UNITY 3 beta preview

How long does it take to bake a small scene like your box there?

Can Beast be used at runtime to make the light maps?

For the dynamic AO in 3.0 is it the same as 2.6?

 

As requested, I attempt to show off what image effects are in Unity 3 Beta 2, and what variables can be adjusted for them.

http://www.burgzergarcade.com/blogs/petey/images-effects-and-going-blind

 

Ok I'm a jerk but...



Well, it seems like we really need to start official Beast thread from now!

 

@Richardo:

That`s why Ambient Occlusion is turned on I presume A tad too noticeable, I agree, but you can turn these off ofcourse. I`ll talk to the guys working on beast at work tomorrow and see if there`s a way to get the light emitters to "override" the AO when situations like these occur.

 

@brokenpoly

Is it SSAO or baked Beast's AO then? Looks like baked one...

 

It`s baked beast AO with a little too high intensity.

 

Cool stuff, but needs to be improved as you already mentioned :wink:

Actually I never tried baked AO since it looks artificial for my personal taste. I found that radiosity with 15-20 iterations and with certain diffuse interreflection values applied serves the same purpose (deeper scene looks, object-to-object proximity dependence, etc) plus fills the scene with beautiful ambient lighting :wink:

For example:

 

You should really post these some place else. I spend more time watching the rebuffering icon than the video

Great work on the videos!

 

Yah. I use to really like Blip.tv, but the last little while, they have not been that great. YouTube limits me to 10 minutes (i hate breaking things up), so maybe time to check out vimeo or something.

Anyone have any recommendations?

Actually, it could be that I have switched to 1080p videos. Even on YouTube, they tend to buffer often... Ill try to shrink the next one down and see if makes a difference.

Next one is on MonoDevelopment...

 

BurgZerg - My vote is Youtube so I can watch on my iDevice.

 

Double, but no iDevice, more that my pentium can't stand your flash player.

 

I have them on YouTube as well. You can find them at:

http://www.youtube.com/user/BurgZergArcade

The movies that are over 10 mins are cut short for now, but I will break them in to parts later on.

Time for Gymboree.

 

I don't mean to sound unappreciative because it's been great to see some things in action, but 10 minutes should be plenty to show these things. Just be more concise. Edit.

 

@BurgZergArcade
Thanks for the new image FX video!

Looking forward to the MonoDevelop one. I'm achin to get into Unity3, and until that download link comes my way, I look forward to your Unity3 walkthrough videos

 

Ok. I've been following along this thread.

It was mentioned that unity 3.0 will be upgraded to Physx 2.8.3.

If the highlight is cloth - does that mean we don't get the rest ?

Looks like 2.8.3 is the latest release (30th September 2009) - http://developer.nvidia.com/object/physx_release_notes.html

Apex [Physx for non programmers] is not included? http://developer.nvidia.com/object/apex.html

The videos on the nvidia site look promising but I have a feeling Unity 3.0 won't have "destruction" at all, not to mention Apex.

I've never tried Apex. I might be getting this all wrong.

Could we get clarification as to what exactly is included of the Physx 2.8.3 SDK?

Thanks. Looks great, with or without destruction.


I'd imagine whatever's left out this release may find its way into a 3.x.

Happy days


--edit

Don't know if this would interest anyone or get me on some black list, but here's a short discussion of Apex on the UDK forum from awhile back.
http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=726327

I'll save you from the rest of the threads on the UDK forums, but quite a few deal with Apex and it's possible integration.

 

@Tzan : Rendering out those maps for the cornell box takes around 1 minute on a fairly new Macbook Pro. The more cores, the better I would guess
All beast lighting is baked not generated during runtime. If you somehow can generate lightmaps in a game with some clever use of scripting, I have no idea. Also, the SSAO is the same in 3.0 as in 2.6 AFAIK.

@Ricardo :

I agree that AO is overused in a lot of games and tend to give some scenes a fake look. Until now, I`ve mostly rendered out an AO-pass from 3dsmax and slightly blended it into my textures. This works pretty well and gives more depth to objects IMO, but yeah, one should be careful with using it too much

As with Unity Beäst implementation, it`s still in beta and is improved constantly towards the 3.0 release. It has so many great features and is maybe a little overwhelming in the beginning, especially if you`re like me, who used to bake all my maps in 3dsmax before importing into Unity. Finding the perfect settings requires some tweaking and testing back forth, but when the result turns out good, that tweaking process is well worth it!

Great looking renders btw.! A little bit too noisy for my taste that Escher image, but very nice indeed Are those in-engine or rendered with something like Vray or mental Ray?


Here`s an image that shows you can emit light from an alpha-map btw. Not perfect, as I`m still a beast n00b, but you can see some cool stuff going on:

 

I do not find more cores to be necessarily better with Unity. On my Windows system, I only seem to use 1 of the 12 cores, and on my MacBool Pro... well its an older laptop (2007 model) that only has a COre 2 Duo in it, but the Mac OS just seems to thread better to me *runs and hides*.

 

Unity runs equally on both, Windows and OSX only do stuff differently behind the scene (Windows for example does not move around a thread / process all the time between cores just to use all of them, which saves a lot of L1 - L3 cache misses that otherwise happen).

What I though found out is that Unity hardlocks the process to the first found processor. so even when its fully used, it won't go to another one (thus disallows the OS to transfer).
That can be proofen by just disabling the affinity to processor / core 1 completely in the task manager for the process.

This was found out on Unity 2, will have to check with Unity 3 when I decide to install it on windows too. But I really hope they fixed this insanity

 

The cores comment was about Beäst specifically, not Unity in general.

--Eric

 

Unity itself may not show appreciable gains when running on additional cores, but lightmap rendering sure will.

Man, I can't wait for us to get 3. My last job was in visualization, so I'm intimately familiar with the lighting process and how frustrating it can be to integrate with Unity. Having everything wrapped up inside is going to be a tremendous asset.

 

So if I understand you correctly, If I disable the affinity for core 1, then it will use more then one core?

 

Unity uses multithreading to asynchronously perform some side tasks, so you will only see it occupying a single core.

Beast on the other hand performs offline rendering which maps quite well to a multithreaded architecture. So when baking scenes in Unity with Beast you will very often see 100% usage on all your CPU cores.

This won't always be the case, though - especially on mac and especially with multi-bounce final gather since then the read/write access to irradiance cache (which is a critical section) becomes a bottleneck for the threads and spawning more threads would just cause them to sit around idle and waste CPU cycles.

 

While I like the integration with Mono Development, I still seem to have some problems with it. This is a quick demonstration of Unity 3 Beta 2, and Mono Development. If anyone uses it on a windows base system, I would love to hear about the process. Better? Wrose? Same?

Enjoy.

http://www.burgzergarcade.com/blogs/petey/unity-3-mono-development-woes

 

I hope Unity 3.x does use some sort of multithreading (4+ cores would be nice as I am getting a 6 8)).

 

Hi guys,

I just received my beta download, but when I try to activate it I'm getting a message telling me that I cannot activate with a "free or trial license".

http://www.nocturnalware.biz/temp/unity01.png

I'm using my Unity iPhone (basic) serial number which is the only one I have.

Can I not use the beta unless I have a Pro license or something? I don't remember reading that anywhere?

 

Make sure the license that you are using is one that starts with U3. It should be the one you got when you pre-ordered Unity3.

 

Yep - it's the U3 license - that's all I've ever had.

Just found another forum entry with a similar issue so I've contacted support. Must be an issue with some of the license codes.

 

Just ignore the trolls..... The rest of us appreciate you taking the time to post examples for us.

 

No F***ing way. I'd take my pants off and run around but i'm at the office, and it's not yet "no-pants-friday".

I'm really glad you guys are allowing the open discussion of the pre-release, it's a hell of a good marketing move!

 

Ask directly to the Unity 3 Beta group.
Cheers,

 

Apologies if this has already been answered - does Beast work with Terrain/Trees? Aside from the Tree Generator (which is totally bloody awesome), has anything else been done to Terrain?

 

Reflector.exe is your friend

 

Hello there,

In the beta there are some cool new particle effects, like a waterfall, fountain, splash, snow, dust. sparkle etc.

I spot also a new character controller, with platform movement in it, so i hope there will be some kind of tutorial about it.

 

Yup, you can lightmap your terrains with beast, but at the moment it`s still under heavy development to work as good as possible with Unity`s terrain.

Other than that, the terrain hasn`t undergone any drastic changes AFAIK. Some shader modifications for the new trees/billboards comes to mind, but not much else. I guess focus will be on the terrain for another release

 

I'd like to know how good the new debugging tools are, if anyone with the beta can explain how well it works. Does it support watch/runtime expressions? Are you able to launch from MonoDevelop and set breakpoints there? Does it allow conditional breakpoints etc. Stepping through, in, and so on.

I'm hoping it's as good as debugging a compiled program from within MonoDevelop/Visual Studio and as Unity already allows recompiling of changes to scripts on the fly then it'll have Edit Continue built right in.

Basically I really need robust debugging tools, ideally as good as those in VC

 

@ Ricardo
Check this out.

http://robert.cupisz.eu/

"My master thesis on Real-Time Rendering and Interactive Configuration of Apartments, on which I worked together with Kuba. In short: real-time global illumination via instant radiosity and deferred lighting."

Good article..

 

Thx, KITT!
Seems to be useful blog overall, bookmarked it...

@brokenpoly

Those were images rendered with vray and mentalray accordingly. Also there was an image of Escher rendered by myself using UDK Beast and area lights + skydome... As soon as I find it I'll post it.

And nice area lights you got in your demo pic, btw! :wink:

 

As far as I can tell the Terrain department remains largely untouched. The rendering of the paint brush has been modified but not it's behavior. There is no update to the sculpting tools. And the Terrain drop down remains the same, so you'll still be relying on your 3rd party scripts to get busy with splatmaps etc

I just had a quick look though, if anyone [Lars!] out there has taken an in depth look lets hear it~

 

Can someone of the unity team explain what the new transform tools do.

Can i change the position of the transform now in Unity ? It saves me a lot of work in my 3D package ....

 

I got no response on my lengthy question a few pages back - So here's a shorter version.

PhysX upgrade to 2.8.3 (latest) - Does that mean there's built in destruction/fluid/force fields etc.?
Will unity support Apex?

 

Personally I think the terrain tools are pretty damned solid as is - I was just curious to know if they'd changed anything along the way while implementing lightmaps (shader stuff probably).

 

@ Duke

There's much that's good about Unity's offering in the Terrain department. It's robust and extremely flexible. Being able to create Terrains with any proportions, create multiple Terrains, independent resolutions of heightmap / control texture /detail texture etc is all excellent.

But the sculpting and painting experience leaves a great deal to be desired. As I've said plenty of times on this forum, a simple 'Flatten' brush would take it up a level. As it is, try sculpting a path that slopes down a hill. Seriously, try it. This is the kind of thing a Flatten brush is for.

There are so many relatively simple things that could be done with painting such as assign to slope, lock one texture as you paint another, assign to height, export texture as alpha to use as a detail layer and so on.
I understand that Unity doesn't have the grunt of some engines, but as a result painting on the terrain is not a smooth experience either, it's slow and clunky and painful.

Also it seems the parameters of the tools have been established by someone that doesn't have any experience with Terrain creation. Height brush for example is typically only useful in a range between 1-5 out of 100. And because these states aren't remembered as you switch tools you are having to constantly readjust them.

There are many things, all quite simple, that could be done to make Terrains really productive for the environment artist. I hope that because nothing's been done for the Unity3 update that big things are planned beyond..

Edit: Oh yea.. Normal and Specular maps on the Terrain, imagine that!

 

"And because these states aren't remembered as you switch tools so you are having to constantly readjust them."

Huge production killer, makes one weary having to reset these every time you return.

 

it really is a petty, that the terrain engine seems to remain more or less the same.

- i agree with chad: some more sculpturing tools would be nice.
- also the ability to resize splat- and texturemaps without loosing your efforts.

- implementation of sixtimesnothing terrain, river and road/path tools

- support of day and night cycles:

modifications to support day and night cycles

--------------------------------------------------------
- terrain lighting 
- possibility to choose between lightmap or vertex lighting as fall back for pixel lightened terrain at the given shadow distance.

- grass shader 
- as the lighting of grass should not be calculated using the normal of the grass mesh but the terrain's normal we need the terrain's normal in the grass shader. 
i can think of two ways of passing it: 
1 ) normals of terrain passed to shader as float if possible 
2 ) instead of passing the lightmap pass a "bumpmap" of the terrain and use it as lookup table for the normals within the shader

and some wishes concerning advanced shaders for the terrain engine 

-------------------------------------------------------

- grass shader 
- receiving real time shadows 
- nicer waving when using detail meshes

- detail meshes [abusing the vertexLit shader – of course it would be nice having a third shader to be able to choose from...] 
- nicer waving 
- casting and receiving real time shadows

- trees 
- casting and receiving real time shadows 
- is it really necessary that 40 mesh trees all using the same 2 materials cause 80 draw calls? 
what is about some dynamic mesh combining on runtime?

- terrain 
- bump mapping: simply use the alpha channel of each terrain texture to store some kind of 8-bit compressed (rrrgggbb) bumpmap.
see: http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=276439#276439 
for details


and of course. grass like this: http://www.mazapan.se/games/grass.php

lars

 

IMO, those new additions make me happier than Beast

 

how much will unity 3 cost? I'm going to use the money I make with unity free to buy unity 3

 

https://store.unity3d.com/shop/

:/

 

I don't get it, does it say i have to buy unity 2.6 for $1200 and then upgrade to 3.0 for $500? So the answer is $1700 ?

with pro and non pro, iphone and pc, full and upgrade,and price changing before and after unity 3 comes out, I'm getting a little confused. I already had seen that link, if you know the answer just answer, don't link me up to things i've already seen.

How much will unity 3 cost when it comes out?

 

$1500