed it to move around, like ghosts made of fog. I don’t have any day/night or weather cycles but there are a lot of glowing and moving elements at about player face level. I tried a weather machine with volumetric lighting (cloudy but intense moon) and added some pointlights and spotlights, and my GPU almost gave up the ghost.

 

One of the best asset on unity and works with Gaia too.2 questions when will the version 1.1 will be available and can one use this on android devices ?

 

how i can use a volumetric light spot with out ambient density ?
i just want to render the light. i dont need ambient density.

 

Hi Raphick, would it be ok to ask for your input regarding a workaround I was thinking of implementing (while we patiently wait for the awesome sounding 1.1 version ) to allow multi camera support, would it it be working if I add the Aura camera script via AddComponent on each camera as it activates, when deactivating then remove the Aura component on that camera? I have not tried it yet, just curious of your thoughts on this.

 

Hi all!

You're always allowed it's a matter of weeks now (I started back giving classes so have less time)

Aura cannot prevent lights being baked.

Unless you absolutely want shadows, you should try aura volumes with color injection to simulate lights around your lamps. Or maybe use volumes for far distance then switch with aura lights when coming near the camera.
Whatever the solution, the amount of lights is critical for performance.

not without compute shader support.

Because that's not how it works. However you can have a very low density and a very high AuraLight strength. This should give you the results you want

Unfortunately not :-(

Best it to wait for the update, hopefully it's gonna be worth

 

Hello!

Is there any speacial requirement to work with HDRP? I imported and setted up the asset as in lmhpoly's tutorial, but nothing happening.

 

Very cool, looking forward to this!

 

I wonder how many Unity games will use/ currently use your asset, I imagine quite a few
You are making a huge difference to Unity and lighting. And for free! It's really amazing, I wonder how I can send Unity (Or someone there like the CEO or Joachim Ante?) a message about your amazing efforts. Or are they aware?

 

Hi,
I have been checking out to tool, looks great, thanks to everyone who has put effort into it.

What can we do to remove the excessive number of pragma in the computer shader file. Regardless of the initial compile time to import the project (just an anoyance, not a real project impact), it adds over 100megs of shader variants to the project which can impact a compiled project greatly depending on its use case. Also auto generating 32k variants of pragma definitions is unreasonable both short term and long term for a shader architecture and open source collaboration potential.

some ideas to kick off the conversation:
(i havnt looked over the architecture fully so some of this is ignorant of how things are currently setup)

1-can the computer shader be broken into parts to reduce exponential variants to only create variants where it matters?

2-although it can cause a extremely minor increase in perf, changing some of the #if def to if(bool) based on a variable bool would remove many of simplier ones and would greatly reduce the number of variants compiled and the disc variants needed. On modern gpu this likely wouldnt even register as a cost if kept minimal.

3-much of the logic appears to resolve around disable_all checks. shouldnt that be possible on the cpu in a different way and then also a more efficient way?

 

Aura 1 doesn't work with HDRP as they bypass legacy lighting system

There are a few yes, not up to me to communicate on this But most of them now wait for Aura 2

They are aware but never came to me no :-/

This subject will be solved in Aura 2 ;-)

 

Hello! It looks cool! How about virtual reality support?

 

Can anyone confirm if the Unity Cloud Building issue has been fixed?

 

absolutely love the effects that can be created with tool, really, really awesome work mate! There's only one issue I am having which is a performance issue but I will add that I am on a dinosaur of a machine (i5). I can handle working with that to build games as I have done some intense things on this ol' beast in the past and they play well when the build is done and customers don't complain about performance due to the optimised way i design. So my question is this, when a game is fully done with aura and built does it have a performance issue? I played one game in which I am sure used your asset in the making.. I could be wrong, The games name is AER Memories of Old.

 

If tuned well performance should not be a problem. Aura's performance is roughly (haven't done exhaustive testing) on par with other solutions like Vapor or Unity's Volumetric Lighting, but Aura has a lot more functionality, an easier workflow and no obvious pit-falls, making it the obvious choice right now.
In my medium-sized scene with a spotlight and 5-10 point lights visible I'm getting 150FPS with 320x176x128 Aura resolution(fairly high) at 1080p on a midrange PC (RX480, 4670K). Adding an animated Planar Volume to that drops framerate to 110. And using a lower Aura resolution of 160x88x64 nets me 200FPS with the Planar Volume, without a significant reduction in visual quality (high reprojection helps a lot with the lower resolution, otherwise the difference is huge).

For those curious about the pitfalls:
Unity's Volumetric Lighting falls on excessive banding (known issue, no fix yet)
Vapor falls on excessive frame-blending, making it, in my opinion, unusable with a moving camera (frame-blending is what Aura calls reprojection as I understand it). It's possible Vapor has a setting that fixes it, but I haven't been able to find one in an hour or two testing it.

 

Might as well throw in a screenshot for further context:

 

I'm trying to make an ingame graphics option for turning Aura on/off and selecting resolution (i.e: Off/Low/High).
The first snag I hit was that Aura seemed to ignore my settings menu initialization, requiring me to change the option again when the level was loaded. But I was able to solve this by changing Aura's script execution order to make sure it always initialized before my settings initialization.
But I've hit a second snag I can't figure out:
Turning Aura off or starting with it disabled prevents it from initializing properly when enabling it again during runtime.
I've tried making Aura's Initialize method public and calling it after turning it on, but to no avail. And turning it on/off several times ultimately ends with a black screen with it active. Aura doesn't seem to like runtime initialization
Anybody got an idea of how I could solve this?

For those curious, you can change Aura's resolution during runtime with:

aura.frustum.SetResolution(new Vector3Int(160, 88, 64));

(where "aura" is a reference to the Aura main script)
It can also be disabled during runtime with "aura.enabled", but cannot be re-enabled (the issue above).

 

Thank you for the advice! I don't care much about realistic shadows, what I'm mostly after is the effect of dynamic glow surrounding the lamps, also lighting up particles. A bit like in the Sponza demo scene.

 

Hi everybody!
I'm sorry for the low answering rate. I am focusin my free time on Aura 2.

Multi view already works. Singlr view is in the backlog for Aura 2

Thank you for this comparison work.
As said Aura uses a modern technique designed for modern graphic cards and that need a decent rig to run.
However Aura contain unique optimisation techniques and flexibility that would allow weaker machines to run it at the cost of degrading quality for example.
For as much as I know AER Memories of Old wasn't made with Aura. Just because it was released month before Aura.

Best is to wait for Aura2 which have an integrated preset system, allowing to switch between presets at runtime.

Disabling Aura breaks the connections with the registred aura objects. Reenabling it will not remake those connections.
There is no workaround for this in Aura1.
Aura2 fully support's enabling/disabling with no particular order.

My pleasure

 

Will Aura 2 be free, too?