[RELEASED] Hx Volumetric Lighting

Maybe he will do surprise, HX Volumetric Lighting 2 that will support URP pipeline =D

 

Hey, We've also been using the Hx Volumetric Lighting plugin and it has been working fine on most platforms. However, we experience this weird aliasing on PlayStation 4 as you can see in the attached image.
(final render)

We have the hunch that there is a bug in the HxVolumetricSpotLight shader, because it seems that this shader causes the render buffers to become corrupted. Another hunch is that there is something wrong with the way it uses the lightmaps. Since these show similar affecting when we inspect the render textures while debugging on the GPU.
(most of the buffers have this weird aliasing going on)

Has anyone encountered this particular issue and been able to solve it?

Kind regards,
Peter Verzijl from AlteregoGames

 

I hope you update it soon for unity 2020 because my game use it so please don't destroy my game No other volumetric lighting assets could help me except this one. It's best volumetric lights asset

 

I have a similar issue. Please guys!! we need a fix!!

 

Be sure to send a note to the support email address. He may not be checking the forum.

 

We did a few weeks ago, no response yet...

 

Ugh. That's too bad. I guess it's the usual thing where the dev is working full time + on their own game and no longer has time to support store customers?

 

From what it seems is that the devs stopped working on every one of their projects...

 

He must put the open source asset on the Github if he want to leave I may not care about the money I paid but I made hundreds of my game lights with this asset

 

Yeah, same here!

 

Or he may be dead?

 

He's not dead. He's active on Twitter.

 

I have struggled with this idea myself. It is difficult to imagine releasing some software that you thought was helpful and then have to support it forever while also doing customer support and such.

I can see that there maybe should be some compromise and stated terms if the decision is made to stop supporting it, like reducing the price (or making it free) or making it open source. But I have also been in the position where something I released was still available for sale but I stopped engaging with the community or providing updates for it. So I can relate to the developer of this asset and any other asset that seems to have been abandoned. It is not an easy thing to do and going back to it when there is an ever increasing mob of angry users can be overwhelmingly intimidating.

 

I'd be okay with some assets like this being updated for compatibility with LTS editions only.

 

I would PAY for a fix. I need it to finish my game, we use it EVERYWHERE.

Surely there is a website out there were we can pile up some bounty money and dangle it under the Dev's nose?

If he doesn't bite I'm sure someone else in the community has the skills required to fix it. It may not be open source but we still have the code. I think there are no dlls involved.

 

Have you tried contacting him through his support email?

 

Some people in here have been waiting for a reply forever and I don't think he will miraculously wake up for a small sum that's why I suggested a bounty. I wouldn't pay hundreds of dollars when there are assets on the store with active developers but if we split the burden, it may become an interesting deal.

 

I've been looking at some tests we did with 2018 and when you enable noise while lowering the scale ie.: 0.5, 0.5, 0.5 you get artifacts that looks like triangles or lines in the fog above.

Has anyone ever investigated why this happens OR know if there is a way to use different noise settings for fog below and above the fog height transition? Maybe using two camera?

EDIT: screenshot in next post

 

Opps... here is the screenshot:

 

It seems that no matter what I change the "Max Light Distance" to it won't render any volumetric lights that are further than 1000 in distance. I flipped through the code and didn't see it being clamped anywhere.

Has anyone experienced this and fixed it somehow? Thanks.

*SOLVED

By making the density in the Light settings .01 the lights now render with distances over 1000

 

Does anyone have a modified StandardSurface particle shader that works with Hx Volumetric and transparency? The asset only comes with Additive particles shaders-

Before I look into making one for myself I thought I'd ask


I'm getting artifacts like the above when using an Hx Volumetric light and particle fog that uses the StandardSurface shader and assume its a transparency issue.

[SOLVED]

I don't know why but there was an Hx Volumetric Image Effect Opaque script attached to the camera- I deleted it and added the Hx Volumetric Image Effect script and now the artifacts are gone.

 

I'm using this in lots of projects and it has always worked really great for me. Here is a screenshot of my latest project using some indoor volumetric lighting.

 

Here is a new screenshot with an improved scene with more volumetric lighting,

 

Same here, we released Ziggurat 2 on Steam a month ago and it uses this asset. It's not perfect and it requires some tinkering, but almost everything we buy in the Asset Store is like that.

 

Zigguarat 2 looks fantastic. Gorgeous game. Great job and congratulations on getting it to early access.

 

I'm having this same issue now- has anyone managed to solve this one? Thanks.

 

Serialization depth limit 10 exceeded at 'HxOctreeNode`1.Parent'. There may be an object composition cycle in one or more of your serialized classes.

Getting this warning all the time now (Unity 2020.1.16f1), anybody knows how to get rid of it?

 

does anyone know how to solve this error ? using unity 2020.2.0

Assets\Plugins\HxVolumetricLighting\Scripts\HxVolumetricCamera.cs(20,19): error CS0234: The type or namespace name 'VR' does not exist in the namespace 'UnityEngine' (are you missing an assembly reference?)

 

FWIW, I tried the HxLighting demo in 2019 LTS, and it seemed to work fine.

 

yeah 2019 LTS works fine but not 2020

 

I went through and fixed that error in my project, but it still doesnt work correctly in 2020.2+. There are some shaders (like HxVolumetricPointLight.shader) that dont compile as they claim my gpu isnt supported. (I have a gtx2070, but saw the same bug on other machines). I cant seem to track down what the compile issue is in the shaders to fix it.
If anyonehas ideas, it would be great to hear them.

 

Not 100% sure, but from memory this is a DX9 shader and DX9 is no longer supported in later versions of unity, could be your issue

 

im using 2020.1.17 and asset works without problems

 

Well, it does work for me too, but I still get the warning ("Serialization depth limit 10 exceeded at 'HxOctreeNode`1.Parent'. There may be an object composition cycle in one or more of your serialized classes.") all the time, which is so annoying that I wouldn't say it's "without problems".

 

Well without problems I mean it works and without errors. It seems warning isnt going to disappear since asset is no more updated (at least it looks like not soon). By the way it looks like its warning regarding editor, not gameplay functionality

 

Correct, it was working in 2020.1 but 2020.2 it doesnt.
I have been trying to work out why its not but still no luck.
One person above suggested dx9 support was removed, but that happened a long time ago (like 2017) and wasnt recent... so i dont believe thats related.

 

Update : Although I dont know which part is causing the issue, but it appears the unity shader compiler caused the problem. In HxVolumetricLightCore.cginc it excluded dx11 ... which is the default renderer...

It added this note at the top:
// Upgrade NOTE: excluded shader from DX11, Xbox360, OpenGL ES 2.0 because it uses unsized arrays
#pragma exclude_renderers d3d11 xbox360 gles

But I am not sure what the unsized array issue is in the code. I know what unsized arrays are, I just dont see one in the shader code.

 

i bought the asset and tried VR but doesnt work even though creator said worked for VR, there is any way to make it work with VR? i just see the screen split in two

 

To be fair, the creator did not claim that it works in VR. It's listed on the roadmap (meaning: it's a feature planned for the future) as "VR support (untested, may already work)".

It's worth noting, however, that the Asset has been deprecated. No idea when that happened... It also appears that the Publisher account of them is gone - maybe their company, Hitbox Team, doesn't exist anymore?

Considering this, I'd recommend using Aura 2 as a replacement:
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/particles-effects/aura-2-volumetric-lighting-fog-137148

.

 

The description of the asset said "VR Supported with single pass stereo Enabled (Unity 5.4.1+)"

 

Sorry, my bad You're right. I just checked via Wayback Machine and I stand corrected:
http://web.archive.org/web/20201112...n-camera-effects/hx-volumetric-lighting-67665

Which version of Unity are you using? Do you use the Built-in RP or HDRP/URP (which don't seem to be supported)?

I would still suggest using Aura 2 - it has Stereo/VR support and is under active development.

 

Yes, i have aura 2 but have some problems with one portal shader. I use built in with 2018.3

 

We're still using HxVolumetricLighting in a VR project with Unity 2019.4.17, legacy render pipeline and legacy VR support. Given that even Unity's own PostProcessing is completely broken with legacy RP and the new VR support (and has been for many months), the big issue probably is Unity just breaking things all the time.

In our case, we're basically stuck with 2019.4 and cannot move on to 2020 simply because Unity broke so many things that at the moment, any benefits that 2020.2 would give us (and there are a few) are outweighed by major breaking changes.

Sad to hear that HxVolumetricLighting has been deprecated - but I can totally understand why publishers do this. Over the last years, Unity has turned into a terrible platform to build extensions for.

 

The entire point is that these extensions shouldn't need to be updated every 2 minor versions in the first place if Unity didn't break these themselves and weren't so unbelievably incompetent when it comes to handling their API changes.

They are constantly changing stuff around and deprecating things left and right and it's just absolutely infuriating and makes updating even to minor versions a game of russian roulette as half your project could just stop working with an absolute circus of errors and extensions stopping working altogether.

 

Absolutely! All any UAS developer ought to have to do is keep current with the LTS versions.

 

PS4 FIX
(There are uninitialized variables in several shaders.)

In file:

Assets\Plugins\HxVolumetricLighting\Resources\Shaders\HxVolumetricLightCore.cginc

add new function:

Code (CSharp):

1. void Init(inout vr vrout)
2. {
3.     vrout.col0 = float4(0, 0, 0, 0);
4. #ifdef VTRANSPARENCY_ON
5.     vrout.col1 = float4(0, 0, 0, 0);
6. #ifndef S_4
7.     vrout.col2 = float4(0, 0, 0, 0);
8. #ifndef S_8
9.     vrout.col3 = float4(0, 0, 0, 0);
10. #if defined (S_16)
11.     vrout.col4 = float4(0, 0, 0, 0);
12. #endif
13. #endif
14. #endif
15. //    vrout.col5 = float4(0, 0, 0, 0);
16. //    vrout.col6 = float4(0, 0, 0, 0);
17. //    vrout.col7 = float4(0, 0, 0, 0);
18. //#endif
19. #endif
20. }

In files:

Assets\Plugins\HxVolumetricLighting\Resources\Shaders\HxVolumetricDirectionalLight.shader
Assets\Plugins\HxVolumetricLighting\Resources\Shaders\HxVolumetricSpotLight.shader
Assets\Plugins\HxVolumetricLighting\Resources\Shaders\HxVolumetricPointLight.shader
Assets\Plugins\HxVolumetricLighting\Resources\Shaders\HxVolumetricProjector.shader

find local variables:

Code (CSharp):

1. vr vrout;

and initialize them:

Code (CSharp):

1. vr vrout;
2. Init(vrout);

Behaviour of uninitialized shader variables can vary on different platforms.

 

Oh my; you are an absolute life saver! This totally fixed it.
How did you know the initialization of the vrout color fields was the issue? Is it a PSSL specific thing that data tends to persist between frames or is it something else?

 

I started with the Razor GPU for PS4 and noticed that random garbage was accumulating in the render targets.
I got to the vrout variable and noticed that this variable is declared but not initialized. And then - magic happened.

About 12 years ago, I debugged a pixel shader that worked well on the GeForce GPU but produced random values on the Radeon GPU. The problem was that the temporary shader registers were initialized to 0 on GeForce but had undefined values on Radeon.

I have no idea if this is a hardware feature or a problem with the shader compiler, but I think the compiler should return an error when the shader uses an uninitialized variable.

 

Has anyone tried the asset with 2020.3 LTS? I can't get it to work...

It seems to generate empty shaders, like HxVolumeSpotLight.shader, if you click on view generated shader has empty passes.