[Released] Scrutiny Renderer v1.0

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Scrutiny is a GPU path tracer that leverages the power of Nvidia OptiX to render high quality images of Unity projects. Great to render promotional screenshots of your game or assets.

Asset Store link: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/58145

Requirements

• Windows 64 bits
• Nvidia Graphic card (GTX 400+)
• Graphic driver R346 and up
• Unity 5 (Free or Pro)

Features

• GPU accelerated path tracing
• Support common Unity lights and materials
• 360 degree rendering for VR

Upcoming Features

• Render video sequence
• Lightmapping

Some Screenshots






Upcoming Features

• Render video sequence
• Lightmapping

If you are not sure if your computer meets the minimum hardware requirements, you can write me and I'll send you a demo package to test it out.

For any questions or comments, just post it here!

 

Hi I think there might be an error in your demo. Just imported it into a blank unity project and get the following errors. I have a gtx 680 and the latest drivers. I can open the scrutiny view but see nothing when I press play.

A gpu accelerated light mapper is something unity is crying out for though so if it works and you implement that I would certainly be interested depending on how much faster it ends up being than the built in unity one.

Also I think you should perhaps make a youtube video of it running and showing how to use it. Also you could do with making some screenshots that show it rendering glass and reflections with correct transparency if it can do that. You need to make some screenshots of it showing things you can't render well without a path tracer.

 

Thanks a lot for the feedback! I'll try to reproduce it right away. I tested it on Unity 5.2 only, maybe something changed in a more recent version.

 

The demo package is updated and should work with Unity 5.3.1p1 and newer A feature I was using changed in that version of Unity, so for now at least this will be the minimum required version to use Scrutiny.

 

I would love to see some realistic screenshot before deciding to buy.

 

Looks awesome! Do this asset works with Radeon 7970 or cpu rendering ?
Or Nvidia only?

 

I will definitely post more screenshots in the coming weeks

This renderer works only with Nvidia cards. This is because the core shading is coded in CUDA, wich doesn't run on AMD hardware, or CPU. This is a bit of a limitation, but it enables much, much faster rendering

 

Awesome. I have been waiting for this !!

It seems my Scrutiny does not like my scene.

Spoiler: No Go

Optix Error: Memory allocation failed (Details: Function "_rtContextLaunch2D" caught exception: Encountered a CUDA error: driver().cuMemcpyDtoH(static_cast<char *>(dst) + dstOffset, src + srcOffset, bytes) returned (2): Out of memory, [6750375])
UnityEngine.Debug:LogError(Object)
Scrutiny.Optix:Check(Int32)
Scrutiny.PathTracer:Update()

 

This error means that your video card does not have enough memory to contain the whole scene You would have to strip down your scene, or get a video card that has more VRAM.

 

4GB 980 : (

 

I've got Nvidia GTX970 but I think I've got an issue with the asset. When I open the Scrutiny viewer, I got an empty tab with only a close button. Is there a manual on how to use it ?

 

Forgive if this is obvious but...

What are the primary uses of the project? Other than making very pretty renderings, I'm assuming top is to help generating HDRI for lighting and reflection maps, etc?
What else?

I like the non-photorealistic rendering (cartoony) sample. That might make some fascinating pics!
Thanks, R.

 

This is a great card! The thing is, it is technically impossible to share the meshes and textures between Unity and Scrutiny. They are duplicated, so Scrutiny has less video memory to use because Unity is using it. Also, at the moment OptiX doesn't support compressed textures (nothing indicates that it will in the future) so all textures are uncompressed in VRAM.

One thing you can do, is to reduce the max size of your textures in Unity, this is probably what is taking up the most memory.

 

Right now you can only render screenshots with Scrutiny. This can be great to showcase a game or asset. Also, you can render high quality 360 images for VR, that is easily viewable with the GearVR or Cardboard, and could be used to tell a story with your game assets.

In the future you will be able to render video sequences, and also lightmaps, that will give much higher fidelity than the actual Unity light mapping system.

It's possible that it could be used for other things as well, like you said to bake reflection maps and such could be very interesting, I'll have to keep an eye on this

 

I've purchased your asset today. I wasn't able to have a decent render from my projects so far, but this looks very promising.

The main issue I have is that your renderer requires a different lighting setup than the normal realtime in Unity. That would be great if you could work on having the same results in realtime and render modes, in term of light intensity, direction, skybox, ect.

Also, I would have loved a screenshot button that would work in play mode, that would pause the game, and render the current playmode camera. My games spawns the assets at runtime (camera included), so it is not possible to use the viewer window, which doesn't seems to update with the assets and camera spawns.

Looking forward for the lightmaps baking!

 

Pls someone can make a video demo, or review of this asset ?

 

I would like to see more of this! Will this be as promising as for example Blender cycles? Can it render my cutscenes in Unity to that level? Could you provide more examples?

 

@volfaze thanks for the reply. I'm sure many more applications in future. Also, thanks for the trial version -- I'll look forward to trying that soon (am out atm).

May I second @bakanekofr request -- I also have procedural generation of geometry so pulling that from the running scene would be really handy!

 

Thanks guys for all the feedback!

Right now there is still slight differences between Unity and Scrutiny setup, but the goal definitely is to have an exact match.

A few people have suggested to have a render button to simplify the workflow, so I'm working on this and it will certainly be in the next update. In the meantime if you need to start rendering later, just close or hide the viewer panel. When you are ready to render, just give it focus and it will then transfer the Unity scene to Scrutiny and start to render.

Scrutiny is a nascent renderer so there is of course a lot less features than Cycles, but the goal is to provide the most important ones at first, and add more features depending on what people need most.

 

This renderer looks very promising!

A couple of questions:
- could you post side-by-side comparison of a scene rendered by Unity and by Scrutiny. It would help convey the difference
- about the 360 panorama renderer, could this support stereo 360 panoramas ? (the idea being that for the left eye, the ray starting point needs to be offset by the neck/nose distance first (usually 8 centimeters i think), and then sideways by the half eye distance (usually 3 centimeters)

 

In previous posts I see that you mention a demo package. Where can we download it ?

I'm eager try this renderer out.
Can you also elaborate a bit on the engine itself, the features it supports at the moment ?
- does it support real reflections or is it only reflection cubemaps?
- transparent materials?
- your screenshots show soft shadows. Are these the result of the rendering or are they pre-baked into the textures?

 

I got the stereo rendering working, I still need to work a bit on the integration with Unity, so I'll release it soon

Everything is dynamically rendered by Scrutiny by path tracing, so no pre-baked lightmaps or shadows, no fake cubemap reflections. This pretty much the point of a path tracer to simulate light transport in it's entirety. So the supported features right now would be reflections, transparency with refraction, and caustics.

 

Ok I tried your demo package and this thing really rocks, it's an instant buy! I highly recommend this to anyone interested in HQ rendering with Unity. The product still needs work in some areas but it's really really promising.
Screenshots available really don't do it justice I think.

 

I can't get transparent materials to work. I changed the alpha value of albedo in the standard material, but the object still renders opaque in Scrutiny. What am I missing?

 

Thanks for the nice comments

The only other thing that affect transparency is specular color. So in the Standard material (Specular setup), if you tone down specular color towards black, the model will become transparent.

The shading of transparent objects still needs a bit more work, because right now to have completely transparent object implies to lose specular reflections.

 

Hello, are you accepting beta testers ?

 

I didn't consider it before, but if you're interested just send me an email with a proof of purchase, and I'll send you experimental builds once in a while.

 

The next update has been submitted to Unity! It should be online in a few days. This adds support for video sequence rendering, and updated to OptiX 3.9 for better performances. In the meantime, here is a few screenshots of the Viking Village rendered with Scrutiny, compared to the default Unity rendering.

 

Scrutiny v1.1 is out! This adds support for video rendering!

 

Looking cool man. I've got a few questions about this :

Are the soft transparent objects sorted accurately with raytracing and shadows ?
Can you make self emission materials that actualy effect GI ?
How long does one frame take to render ? Is it relatively faster to offline renderers such as Vray and Mentalray ?

Thanks in advance.

 

Thanks!

Yes, with ray tracing the transparent object are always sorted correctly. I'm working on the emission, it will probably be working this week, and yes it will affect all the GI as if it was a light source.

On my machine (GTX 970) it takes 5 minutes to render a 1920x1080 image of the shaderball scene above until there is no noticeable noise. The rendering time depends mostly on the lighting setup, some hard to sample indirect lit scenes will take a lot more time, and scenes lit directly by analytical lights will take a lot less time than this. For most scenes the Scrutiny renderer, because it's GPU based, will be much faster than a CPU renderder (~10x) on a single workstation.

 

Ah, ok thanks.

I can't wait for you to complete this tool. So I can finally dump my offline renderers

 

This is super cool, how long before you think light mapping will be available? Also, do you have any idea of how it will compare to Beast or Enlighten? As far as render times go, I suppose we should expect the same time per pixel on a light map correct?

 

I'll probably begin to work on light mapping in a few weeks, so right now I am not sure what to expect in terms of performances, I assume it will be a few minutes per lightmap. But the quality of the lightmaps will be much higher.

 

I'm having an issue with Scrutiny. I've installed the latest version and imported it to my project, and the latest non beta Nvidia Driver (GTX 770 / Windows 10 x64). The demo scene works fine, but when I test it on a static scene from my project, as soon as I click to render the image with the default parameters, I get this:



Anyway, I'm really looking forward for the lightmap baking support. Cheers!

 

Before I buy this, do you have an Optix commercial license to sell this, and does it transfer to users or do we need to get a commercial license from Nvidia as well?

 

Thanks for reporting. I don't have this error, I'll try to reproduce it on my side.

 

Yes there is an OptiX commercial license included in the package. This allows you to use Scrutiny to create content for commercial purposes. Scrutiny cannot be used at runtime in a an application, it's editor only right now. I know that they removed the commercial license requirements in OptiX 4, but the performances are not great yet, so we stick to 3.9 for now.

 

Please add lightmapping, I miss Beast so much!

enlighten takes FOREVER.

 

What is teh status of the lightmaping implementation?

And. would it be possible to in runtime update the lighting data each n seconds so that betwen updates the lighting gets updated in the background with minor performance hit?

 

I would say the lightmapping is in alpha stage. It works, but there is some small artifacts sometimes and the UI for using it is a bit awkward. It looks like this:



Scrutiny is not yet usable at runtime, but it's one of the things I would like to add once lightmapping is done.

 

Nice!. Yes may be runtime is not a big priority, just asking.

Screenshot looks nice very nice. May be when it is more advance you could try with
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/34268

This way we could compare against Beast because is the scene I use.


It upgraded my project from 4.7.2 to 5.4 to test new stuff and realiced that lighting is still a piece of junk for large scenes.

Your lightmaps do merge smoothly with realtime shadows too?

 

This are my result in unity 4.7.2

No lightmaps:


Yes lightmaps:

The setup:


closeup:
no lightmaps

yes lightmaps:


//------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please do not forget to add the "bake selected only" option. Because no all the object do necesarily need to be baked.

 

I made a quick test, this is what I get with Scrutiny lightmapping:



The sky is used to light the scene, this is what gives the blueish color.

 

I did a quick color correction to avoid the too bluish coloring.


The ressults are quite promising!.

 

Really interested in this.
Do you have a tentative date on when lightmapping support might make it into Scrutiny?
On the lightmapping tests that were just posted, could you give a breakdown on what NVidia card was being used, and since it's obviously not a native unity feature, is there a way that it could show the baked lighting density (similar to the baked scene view with lightmap resolution enabled?)

 

Instead of the IBL wittch is can be very cool may be consider the option of, like in Beast using the directional light and an ambient color. What is the resolution of your lightmap? In my scene there were several 1k lightmaps.

 

I'm glad you like the results

The lightmapping is still very experimental, but I could release it in a week or two so that people can try it.

Right now the workflow is not optimal because I'm using Unity to generate the lightmap layout, so it requires doing a low quality lightmapping with Enlighten before doing it with Scrutiny. At least this has the advantage that the lightmap layout matches Unity's, so the tools that show the lightmap density can be used for Scrutiny, and lightmaps themselves are interchangeable with Enlighten's.

I used a Nvidia GTX 970 to render the screenshot above. It took approximately 10 minutes to generate 8 maps of 512x512 at 500 samples per pixel with coherence 0.95. Even though it's not significantly faster than Enlighten right now, it gives much higher quality lighting, and it's progressive. So rendering only 50 samples would take 1 minute and give a good preview during development. A feature I really need to implement is a denoiser. It would improve performances by ~10x.

It's possible to do the render with a directional light, I might try it tomorrow.

 

Nice. Atm I'm 2 days away from my first game launch on Steam, so no rush for me but I'll be giving my opinion. I've a gtx1080 I guess this times would reduce. 10min is ok, althought the result still needs polishing etc but is very promising. Ultra low quality/garbage lightmaps with Enlighten are fast so if all Enlighten calculations are trown to the trash and only used as a dummy for your data to jump in that is not bad because this way you can take advantage of lightmap blending with relatime lights etc.