SEGI (Fully Dynamic Global Illumination)

Sounds good. Does that approach require evenly sized volumes or could areas with higher density be defined?

 

The guy at media molecule tried that and documented their similar works with similar idea, have you seen it?

 

That sounds really great!
So basically at the current state there is basic cascade and temporal sampling?
WIll you update the beta version available on the store with this one so we can start trying to do something with it?

 

I implemented the velocity buffer and cascades in separate development branches, when they're both ready I'll merge them.

But, that does remind me that I would like to have a way for people who have purchased SEGI to be able to test experimental versions. I'll have to look into how to do this within the Asset Store guidelines.

 

I'm down with that!

 

So this means large scene support is right around the corner right?

 

Bravo - I think this is key to keeping people happy during prolonged development periods

 

Hi,
I have a question about Cascades, will they work like in unity shadow cascades or different way? Problem I have in my scene is that distant mountains does not cast shadows because they are far like 500meters... and if I set hight distance there is huge quality drop. So there is no way to have distant shadows even at low quality and it looks very strange, to not have shadows under forrest or behind mountains...

My scene has problems that it is round 1km^2 large and let players to build enviroment with buildings. And unity default lighting does not allow to create darker interiors than exteriors beside that without baking. Segi is still not optimised for big scenes. So I would like to ask if even after cascades will be done, it will be suitable for such large scenes? Will not burn players computers as it will try to calculate shadows everywhere? Or cascades only improve shadow distance, but still some distance limit for shadows remains? And when I can expect your asset might work for my scene?

I would like to buy this asset as soon as I will be sure it will works for me and it will be suitable for me before I release the game

Thanks.

 

This looks like an awesome tool, Unity should hire this guy.

Here is my benchmark of the demo that were in an old thread of this tool, thought it could be informative for the author.

Without integrated graphics card:
4 = 11
3 = 12
2 = 14
1 = 40
No GI = 85

With integrated graphics card:
1 = 14
2 = 5
3 = 4
4 = 4
No GI = 31
Also one out of four times, the program crashed.

System Spects:
CPU 4700MQ (Intel i7)
GPU 4600 (Intel) and 750M (nVidia) with 2 GB RAM

There were artifacts in the demo.

 

Could this be related to the fact that your GPU is a mobile version (750M) which has not that much of a shader units ( just a thought). I have never heard someone to get the editor crashed when using SEGI. I am having 750Ti Desktop card and has never crashed Unity currently... Have you tried with different drivers or with another GPU?

 

I think it is. Last times I tried to make SEGI run on my laptop's editor (740m) it crashed every time (VXGI is really designed for high end hardware, I thought it was because of that at first). However I never experienced any problem on my desktop with a gtx770 aside from Vram leak (but it was quick to fix, it was due to some combination with other Post Process Effects).

 

Using SEGI on my laptop(960m 2gb) and it works fine. Know performance would be better with a desktop 960, 970 but it works on my laptop.

 

I didn't run it via Unity Editor, It is a demo (PC console standalone game). I haven't checked the log file (and I think I deleted the whole folder after the ten minute test) but I believe lots of other factors could play role there (like HDD speed, antivirus scans, blah blah). And it didn't happen with 750M, the crash happened when I was playing it with the Intel graphics card.

So your 740M crashed, I have 750M for my laptop. Hmm I think author of the asset could think about that. However when I was talking about the crashes, I was using the Intel graphics card of my laptop and not the more powerful one. When I was using the 750M, no crashes happened. So it highly is possible that those nVidia 700 series cards and those crashes are complete irrelevant.

 

It's possible, but my card being really low end on the laptop, it might still be due to rest of the hardware being insufficient (4go ram and a not so great processor). Do you have an other computer for your work? An incompatibility with other softwares might still be the cause of your crash. By the way are you using an "optimus" laptop? I know the optimus can be a pain compatibility wise with a lot of softwares...

 

I have a Lenovo y510p laptop and it is powerful enough to run games like GTA, NFS and ProjectCARS smoothly (but obviously not with high settings, though), I use it for heavy 3DS Max rendering, web designing and of course Unity3D, I'll test it on a high-end desktop PC and show its benchmark here when possible.

 

@sonicether This changes everthing! Absolutely amazing tool. Love it!

I just have the problem that I am not able to use the Presets. Everytime I change them and hit play it changes back to "Bright".

Moreover I am using the VRPanorama Script which you can find in the Asset Store. So is it possible to make your GI Solution work with multiple Cameras (around 12)? I know it is quite early to ask

Thanks so much!

 

When you apply the settings for a preset, the param's are updating, but the drop-down menu defaults to Bright.

 

@SteveB Thank you. So I had the right settings all the time

@sonicether I just noticed with one Project that when using the VR Panorama tool, there is GI in the saved JPG but no shadows. Just for the case you want to optimize your tool for that kind of use in the future.

 

Rock on man

 

going Steam Greenlight is pretty stressful...
Anyway the game is featuring SEGI (on/off toggle: off - ambient light). Several initial scenes are without SEGI (grass is dark with it)

 

My favorite game style - reminds me of Painkiller - but better ... Looks and feels awesome - congrats... will do great!

 

@Vagabond_ Thank you for the kind words!

 

Really nice work @Trung23 !

 

Alright, so I've done some research and it seems that I'll probably be able to include a folder of .unitypackages that act as "patches" for experimental versions. So, I'll have a folder--called something like "Experimental Versions"--that will contain .unitypackages that, upon importing, will patch your installation of SEGI to that experimental version. This shouldn't bloat the asset too much since it'll just contain the scripts that need overwriting. Of course, it'll be up to the Asset Store team to decide whether they'll allow that or not.

I think this is probably the best way to go about providing SEGI owners access to experimental versions while requiring the least amount of work on the user's part and on my part.

So, we'll probably find out relatively soon. I plan on submitting an update that will include improved temporal sampling via Unity's motion vectors (this functionality isn't perfect yet, but it's certainly a step forward in every way) and includes an experimental version for those who want to test the current rough version with voxel cascades.

And, I suppose I don't need to ask whether it's important to retain sub-5.4 compatibility. So, it'll take some extra work to make sure that the new temporal sampling behavior is inactive for versions before 5.4 (before they added motion vectors).

 

@sonicether Would you please check why is not SEGI working in 5.5. I know is still in beta but 5.5 is a big step forward and i am currently using it. Thank you!

 

Just wondering is there anyway to bake SEGI lighting to uv2 textures? Would be really nice to bake super fast light maps.

 

It's blazing fast because it is not baking anything also, because its a post-process effect, it only works with what is currently being rendered. For baked lighting I'd go with Enlighten, you will likely get much higher quality lighting that way.. Just my two cents, of course.

 

Just wanted to announce my VR app that uses this fantastic asset. It's called "Massit" and it is a simple modeling and rendering tool for designers to create massing studies and diagrams. My background is in ArchViz, so if you own a Vive, it would be great if you could download the alpha and give me some feedback - and spread the word if you care.

Most of all, thank you to sonicether for all your hard work - you made this possible.

Get the free app here.
Join the community here.

 

Unity has in Beta fast high quality new lightmapper. SEGI will have useless for baking lightmaps once it comes out.
https://blogs.unity3d.com/2016/09/28/in-development-progressive-lightmapper/

 

From my understanding, that tech will be Editor only. SEGI has always been focused on runtime. Runtime baking would be very useful from SEGI whilst Unity's progressive lightmapper wouldn't even fit that use case.

 

The progressive Lightmapper comes in 5.5 or 5.6 and will be amazing for baking light maps. It uses Inte's Embree under the hood which is extremely fast, and have some plans to move as many things as they could to the GPU to make it even faster... So once it get's completed, it should be much better than using Enlighten for baked light maps...

In my opinion Sonic should put his effort on making SEGI production ready for realtime aps as this is the initial point of the system, instead of spending resources on adding lightmap support... But that's his decision though.

 

What you said about progressive Lightmapper seems very good but as far as I know progressive lightmapper will be Editor only.
So there is still the need for a fast real-time lightmapper for procedural content and in-game level editors.

 

I agree on this. If I could build a lightmap for my procedural levels it would be great.

 

You will bake lightmaps, and you'll use Enlighten fast engine computation to have real time GI based on all lightening baked lightmaps. It is lot faster than real time GI and look as good.

For what ? Your level swill be baked in less than one minute each time you need a preview.
Once the level is done you bake in high quality and you can use Enlighten fast real time GI system , even on mobile.
The only usage i see for SEGI once this fast lightmapper will be out will be real time GI for real time generated levels, for other common usage, Enlighten and progressive lightmaper will stay the best and fastest solution for real time GI.

 

I will be sticking with SEGI but I have to say I am extremely happy to see Unity making its own system separate from Enlighten. Looks like it will be a life saver for some devs.

 

For stuff created in in-game level editors or procedural levels there is no way to prebake. If this could be done runtime it would make a HUGE difference on platforms that can not support SEGI realtime

 

Not an expert but looking just at the images appear to me less realistic shadows and illumination vs SEGI. Will be anyway ok for me since my goal it's not realtime but video creation, as far is really faster than Enlighten. If 5.6 we need to wait at least other 6 months I suppose.

 

My vote goes to realtime baking. That would be awesome!

 

I don't see how a faster preview removes the drawbacks of "pre-baked" GI solutions. It doesn't solve simple problems like doors, for instance. Thus I don't see why SEGI would become obsolete. It's simply the very near future. With the updated consoles (PS4 Pro, Scorpio) there's enough hardware power to use it per default.

 

^This. Yup.

 

I'm having a problem with faded materials. The reflection don't seem to work. What would be the best shader to use for a glass material in VR with SEGI?

 

I don't profess to have any sort of technical expertise to say this is helpful, but I think/hope it may help out with SEGI's future development: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/ScriptableRenderLoop

 

So here is the result:
SLI didn't work well on the demo, only one GPU was 99-100% working. Maybe it doesn't support SLI tech.
No Gi = 540 - 560 fps
1 = 185 - 187 fps , when looking elsewhere it would be 200 fps
2 = 70 fps
3 and 4 = 47 - 49 fps

VGA spec: Dual over clocked 770 GTX (SLI) 2 GB RAM for each.

 

I don't necessarily agree. I am working on my heavy huge sandbox game which is being made via Unity 5.3.6, I can't upgrade it to 5.4 (let alone upgrading it to 5.5 to work with the new light mapping tech). There are even professional people and studios that customized specific version of Unity so they don't want to upgrade it to the newer ones. For those people, SEGI is a huge advancement since the progressive lightmapper is not available to them.

 

I agree, there is very diverse cases of utilisation and specific needs for SEGI.

 

Any word yet on some kind of trial version so we could test around inside the editor?

 

Can't we just wait instead of begging for additions all the time? Let's get SEGI up to a solid product first. Improved temporal sampling and voxel cascades are a step in the right direction. Make the performance better and then we can talk about those sexy forward shaders... There's still a lot of work to be done.

 

I've read through the forum and i couldn't really figure it out. the indirect lighting is amazing. But does plugin/lighting replacement replace the shadows too? I mean, are the shadows higher resolution or is it the same shadowmapped directional shadows full of acne and artifacts?

 

The progressive lightmapper cant bake on a client, so it's just a fancy and faster (gpu) baker.

 

Thanks for the uploaded build. I tested and it works as advertised. The performance boost is real. I noticed that there is some light flicking around the torches. I take it that it's the particles that contribute to the GI? It's nowhere written under the Knows Issues and Current Limitations, that particles don't contribute to GI. I would love to see more screenshots/videos of somebody doing things with particles. Particles are real-time, to this is where SEGI could show something off. Yeah, the torch's particle light looks a bit noisy. I guess this is also where the voxel count would matter a lot.

He called people stupid!