Unity 5.0 and Variance Shadow Mapping

Will we got some improvements in Unity ShadowMapping i.e. VarianceShadowMapping OR
Will Unity give as ability to render shadow maps manually?

VSM pdf's:
http://www.punkuser.net/vsm/
http://www.punkuser.net/savsm/i3d2007_poster.pdf
http://www.punkuser.net/lvsm/lvsm.pdf

Have anyone any info about this or maybe Unity Team can say something.

 

And what about PCSS?

 

Aw.. Very sad to hear. I was just comparing Unreal 4's real-time shadows to Unity's and it's a big difference in quality. I'll be excited when you guys get a chance to work on it though.

 

Doesn't Enlighten bring some shadow improvements? Or will it still use Unity's standard shadows?
Maybe i'm confused with what new things Enlighten brings to the table, besides real-time global illumination and new lightmapping.

 

Since we're talking about shadow techniques there's something I've been meaning to ask, I've been having to deal with shadow performance and stuff lately and mind you I have no clue how this stuff works in the background so forgive my ignorance...
But I've been wondering, if deferred lighting basically allows us to have a large number of lights with really good performance, is there some sort of equivalent for shadows? Deferred shadows so to speak. Or maybe that's already a thing? (again, I have no idea and I'm probably butchering how this stuff works lol). I'm just wondering because it seems like it would be a natural progression of deferred lighting (like if you can have near unlimited lights, makes sense to be able to have near unlimited shadows).

In my game BHB I have scenes where I use a large number of dynamic lights and I get really good performance. But where turning a couple of lights on/off doesn't change performance much, turning a couple of shadows on/off does and I'm wondering if there are any techniques out there that would allow for large numbers of dynamic shadows. Again, pardon my ignorance on the subject but I've been really interested in knowing. I've been able to fake it really well using cookies for a lot of stuff, but there are many cases where dynamic shadows would be more desirable.

 

You have "unlimited" shadows in your shadow range. If you want to increase that range, you basically have to render more and more objects so it gets slower. But the option is existent...

You can always decrease your light power.
If you have a grid of objects with a distance of one unit and one light with a range of one unit, every light has to affect 5 objects at most.
If you increase the light to 2 units, you will get to 12 affected objects.

 

A question for all of you: how would one go about modifying the shadow maps, or even accessing the tex?

 

I'm well aware of all that. And what I'm talking about is mainly performance related, if you reread my post you'll see that I mention that it does get slower and that's my point. I already have workarounds and can get the look I want though, so it's not a matter of me being stuck or complaining or anything.
With deferred lighting, the performance cost is based on how many pixels are being lit, which means you can have many lights for relatively cheap performance-wise.
What I'm asking (and I guess I should have specified that I was asking Aras) is if there's some sort of equivalent for shadows or if such a technique even exists or is possible (not in Unity, but technology in general). Because currently while we get great performance with lights, we don't have similar boosts (to my knowledge) with shadows. What I'm asking is more theoretically than anything else but I wanted to get Aras's thoughts on that since we're talking about shadows

 

For bakes? A folder with the maps gets created alongside the scene during the bake process. Then you can just use/access them as normal textures if you want, including opening them in an image editor and messing with them.

 

@angrypenguin,
I think he mean dynamic shadows = "shadow maps".

@FuzzyQuills,
I've posted a while while back a custom AutoLight.cging that adds 8-tap filtering to Unity shadows (to smooth them a bit more) but I don't have the link right now, make a forum digging search! ^^

 

Ohh...please do it man..
I need to know how to improve shadow filtering

At least you guys aware about this issues, so i hope we got better shadow sooner

 

I have to dig the forums, I posted it a while back (back to 3.x) you probably don't want to use it entirely in v4 (I mean don't add it straight to your project) get only the 8-tap filtering part and add it to the latest AutoLight.cginc (v4).
In the mean time there's an asset store package that will help improve shadows too (dunno the name of it though).

 

thanks for the clarification. I guess i was mostly wrong about what it would bring to Unity.

 

it would be no problem, at least i know how to add custom shadow filtering...

 

If this can be done then it should be a part of the out of the box toolkit and implemented in a class of shaders. If it is a performance hit for some give us a checkbox or similar to toggle it off or on.

 

The asset is here https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/11102 i'm told it's extremely good although i haven't tried it myself

It makes slight alterations to your shaders which it can do automatically or you can do it yourself. I'm told it's much more visually pleasing and better performing than Unity's own soft shadows

 

Awesome that's exactly the sort of thing I'm interested in, thanks for that!

This is me just thinking aloud and brainstorming but if I remember correctly Unity 5 will be using PowerVR's tech for the new lightmapping system...could that potentially be a possible avenue?
I mean like using the hybrid raytracing for just the shadows but rather than limiting it to the editor for lightmaps actually using it in-game in real-time? Or would that still face similar performance scaling as shadowmaps and having many objects? I imagine there'd be a big initial performance hit but could that maybe work as an equivalent to deferred? (I'm thinking a few years ahead when consumer level GPUs are more powerful).

I'm thinking about the stuff from this article here
http://blog.imgtec.com/powervr-developers/implementing-hybrid-ray-tracing-rasterized-game-engine


Thanks for your answer by the way, appreciate it!

 

Forgive my ignorance but what filtering are you using at the moment? PCF?

I hear good things about VSM, is there a reason as why you wouldn't impliment this, besides manpower?

 

Better PCF shadow filtering is good enough i think (so maybe we can choose between rotated filtering or not), and also i've tried some VSM and EVSM demo some of them are kinda heavy in performance

 

Cool news. Hope this will be done in near 5.x release.

 

Somebody in this thread has been working with fat G-Buffers lately. It's funny how the terminology you use reflects the work you've been doing.

 

@lazygunn: That asset is paid for, I was looking for a way to mod it myself.

@tatoforever: I so hope you can find it... pweeease?

 

Hi guys, I figured it out:
Basically, AutoLight.cginc has all the shadow mapping helpers tucked into a neat package. And once you know which part is the one you need to modify, doing the rest is a breeze! One thing suggested: put the AutoLight.cginc into a folder marked "Resources" then use a custom shader in the same folder: your new shadow mapping will come to life!

You may also need to clone the other .cginc's depending on the shader... *

*EDIT: Forget the last line, all you need is the AutoLight placed with the shaders, then it will work wonders...

 

More interested in getting some optimisations in to be honest. Shadows are still expensive regardless of platform... more speed means more other fun things to draw.

 

Yeah what he said. More stuff/choices for usability rather than just throwing a quality filter on things or going to SM3.

 

@hippocoder: Mr Hippo, you have a point. It was definitely annyoing when I would make my shadow filter... only to have SM2.0 spit out complaints about register limits!

 

Old-ish thread, but... I thought the transporter demo :

had pretty kick ass soft shadows (towards the end with the spinny rings). Which led me to believe we would see new shadowing for Unity 5. But I read here it's not the case. Then what is going on in the demo?

 

Uh those shadows are perfectly doable in current unity though, they're moving pretty fast. In any case being able to specify the shadow quality at a fine grain like superpig suggests would be awesome for speed on what is possibly one of the messiest hack fest parts of Unity. I've spent a long time going through it's shadow system and include files, and there's tonnes of speed to be had, just not easily as it could be.

 

In a home project once I implemented VSM. I can't recall it being terribly complicated. And it was a deferred/forward renderer too. But I have no idea what Unity is doing on their backend. It was just a straight forward implementation based on Crytek's paper. Wasn't worried bout light bleeding or whatever it is called.

Unity's current shadows look good too me tho. I'm not an artist by trade so I am not going to stare down and nit too hard though

 

They are? Unless the compression from the youtube video is doing wonders, I can't get shadows from point lights look that soft or that smooth. Or did you mean they are do-able by messing with AutoLight? Then, yeah I guess they are doable.

So are those shadows in the video done with a custom AutoLight?

 

Maybe those shadows were made with good old shadow cookies.

 

I don't believe cookies work on point lights though.

 

They do, I use them too.

http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-Light.html

They probably generated the texture by baking the shadows onto a cube and using this textures for the cookie. I could be wrong though.

 

But the ring rotation were random (it seems), so is it realtime updated point light cookie?

 

No the light would be parented to the same transform as the ring, so they just move together.

 

Ah, i see that make sense....

 

Wait, hang on, does that mean theoretically, us indies could write a tool that bakes point shadows into a POINT LIGHT COOKIE!?

and such shadows could be any resolution we want, so that would work out really nice!

 

Cookies can never be used as proper shadows. Because the 'shadow' would be projected over everything. Meaning, if you had a pillar that casted a shadow over a floor, its own shadow would be projected over itself on the side facing the light.

 

True... but don't you have a layer mask to take care of that?

 

Well it's been done before, it's long time ago when unity were still around 2.xx Someone using the point light cookies for shadow and it works great, tricky but it works.

 

What's the performance implications of light cookies?