SESSAO (High-Quality SSAO w/ Color-Bleed)

that's ok - I understand ... thanks anyway

 

I thought color bleeding was based on mat color, nice to see that is a blend of many things.
with


without

 

I´ve got exactly the same problem. I´ve tested on an Imac mid 2011 and a Mac Mini late 2012 both woth the same result.

 

Hello does this work with a two camera setup? one on one layer , and one on another

 

Has anyone tried SESSAO with OVR Camera?

 

yes, Sonic has seems to work just fine

 

Hey guys, not to be a downer debbuie, but at least atm, you should NOT use SSAO with VR for the following two reasons:
- Expense: Unless you're running a 980gtx or a titan, you're not going to hit 90hz using post fx this expensive
- Image Discontinuity: SSAO is screen-space, which means shading will be different for the same point in the world for each camera in a way that is not optically correct. This effect is magnified at contrast points near screen-edge. When I tried out the UE4 demos at Oculus Connect it was immediately apparent that neither SSR nor SSAO were being used, as the left-eye/right-eye discontinuity can be huge.

 

Two questions:

1) Why there's no support for mobile-devices?

2) Are there any benefits compared to SSAO Pro (https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/...edium=social&utm_campaign=new#!/content/22369) ?

 

1) because mobile devices can't handle such complex effects (at reasonable speeds)

2) http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/ssao-pro-vs-sonic-ether-ssao.326212/

 

Thank you

Can XBOX One / PS4 handle it?

 

hmmm ... I'm pretty sure someone already tested it on a PS4 iirc ... or maybe it was Sonic's bloom ... either way - yeah, the new consoles should handle it just fine

 

Sounds good

 

Can color be changed or not AO terrain? I'm working on snow scene, I tried Unity 5 new AO. It looks good on structures, but no good on snow terrain. If I can change color to something with blue tint or not AO terrain that would be ideal.

 

well you can enable colour bleeding which would tint the AO with the colour of whatever happens to be around it ....

 

Damn! I just needed to look at sample shot to see AO can have color. Out of luck with masking out AO on terrain I guess.

Thanks

 

there are screenshots on the store page ... and a live demo ....

 

Wow, thank you so much for sharing this. I have tried 'SSAO Pro' on DK2 and the results were acceptable, but I have not tried SESSAO with DK2 yet. That being said, I prefer SESSAO, at least from what I've seen on the web demo.

On another note, I've noticed a couple reviews on the SESSAO Asset Store page regarding performance hit. SE has pointed out that the frame rate range is important to consider when assessing how much performance is being lost. Can anyone else provide some before / after values for how SESSAO has affected your scene?

 

well there was this post on the first page of this thread

 

Well, it does say, "Believe the hype", but I'm not so sure (?)
I also read the SSAO Pro vs. SESSAO, which was a great post, but there isn't much mention of FPS.

 

Hey guys,
I wanted to post some details shot triptych's from two of my scenes so you can see how this looks in use. Note that I have the color bleed turned waaay the hell up in both of these because well... i adore it. It's like a reactive color burn.

First, shots of the Alloy Loot Demo Scene:


*edit(for the buffer viz, ignore the greyish base tone, forgot to turn off tonemapping)

 

And next, from my gamejam game Rollgue:


Ignore the fact that the glass objects are rendered in the buffer viz shots. Its just a multi-pass shader thing.

 

So I've been working with SESSAO since it was released but unfortunately after finally taking the time to evaluate it, I've come to discover that the color bleed just isn't doing much of anything, as you'll see below.

While the "visualize" seems to indicate it's working, I think the screenshot above it says it all. It isn't "slight", it just isn't there at all.

What I believe is going on is that the maximum value of this effect, whatever that is in code, is calibrated to take U5's innate color bounce of light into effect and thus is much less pronounced to compensate for this and keep it from being "too much".

However you have to keep in mind that U4 doesn't have color bounce of lights. Therefore the effect is so in-perceivable, it might as well not even be there, and if it isn't there, there advantage over other pre-existing SSAO options is gone.

To be blunt, I bought SESSAO simply because it offered color bleed to compensate for the lack of such an effect in U4 Pro. If you really, really, want to cut U4 Pro users out of this, you need to understand that while a vast majority of kids will be using U5, they think a "switch" to U5 from 4 is "easy" simply because they aren't running a large, professional product built on two-years of pre-existing code. The reality is it requires a ton of major surgery and thus, you're choosing to exclude all those people from our potential customerbase rather than simply change (more than likely) one line of code that "bumps up" the bleed effect to a higher, more usable number.

It's your business, your product, and your decision, but as a supporter of your products since SENBDL, and someone with an upcoming Steam release, I'd still like very much to be able to tell people that yes, we used Sonic Ether effects as opposed to having to go with other options which still support U4.

Or, if you're unwilling to support U4 still, is there any chance this effect can be multiplied just by a line of code you could tell me how to modify to fix this one issue?

Thanks in advance.

 

just a heads up - Sonic is currently away at Comicon and will be back on Monday

 

He goes to a lot of conventions doesn't he.

Well i messed with it some more and sadly I've confirmed that the bleed really isn't doing anything at all, at least with regards to bleeding color and not just white light. The "visualize" bool is obviously showing you what should be happening, but it definitely isn't. The only thing the bleed slider does is add more light to those areas.

What I did was go into the shader and boost the maximum value from 1 to 3 to exaggerate the effect. The result is that you can clearly see that the "visualizer" definitely shows more color bleeding to its surroundings, but the only thing that transfers to the actual camera is a boost in all channels, meaning just straight white light, which means brightness.

Looking forward to a fix.

 

no, not really ... last time he went anywhere (afaik) was GDC .... either way - I'm sure he'll reply to your post when he gets back

 

Is there anyway someone can post what the settings are to get the results he got in these two:



and this one:



Despite my attempts the way it looks on my screen while playing the demo is nothing like what it looks like in those images....I want to request if Sonic can put the actual values in the demos while we press the arrow keys and page up etc to see what the values are.

I have been considering buying this plugin and have heard so much good news about it but on my end it looks not so good and I heard him saying anything under 1080 p res had some artifacts....I wonder if that's the reason....

When I load the demo on default settings but with color bleed off this is what it looks like :



Despite tweaking all the setting look very dodgy and theirs a lot of grain too especially when moving. I think a video tutorial would also help.

*You may notice my image has scroll bars indicating it doesn't fit....preserve details doesn't do much also.

*My TV res is 1280 x 800.

 

does this work with two split screen cameras? deferred...

I've tried every other ssao and it just crashes unity 5.

 

It's Wednesday. No response yet.

 

Sorry for the late reply! I'm pretty sure I know what the problem is. Once again, certain graphics cards will let you get away with things that others won't... Can I send you a PM with a test version to assure I've fixed the problem?

The images I posted were taken at a high resolution (slightly above 1080p, I believe), which would explain why your results look different at 800p. In order to cut corners and keep performance to a maximum, AO has to be calculated at a lower resolution. This works well for 1080p and above, but any lower resolutions and there are issues. The "Preserve Details" parameter is meant to help with this. If AO were to be calculated at full resolution, in order for performance to remain the same, the sampling density would have to be drastically lowered which would either lead to very apparent discretization artifacts or noise. I made the choice to keep AO smooth with a sacrifice in spatial resolution. Blended with the scene, a slight drop in spatial resolution is less noticeable--in my opinion--than banding or noise, which is why I made this choice.

 

Absolutely!

 

This asset has made a tremendous positive difference in the way that my game looks. Thank you for creating it. I use Unity3d 5 and have had no issues other than some of the transparency issues because I was using an outdated shader. Easily fixed with the guidance that was given previously in this post.

Thanks for such a great asset!

 

Well I am not happy about this at all, Showing unrealistic results by putting it on resolutions higher than 1080p is false advertising. I knew something was fishy but I turned the other cheek thinking that all the positive reviews would have meant I misunderstood something.

 

Whether or not showing screenshots taken at higher than 1080p is unrealistic is a subjective matter, considering that displays with a resolution higher than 1080p are becoming more and more common and affordable, and GPUs that can power games at those resolutions are becoming so as well. Being completely thorough and stating the resolution at which the screenshots were taken on the Asset Store page would have been beneficial in the transparency between me and potential buyers. I would concede with your statement had I stated that the screenshots were taken at 1080p when in fact they hadn't been. However, not only did I not state that, but I've also provided a live demo for people to see exactly what they're buying and how it behaves at any resolution they wish to see it, and have also provided a solution for those designing games to be run at sub-1080p resolutions. If the live demo has preemptively shown you what you're to expect at sub-1080p and you weren't satisfied with the results and therefore decided not to purchase my asset, I'd think that my advertising has accurately served its purpose.

 

I was really looking forward to the release of 5.1 because of this issue with vegetation shaders in forward not working with the deferred pipeline.

But I must report that the issue is still there in 5.1 (and also obviously still affects the SSAO). To say that I'm disappointed is putting it mildly.

When I saw it still didn't work I followed your advise @xenius with renaming the parameters but even that didn't change a thing.

 

Just to confirm Seith, you are running in deferred?

 

Yes, I'm in Deferred, Linear, DX11.

 

@Seith, gimme a bit to dig out a module SE put together for our testing together. I'd really like to see the Depth, Depth from CameraDepthNormals, Normals from CameraDepthNormals on a shot like the one you posted.

 

Is there any way to exclude layers/objects? For example: blend alpha particle effects. I'd like to find a way of doing this without having to introduce a new camera to render these effects.

BTW, LOVE the package! Really great work.

 

Sorry, I totally missed your screenshots request. I'll do that as soon as possible (using the mighty Frame Debugger)!

 

Here are the screenshots you requested. I'm not too sure what you were looking for so I captured everything that sounded like what you mentioned...

https://www.dropbox.com/s/v7zy2jwkp6el5t6/screenshots_cameraNormals.zip?dl=1

Thank you for looking into that!

 

@sonicether

Hello, I sent you a PM.

 

@sonicether

Hi, any ideas what could be causing this?

this is with the plugin on, linear color space, and all that. This only happens on my computer, and it doesn't matter what project I have open. I have tested the same project on another computer and it looks fine. Adjusting any setting doesn't remove the splotches.
Here's what it looks like with the effect off:

Any ideas? Here is the system I am using:

 

heey there..
you must have heard this a 100x times...but the colorbleed doesn't work on mac, but it does work on Windows on Mac. Also, the mac web player seems to look much worse then the windows-on-mac-webplayer.
Although the effect is performance heavy...not sure if I could use it. (I didn't buy it yet)
Hopefully, this can be fixed.
Regards! T

 

I'm curious to know, if at some point I would be able to use your asset to "bake" out the SSAO maps for some scene composition work?

This would solve any "mobile" issues as I could atlas the maps, make any adjustments to my prefabs (et al) and use the baked data...

This would also allow me to take multiple sets and composite my scenes and really elevate the quality level while drastically reducing my load on performance...

any thoughts about this?

 

I don't think that's even possible since the SSAO is, as name implies, done in screen-space ... so it's not exactly a REAL ambient occlusion

 

true, I suppose I need some other solution then

 

heh... I guess i'm still getting familiar with the new GI system... seems there is already one for this:

http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/GlobalIllumination.html

 

@sonicether Hi, it's been a couple of weeks I haven't heard anything related to fixing the issue with this asset and the vegetation assets (forward shaders rendered in a deferred pipeline). Could you please let me know if there is any progress made in that regard?

@xenius I'm not sure you got the screenshots archive I posted to try and help you pinpoint the problem. Do you need any other information?

 

@Seith From what I can tell, there isn't a clever solution to it. SSAO is fundamentally a depth-reliant effect. Games that make heavy use of both SSAO and Foliage (Crysis series as an example) use deferred-rendered opaque foliage. In Unity, you really have two options to have it look right:
- Straight alpha-cutout foliage
- Forward-drawn (like if you need a transmission shader) but still alpha-test foliage

Anything else is going to have strange visual interactions with any SSAO implementation.

 

Thanks for your reply! Well that's the thing; the shader I use falls in the second category you described: alpha-tested with forward for transmission effect. But it still looks wrong with SSAO. That's what I can't fathom.