SE Natural Bloom Dirty Lens

Thanks for looking into the flipping issue. I diddnt look in to it myself, but probably its related to the D3D-Texel-Problem:
http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Components/SL-PlatformDifferences.html

 

Hello,

My camera has a solid black color as background. adding the SENBDL effect; as higher the intensity is brought I can see that the final render is not smooth, in terms of the brightness around brighter object it seems that bloom is not falling off smoothly thus not achieving a perfect gradient image but has noticeable edges, resulting in something similar to a topographic height map.

Any idea what I might be doing wrong in setting up things?

Thanks

 

rosevelt, are you working in linear color space?

 

I am working in linear color space.
Switching to gamma color space I was able to see these artifacts as well though less apparent.

 

@rosevelt I've had this issue as well. What you're seeing actually is the limitation of 8-bit color, or 'color banding'. There's no easy solution, other than using other forms of image processing to lessen the effect (either using color grading to clamp out the outer couple bands of nearly-black, or having a noise post effect after the bloom). In general I tend to run an image effect sequence of SEBloom->ToneMapping->AmplifyColor->Noise(super subtle), and have been able to get pleasing results.

 

Thanks xenius,

What part in the render chain is limiting to 8 bit color?
In SEBloom demo, if I remember correctly I don't see any noticeable color banding at all.
Also Unity Bloom effect is not suffering from this color banding too, I guess it works differently.

 

The entire render chain/engine is limited by it. We use: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Color#True_color_.2824-bit.29 in basically every game engine. You only have 256 luminance levels to work with. The banding you're seeing is the result of colors being represented by this limited amount of steps.

The banding is even there in the demo (turn the lens dirt, essentially noise that masks it, off with the down arrow key).



Its harder to see there, because we have color transition, noise, and a lot more fill from the bloom. Basically truecolor friggin blows for subtle gradients, whether its games, photos, movies, animation, whatever. The solution is always to try to compose an image that masks/hides this problem, by having the transition occur either over a shorter distance, or having other image elements mask this via noise, content etc.

The Unity bloom doesn't tend to cause this problem _as much_ because:
1. By default its blur radius is fairly tight, so it has a much less prominent halo. If you set it to have 4-8 blur steps, the banding becomes evident.
2. It blows goats for quarters, so it usually has visual problems that are louder than its banding

Anywho, hope this was in some way helpful for you.

 

Thanks it been very helpful.
I'll try adding those other image effects to lessen the harshness of the bands.

 

Oh wow, as I'm doing a space game with VR (Oculus Rift) support, that would be sick. Having a dirty effect on cockpit glass would be perfect.

 

What do you guys think?

 

I think you should probably tone down the reflection on the wood crates (better specularity/reflection map) and tweak the shadow bias, change the default UFPS sky shader with a HDR ready one to improve the bloom on the sky, ramp up the sunlight.

 

Does SNBDL have any advantage over Unity one when it comes to fill rate? I'm using bloom effects to make entire screen blurry and soft by setting its threshold very low, not really for emitting lights. But I needed to increase blur iterations to make it look nice and fillrate has been problem lately. I'm wondering if SNBDL can be the solution.

 

Sorry if this is too far off topic, but I was wondering if it's possible to create fictional HDR skyboxes that interact well with this bloom effect. Specifically, I want space skyboxes that have bright suns and possibly semi-bright galaxies and things in ideally. Currently I have LDR skyboxes.

Now for a sun, it looks like instead I can just put a sphere in a scene and put the emitter shader that comes with this on it and get a pretty great "this is super bright" effect without even doing anything else. But for something like a bright galaxy, it'd be cool to have it more image-based.

Are there any tools out there to let you define super bright areas in an HDR skybox manually? My space ship is broken, so I can't take my camera into space to take photos.

 

Has anyone gotten this to work properly on the UFPS weaponcamera? The bloom effect works, but it vertically inverts my camera so that I'm upside down. Am I doing something wrong?

 

Just looking for a status update on the vertical flip issue. Any ETA for when we can expect a fix to this issue?

 

Ah, wasn't aware others had posted about this. Looking forward to a fix!

 

Please Sonic Ether, add mobile support to this marvelous shader effect! The Pc looks great, but on my Windows Phone my entire scene it`s just a pink image

 

This is a real dealbreaker for me, so here's another pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeas fix it.

 

So you have planned to spend here every two or three weeks.

 

I create my own shader with shader forge but how can it work with my custom shader please help ?

 

I'm sorry that I've been away, everyone!

I am only able to replicate the vertical flipping issue when I have two scene cameras, the topmost clear flags set to "depth only" and SENBDL on the top camera, along with using forward rendering. Is there another condition under which this occurs?

This is not the only issue I see with this setup. It seems as though the pow(color, 1.0 / 2.2) for linear-space lighting that happens behind the scenes in Unity is occurring twice, because all colors within the scene become very pale.

Things are finally settling down in my personal life allowing me the time to work on these issues. Please accept my sincere apology for not fixing this sooner.

EDIT: I've come across another problem. For some reason, with this setup, HDR doesn't seem to be working on the second camera. I'm wondering if this is simply a limitation of forward rendering in Unity and if there would be nothing I could do about this... I'll look into it. It seems as though I'm not the only one with this issue. http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/630833/hdr-and-depth-only-clearflags-problem-forward-rend.html

 

This sounds familiar. Check this post for a possible solution:
deferred-renderer-multiple-cameras-posts-ssao-bugged-ufps-onrenderimage

 

I've looked into the link you shared, and this doesn't fix the issues I mentioned. It seems that the render textures are being truncated to LDR... This isn't just with SENBDL, but with anything.

So... pale colors and truncation from HDR to LDR on additional cameras set to "depth only" with forward rendering occurs with any image effects. This is a Unity problem...

 

Glad you picked up on all the colours in the scene getting pale, I was about to ask about that. I have another question though: when I put your shader on an fps camera that has nothing else on it, just your shader, I still get a warning telling me that either the camera does not have HDR enabled (which it does), or there is something else further up the line on the camera preventing it from using HDR; any idea why that is, when yours is the only additional thing on the camera? And yes, I have 'colour space' set to linear in the player settings.
Cheers.

 

Bought , too good an offer to pass by and looks amazing

Now hopefully will have Pro soon and use it

 

very easy to use, looks much better than the unity bloom, but its a little heavier.

Thanks for the great work!

 

WOW!! this looks REALLY good!!

 

Hi. I'm not an expert, but this seems to be an odd behavior in cases when both cameras are set to HDR mode. Do you think it should be filed as bug, or maybe as a suggestion/petition to fix in future unity releases (Unity 5 maybe)?

And I would also like to thank you for this great tool! (Looking forward to vertical flipping issue fix like other ppl here-).

 

Are any of you guys getting the vertical flipping issue without the other issues? If so, please let me know how I can recreate this problem so I can work on solving it.

 

For my project, I have the exact setup you described above. One camera (depth -2) renders 'deep sky' layer and sends results up to main camera (depth -1, clear flags: depth only) which renders the rest of the scene. Eventually if you switch 'clear flags' on main camera to 'skybox' the flipping is gone. (But I thought you know that already.)

 

Don't know if it'll help or complicate matter more, but I was able to reproduce flipping effect on default setup camera, though on a 3d party GUI plugin -- Noesis GUI (http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/noesisgui-xaml-based-user-interface-released.192064/).
When I apply SENB to the only camera in the scene whole GUI becomes flipped. See attached.

 

Bump for VR support ( the dirty lens part, bloom works great)
Thanks!

 

[Unity] AntialiasingAsPost messes up UI
http://www.noesisengine.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=423

 

Related? http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/8092/anti-aliasing-causes-post-processing-effects-to-fl.html

 

I would love to see that as well. I was hoping that the asset had the ability to do that when I purchased it. Regardless, it's still a great asset you made. Good stuff!

 

+1

 

Been watching this one for a while, saw the sale and bought. Looks like it could really come in handy for my project. Thanks a ton!

 

Yeah that fixed UI flipping, thanks for sharing!

 

Will the Scale vs Distance and Emission Gain vs Distance scripts be in future updates for sonic ether bloom?

 

has anybody figured out how to get this to work with shader forge?
I put a value node and cranked it up.. and it makes it glow.. but i need to put custom maps in for the glows.. and if i use value it cranks the blacks up to white.

 

I'm trying to add the SENaturalBloomAndDirtyLens component to my generated camera by script.(camera.AddComponent<SENaturalBloomAndDirtyLens>()) but I'm getting Nullreference exceptions because the shader variable
of the component is not set.
And I don't have any idea where it would be set when you adding the component in the Editor.

can anybody help me?

 

sonicether -

Great asset, it truly does an awesome job.

One thing I was curious about is (and you can excuse this question if it doesn't "make sense" with this form of bloom): is it possible to bloom different sources at different intensities? I think the first three images in this post explains what I mean clearly enough: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/hdr-the-bungie-way-featuring-bloom-flares-and-lighting.213768/.

I think I understand how this shader works -- by analyzing the rgb results of a render pass -- however if we were to setup our scene to specify the bloom intensity in the alpha channel, would it be possible to use this intensity to control the bloom intensity for different objects?

Thank you.

 

Feature request:
Reduce the brightness of the image a bit before applying HDR lights and bloom. This way the lights and bloom should appear even more bright.

 

SE, I noticed that with the latest version, the dirt texture works now in VR. However, the dirt texture is applied to a space helmet. Can it be applied to a vehicle windscreen as well, with an option to choose from?

 

Thanks, getting the look I want for my visualiser project

 

SE, while you are working on that lens dirt shader in world space, can you make it support an animated texture (UV offset) as well? I would love to get an animated rain-on-window effect working.

Edit:
Here is a video of my project

 

It would be good if the attenuation features and other features were in this bloom by default.

 

I just bought Natural Bloom... works perfectly and as advertised...