[DEPRECATED] PIDI Planar Reflections 3 - Real-time reflections with LWRP+UniversalRP+Mobile support!

PIDI Planar Reflections 3.x is now deprecated. Please visit the thread for PIDI Planar Reflections 4.x instead, as it is the latest release and has been developed with newer Unity versions in mind : https://forum.unity.com/threads/new...e-reflections-for-urp-hdrp-legacy-rp.1157174/

ORIGINAL POST

Version 3.8 changelog here

We are proud to introduce our latest tool, PIDI - Planar Reflections 3 :

PIDI - Planar Reflections allows you to easily add real-time planar reflections to your scenes. Planar reflections are commonly used in mirrors, water, floors and other reflective "flat" surfaces.

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Our unique workflow that mixes Reflection Renderers, that calculate and render the reflection of a scene with full control over most of their parameters, and Reflection Casters that project said reflection over a material on a per-instance basis allows you to create impressive scenes in no time while keeping all the resources and performance of your game under control.

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PIDI Planar Reflections is more than a simple reflections tool, however. It was designed by and for game developers and because of that it is full of useful settings to control every aspect of the reflection, from its use of shadows and layer-culling to matrix projections, rendering paths and resolution downscaling.

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Additional features can be unlocked thanks to the separate depth pass that the reflections system generates, and in future updates custom pass shaders can be added (in the Standard / Built-in pipeline) to create custom effects.

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PIDI Planar Reflections 3 is also fully compatible with the Post Process Stack versions 2 and 3 (version 3 is available only for Universal RP) to let you reflect independent Post FX volumes and add per-reflection settings to your scene.

On top of this, the performance of PIDI Planar Reflections is the best of any reflections asset and many of the included shaders are mobile ready, including some of our ready to use water shaders.

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For users of Unity 2019+, additional packages that add support for Lightweight RP and Universal RP in different versions are also provided in ShaderGraph format as well as useful subgraphs that will let you create your own shaders in no time. For differences and limitations on LWRP and URP please read this

The asset is fully documented, both offline (PDF) and online and comes in three different editions :

• Lite Edition, with some limited features and a smaller shaders collection but with a very affordable price and a Per-Seat license
• Standard Edition, with all features included and a Per-Seat license
• Team Edition, with all the power and features of the Standard Edition but without any Per-Seat restrictions.

You can see the full list of differences between editions right here

PIDI Planar Reflections 3 is now available on the Asset Store for a 15 USD price for the Lite Edition and 35 USD for the Standard Edition.

We hope this new version will be a great help to all of your projects and can't wait to see the amazing things you can do with it


IMPORTANT NOTICES : This asset is not compatible with any XR features (AR/ VR) nor are there plans to support them.

This initial release comes with less shaders than version 2 since many of those shaders were combined and some of them will be re-done to have better performance / features. We plan to release new shaders monthly so you can expect your collection of reflective shaders to grow considerably within the next few months

Users of version 2 who bought this asset after August 1st will receive a free upgrade to version 3, Standard Edition.

All other users of version 2 will receive a ~45% discount and users of version 1 a 15% discount.

We hope this helps, and that you have a great day!

 

Fantastic news! Congrats.

I bought the version 2 asset two weeks ago - how can I go about getting the free upgrade?

 

Thanks!


Simply going to the store page for version 3 should show you the discounted price (in this case, free). I hope this helps and please let us know if you have any issues

Have a great day!

 

Now that PIDI Planar Reflections 3 is released and, thanks to that, our approval time for updates is much shorter, we are preparing the first update for the asset to come out before the end of October. It will be our first Shader Pack to extend the capabilities of the tool.

Here is the (tentative, may change a bit before releasing the update) list of changes we are working on :

• Depth Fade shaders in Metallic and Specular variants (Standard Pipeline)
• Additional Static + Real-time reflection shaders (Standard Pipeline, currently in research for LWRP / URP)
• Advanced Mirror shader with fogging + blur (Standard Pipeline, currently in research for LWRP / URP)
• Improvements to the occlusion values on all PBR shaders

At the moment, the Asset Store's uploads back end (which is used to send new updates) seems to be down again so we ask you patience in case the update is slightly delayed. The asset store has been facing some delays during the last month and a half and these are outside of our control, but we are in touch with them to try to find solutions and release all updates in time.

We hope this will be helpful for your projects and wish you all a great day

 

Thanks - everything is working fine so far, except that using the PBR Metallic shader, I can't get it to blur the reflections at all if I'm using a gloss map texture - it works ok if I change it to use a single value. Is there an easy fix for that?

 

Hi there,

We ask you to please send your support request to our support email or through a PM accompanied by your invoice number as this will allow us to follow it up more easily and give you a more complete answer to your request.

Leaving this aside, there will be some changes and improvements to the pbr shaders coming next week as we posted above (which could not be done while the asset was under review and that due to current technical issues on the asset store are being delayed) and that may help with this as well.

In any case, we invite you again to make your support request through our support channels as that will make the process easier and more efficient

Thanks for commenting!

 

Hi there,

First of all, thank you for your purchase

Reflection Renderers cannot be scaled in any way since they are not intended to be visible in a scene. For that purpose you must add a Reflection Caster component to any mesh, which will display the reflection that the Renderer is drawing.

The mesh with the Caster can have any scale whatsoever, regardless of the original scale of the Renderer. For more information, please read the documentation in the "Adding Reflections to a Scene" section or open the included demo scenes. In them, you can see that the object that shows the reflection in the game is the mesh with the Reflection Caster attached, while the Reflection Renderer just calculates it and stores it.

Always remember that to use PIDI Planar Reflections you always need at the very least 2 objects : the Renderer, which will be invisible in the game and cannot be scaled and the Caster, which will take the reflection produced by the renderer and assign it to any given material.

If you have further questions, please contact us through our support email with more information about the issue and your invoice number and we will be glad to provide you further assistance

Have a great day!

 

Thanks! That makes more sense now!

 

Hi,

I ran into a similar issue than what I'm about to describe when implemented a simple planar reflection solution when decided to move to URP with my current project and therefore not beneficiating anymore from your great plugin feature, but I'd like to see if you have the same behavior as I do.

Basically, when using either your plugin or my implementation of planar reflection using URP (or LWRP btw), if I have any uGUI rendered in World space, I can only see the reflection happening in the Editor and only if the Scene View is actually active.
You can try by yourself: just open an URP sample, add planar reflection as you would normally do as well as a simple Text or Image UI item rendered inside a Canvas (set to World using the only supported Camera).

Now, if you either build a player and run it, or maximize the Game window, or hide the Scene View behind another Tabbed Window, or just closing the Scene View, you'll notice that the UI doesn't get reflected.

I believe it is related to when the UI is actually rendered (in URP implementation) but I wondered if you would see a way to override it and get the expected result?

Thanks
Best regards

 

Hi there,

Unfortunately, we cannot reproduce the issue on our end since just performing the required test (Canvas in World Space, URP in Unity 2019.3, Scene view disabled) we still see the UI elements being rendered as expected :

Scene view :



Game View :




Game View maximized :



And a build :



In short, everything seems to indicate that our reflections system in its current version works without issues with UI Canvas in World Space within URP and Unity 2019.3. We suggest you to update to the latest release as it may help you achieve the effects you want but if you have further issues please contact us directly to our support email and we will do our best to provide further assistance

Thank you for your support to our products, we hope this will help you!

 

A new update is coming very soon with a couple improvements to LWRP :

• Improved Metallic and Specular shaders for LWRP and URP
• Improved performance in LWRP and URP
• Fixed a bug when reflecting reflective surfaces

This update should be available within this week or (if there are any delays on the Asset store side) next Monday

 

Changelog for version 3.05 (Standard Edition) :

Fixes :

• Fixed "red foam" bug in one of the water shaders
  
• Fixed the way gloss affects blur

Improvements :

• Improved the depth pass shader
  
• Exposed the depth shader slot on the UI to allow for custom pass shaders to be used
  
• Improved the way occlusion is handled in PBR shaders
  
• Box based projection added to the static + real-time mix shaders

New :

• First pack of new shaders, including Depth Fade shaders and a first port of several Legacy shaders into the new version.

 

Hi there,

We had a slight delay with the new update to version 3.1 but it will be released in the next few days. It comes with the following improvements :

• Improved Metallic and Specular shaders in LWRP / Universal RP
• Improved performance in LWRP and URP
• Fixed some issues when reflecting reflective surfaces in LWRP / URP

As a small peek at the roadmap for December and Q1 2020, we are working hard on the following features and improvements :

• HDRP version of the shaders to let the asset work on HDRP workflows (~Q1 2020 )
• Improved LWRP / URP shaders and water shaders ( December 2019 )
• Additional Cutout shaders, Unlit shaders and additional ports of the Legacy Shaders ( December 2019 )
• Improved workflow for blurry reflections ( Q1 2020 )

We hope this helps !

 

Any chance of getting some Amplify Shader Editor support or any ideas on how to go about doing it ourselves?

 

Version 3.08 (previously 3.1) has been released with the following change log :

Fixes :
- Fixed a small bug which prevented the reflections from being disabled on other reflective surfaces within SRP renderers and Unity 2019.3

Improvements :
- Improved Metallic and Specular Workflows on LWRP and Universal RP with support for Metallic / Specular maps
- Improved support for Unity 2019.3 (BETA)
- Re-labelled the packages for Unity 2019.3 and Universal RP as "PREVIEW" instead of "Unsupported" to avoid confusion.
- Internal work to prepare for the December update and its new batch of shaders is ready now.

 

Hi there,

A small unitypackage containing Amplify Shader Editor samples will be released at some point next week as part of the December update (along with the second half of the "legacy" shaders) which should be a great starting point for all users working with ASE

However, if you need to start already with your own shaders a good starting point is the "Create Custom Shaders" section of our documentation. In short, you should be able to add reflections to your shader by having a "_ReflectionTex" property of type sampler2D and project it over screen UVs whose x coordinate has been flipped :

screenUV.x = 1-screenUV.x;​

The package to be uploaded next week will contain some Amplify specific sub-graphs and functions to help you with this as well as several easy to extend shaders that will cover the basic workflow. It will be included in all three editions of the tool : Lite, Standard and Team.

We hope this helps!

EDIT : We will not, however, release Amplify Shader Editor samples for SRP. The default shader editor for SRP will continue to be ShaderGraph

 

The December update is coming next week with the following changes :

• New shader pack with more legacy shaders ported to the new version of the tool (Standard Edition)
• New pack of static reflection+real-time reflection shaders with support for box projections (Beta)
• New sample package for Amplify Shader Editor users with several functions to make it easier to create your own shaders compatible with the system (Lite, Standard and Team, no SRP compatibility)

 

A small peek to the Amplify Shader Editor sample to be included in the December Update :



With a very easy to use function node that unwraps and outputs the reflections as "ready to use" as possible, and a great starting point to implement your own custom modifications to the way the reflection is unwrapped, in case you want to copy effects such as the broken reflections included with the asset

 

Does it support orthographic camera？

 

Hi there!

Yes, it does

 

Version 3.1 has been sent for approval. While we will soon go out for the holidays and this might delay slightly the release of v 3.2, we are preparing some important additions including the first "Experimental" batch of shaders to support HDRP at some point in February

For now, version 3.1 will be available next week with the following changes :

• New shader pack with more legacy shaders ported to the new version of the tool (Standard Edition)
• New static reflection+real-time reflection shader with support for box projections (Beta)
• New sample package for Amplify Shader Editor users with several functions to make it easier to create your own shaders compatible with the system (Lite, Standard and Team, no SRP compatibility)

 

Version 3.1 is now available with the following changes :

• New shader pack with more legacy shaders ported to the new version of the tool (Standard & Team Edition)
• New static reflection+real-time reflection shader with support for box projections (Beta, Standard & Team Editions)
• New sample package for Amplify Shader Editor users with several functions to make it easier to create your own shaders compatible with the system (Lite, Standard and Team, no SRP compatibility)

 

We want to take a moment to inform all of you that our team will be on holiday (and thus unable to reply to support requests) from December 12 until January 13. While we may still be active from time to time on the forums and we will not leave in full until December 20, we will not be able to solve requests as we will be mostly away from our main office.

As soon as we are back we expect to reply to all support requests within the first few days. Thanks for your understanding.

 

Hello!! I love the this asset but I'm running into two problems:
1- If I set the camera to Accurate Clipping I get this error:
*See Attachment*

2- Everything works well if I set it to Approximation but once I enter play mode I get this bug and it does not works:

 

Hi there,

Thank you for contacting us. While we won't be back at work until next Monday (right now we do not have access to all our devices as to give a full follow up to this support request) we may still be able to help you with some of it, but we will first need to ask you to please contact us through our support email with the following :

- Invoice number
- Camera location when the error appears as well as all camera settings (the main camera of your game)
- Unity version you are using
- SRP used (if any) and its version
- Rendering device used ( Direct3D, OpenGL, Vulkan, etc)
- Target Platform
- Version of our asset that you are using

We will look into the Approximation bug as soon as we can, if possible before heading back to our office, but in the meantime please contact us back with the information requested above to start the support process and get you into the support queue

We hope that this helps and we will do our best to solve this issue as fast as possible. Have a great day and a great start for this 2020!

 

This small post is to remind you that we will be back at work on January 13 (next Monday) and after this we will resume work on the updates for this tool

The first update of 2020 to version 3.15, which should be available on late January, will include some initial fixes for the Assertion errors experienced by some users as well as other internal fixes. The new shaders pack will be available in mid February

Have a great day!

 

Version 3.2 will be available in mid-late February with the first release of our HDRP variants for this asset, bringing HDRP compatibility for Unity 2019.3+

We hope that this will be a great addition, that will be available for free to existing users of the Standard and Team Editions. Have a great day!

 

Please can you send me your support email?

 

Our support email is support at irreverent-software.com

You can also find it on the documentation of the asset. We hope this helps!

 

Hi

Does your asset gives Recursive Reflections like Magic Mirror Lite do ?

 

Hi there,

No, our asset doesn't support recursive reflections. You can reflect other reflective surfaces but their reflections are ignored.

On the plus side, our asset supports any number of reflections in an extremely efficient way, being limited only by the amount of draw calls of your scene. Our asset is also compatible with LWRP, URP and soon HDRP and has been used successfully in all platforms, including some consoles and mobile

We hope this helps!

 

Is it tough to implement such a feature into your asset ?! (even if i hand it to a programmer to do it ) ?
im asking because the Magic Mirror Lite is a free and small asset, i thought that it must not be that complicated feature...
your asset has everything except this thing which i need for my Arch visualization project , and i see what you mean by being mobile friendly, but someone like me who just aims high end PCs to run their project on would care abut aesthetics more

thank you for your responds.

 

Hi there,

We are not aware of Magic Mirror's current implementation of this technique but from what we can remember (might have changed) it required the mirrors to NOT be physically accurate in order to work and severely limited the amount of mirrors to be used, among other complications it introduced with newer rendering pipelines.

Our asset has always aimed to offer paired features across all rendering pipelines and platforms as well as accurate real-time reflections, which is what most users need for their projects (especially ArchViz ones), which are unfortunately incompatible in most cases with real recursion as it would incur in an excessive performance cost (even on Desktop), at least with our current accurate implementation.

Since we could not develop both sets of features without severely compromising either one and were forced to choose between high quality visuals and accuracy or the recursion effect, we decided to focus on the set of features that most people use and due to this there are, unfortunately, no current plans to incorporate recursion capabilities to our asset in the near future.

This may change in the future but at the moment our focus is, again, to achieve feature parity between platforms and rendering pipelines, with our upcoming HDRP port being a top priority.

Our decision was not taken based on the limitations of mobile platforms but actually from our desire to achieve accurate, efficient and physically correct reflections on all platforms and all pipelines.

Thanks for asking, we hope this answer gives more insight !

 

Planar Reflections version 3.15 is ready to send for approval. It will be available early next week. It includes the following fixes :

- Solved import errors on Unity 2019.3 Beta when the Universal RP packages are not present}
- New unified auto-detect SRP script to manage the different features for LWRP, URP and HDRP (coming soon)
- Initial fix for the "assertion" camera errors.

We hope this will be a great help to all of you !

 

We have been asked this question frequently in our support email, so we are updating our documentation soon with the relevant information. However, for anyone wondering :

• The Lite and Standard versions of our assets have a Seat license model. That means that for every developer that actively uses the asset, one copy is required.
• Active use means to actively interact with the tool's UI, code or features as a part of your workflow. For example, testing characters in a level that uses our reflections does not mean active use. Having our reflections asset on your PC as part of a shared repo does not mean active use. Writing code that uses the reflections API or actively setting up said reflections in your levels or writing new shaders for our tool DOES constitute active use.
  
• The Team licenses allow the use by larger entities. Right now, a Team license allows you to share our tool with any number of employees within your company or any number of teammates, local or remote.
  
• Soon, it is expected that as soon as next week, after some updates to Unity's licensing model, the Team license will be available on Single Entity (small business and teams / individual, as long as every user in the same location and working under the same entity name) and Multi-Entity variants (large companies or teams that work remotely, work through contractors or with sister and child companies)

If you have any further questions about any of this please don't hesitate and contact us either to support at irreverent-software.com, send us a direct message here in the Unity forums

Have a great weekend!

 

Version 3.15 has now been approved :

Maintenance Patch. Fixes :
- First fix for the Camera Assertion Error. As an additional Workaround, disable Visibility Optimizations.
- Fix for a bug when using in Unity 2019.3 without Universal RP installed
- New automatic SRP detector to enable and disable features as needed
- Added placeholder support for the upcoming HDRP shaders (ETA ~February 2020)

What to expect for version 3.2 coming in mid-late February :

- First iteration of (Experimental) HDRP support
- New settings to control the background color of your reflections (either solid color, transparent or the scene's Skybox)
- Small improvements to performance

 

Version 3.2 is being finished this week, and will be sent for approval around next weekend

It will include the first iteration of HDRP support, full compatibility with Unity 2019.3, new settings to control the background color of the reflections among other smaller improvements.

We hope this will be great news to all of you !

HDRP Support will be included in the Standard Edition at no additional cost.

 

is your asset Blur/Fade reflection shader compatible with post processing stack 2 and its Temporal Anti-aliasing (TAA) ?
or makes the blur corrupted

 

Hi there,

The integrated blur and fade work on a shader basis so they are applied after any PostFX which would most likely make any PostFX based anti-aliasing look odd or make it unnecessary since the reflection will be blurred thus its edges will be already smoothed. Temporal anti-aliasing is furthermore not recommended for the reflections themselves since it is too performance intensive for a reflection. For this, we recommend to use hardware anti-aliasing (MSAA) on the reflection or in the RenderTexture itself or a more performant anti-aliasing algorithm.

We hope this helps

 

This really looks very promising. Does it also work in WebGL2 ?

 

Hi there,

It works on all platforms and devices that support RenderTextures. We've made a few tests with WebGL2 and it is compatible.



We hope this helps!

 

A small patch has been sent for approval with the following updates :

- GC allocation fix for the standard pipeline, reducing their footprint considerably

Later this month, we will release a first iteration of the HDRP port of PIDI Planar Reflections 3

 

The patch to version 3.18 has been released with the following fixes :

- Greatly reduced GC allocations in all components, systems and platforms for the Standard pipeline
- Added new 2019.3 specific version to our releases for maximum compatibility

 

A new patch has been issued to improve our fix for the "Screen out of view frustrum" and Camera assertion Unity bugs, this time compatible with both the Accurate and Simplified projection techniques. It should be available for download within the next 2-3 days

 

Hi,
Whitch shaders are good for mobile performance? My goal is to use a depth fade reflection shader (maybe with depth blurring combination). What is the suggested mobile optimization setup?

 

Hi there,

Blurring is an expensive shader computation, as is depth fade (since it makes use of a custom depth buffer). However, the performance impact of the shaders themselves is not too high if you are using mid-high end moblle devices. The higher performance cost of our asset is derived from how many things does the reflection need to render. If your scene is already making many drawcalls and barely giving you a good framerate, adding a reflection regardless of the shader may add anywhere between 50-100% of the cost of rendering the scene again to your game.

The best setup to ensure a mobile game can use real-time reflections is to have it working at almost double the target framerate without the reflections so that the gameplay is not affected when adding the reflections or, as an alternative, construct your scene in a way that only a small section has to be reflected at once.

There is a high performance trick you can use for blurring with any of the included shaders, which is to render the reflection to an external texture and make sure this texture has a low resolution. This will produce a good quality blur for most cases and adding anti-aliasing to the texture will remove any pixelation to the result.

There are multiple shaders in the Legacy shader packs (included with the tool) aimed at mobile development and most of the shaders included are Shader Model 2.0 compatible. Again, the shaders themselves should not be a huge issue for a mid-high end phone (which is what you would need anyway for depth fade and blurriness) but rather the scene complexity.

We hope this helps!

 

Patch to version 3.19 is now available for download, correcting the Screen position out of view frustum, camera assertion and other bugs. We hope it helps !

 

Just picked up the asset to give it a test-run and see if it might fit the needs for our reflective/glossy flooring.

Demos run OK but did encounter editor-code errors with them upon entering play mode. Stack traces follow...

Code (CSharp):

1. NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
2. PlanarReflections3.PlanarReflectionsCaster_Editor.OnInspectorGUI () (at Assets/PIDI Game Development Framework/Planar Reflections 3/Source/Editor/PlanarReflectionsCaster_Editor.cs:31)
3. UnityEditor.UIElements.InspectorElement+<CreateIMGUIInspectorFromEditor>c__AnonStorey1.<>m__0 () (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/unity/build/Editor/Mono/Inspector/InspectorElement.cs:501)
4. UnityEngine.GUIUtility:ProcessEvent(Int32, IntPtr) (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/unity/build/Modules/IMGUI/GUIUtility.cs:179)

and

Code (CSharp):

1. NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
2. PlanarReflections3.PlanarReflectionsCaster_Editor.OnInspectorGUI () (at Assets/PIDI Game Development Framework/Planar Reflections 3/Source/Editor/PlanarReflectionsCaster_Editor.cs:31)
3. UnityEditor.UIElements.InspectorElement+<CreateIMGUIInspectorFromEditor>c__AnonStorey1.<>m__0 () (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/unity/build/Editor/Mono/Inspector/InspectorElement.cs:501)
4. UnityEngine.GUIUtility:ProcessEvent(Int32, IntPtr) (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/unity/build/Modules/IMGUI/GUIUtility.cs:179)
5.  

As far as I can see with a quick skim of the code & a few find-reference invokes, the 'pidiSkin2' is never assigned to but maybe I'm missing something obvious. FWIW, I'm running Unity 2019.2.21f1 on macOS (Metal API) -- project uses Forward rendering with the 'built-in' (non-scriptable) rendering pipeline. Aside from the errors initially, the effect does work in the demo.

 

Hi there,

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. While we cannot reproduce this behavior on our end during our tests with Unity 2019.1 and 2019.3, we believe that indeed a misplaced reference is causing the error you see. This may have happened if you moved the location of our asset in an incomplete manner, changed the name of its contents, there was an internal error during the asset's download / import process or due to some bug in Unity's Assets Database.

We would like you to please make sure that the PIDI Editor Skin 2 asset (included with the tool) is properly assigned to the PlanarReflectionsCaster_Editor script in the Unity Inspector as follows :




If this doesn't work, try to re-import the asset and / or import it to a brand new, empty project and test if the error still occurs (to discard any import errors and project specific errors).

If after this you still have the error appear in Play Mode, please contact us to our support email with your invoice number and the details of the issue and we will get back to you to work on a solution to the issue ASAP.

We hope this helps. Have a great day!

 

With many of us having to stay at home at the moment, we know that some are using this time to work on their projects and games.

In order to help your development needs, many of our tools and assets have discounts starting today and until April 2nd!
XFur Mobile - Standard Edition is now available with a 30% off, so you can get it for only 35 USD.
XFur Studio has a 50% off, being available for only 25 USD
PIDI Planar Reflections 3 - Lite Edition has a 30% off, being available now for 10 USD
PIDI 2D Reflections 2 - Lite Edition is available for only 7.50 USD
PIDI Advanced Skin Shader 2 - Lite Edition is available for only 20 USD

We hope this will help you and make a good addition for all your projects
Have a great week!