Unity 5.0 and Variance Shadow Mapping

Some memory for the textures.

 

Not much on PC's, but being a projector, doesn't it take an extra draw call to mask another object? Or is that just the projector prefab? If this is such the case, then such a soultion probably wouldn't work well on mobile devices.

 

HA HA! OOPS! This absolutely made my day!

I definitely won't make THAT mistake again!

So, in either case, I could technically use one or two on mobile without much overhead. on my Dell Mini 9 however... It has no cubemap support, let alone handling 10k meshes. (Apparently, the GMA 950 chip does T&L on the CPU... WHY?! )

 

@unityteam how about prebaked shadow casting on dynamic objects, is there any plan for that??

 

I did recently drop the $1,500 for Unity Pro because I thought to myself "There are things in Unity I want to see and the best way to do that is support the company"... I didn't want to be begging for features and then not putting my money where my mouth is. I didn't feel good doing that.

That being said, I really do hope we get some better shadow filtering in Unity 5.0. It's kind of embarrassing when someone plays your game and goes "Is this Unity?" and you go "Oh... yes, why do you ask?" and they go "I know those grainy shadows anywhere!"

I'm also experiencing a little bit of... well, penis envy ever since Unreal Engine recently showed off its distance field soft shadows. I'm not trying to referee a whizzing match or anything, it's just that I occasionally like to check the update feed for both engines and see where either engine might be dragging its feet a little. For Unity I feel like the graininess of shadows are one area where it shouldn't have taken so long for an improvement.

Not that I'm not excited by other things we're getting in Unity 5.0; when we get physical rendering at long last I'll once again be proud to flaunt my copy of Unity Pro, and I'm happy that it's making advancements for those of us who create high-end PC games, etc. (and the new UI system in 4.6 is great and will end everyone's dependence on third party assets to have a decent interface.)

I just wanted to lobby for stuff I hope to see.

 

Static shadow map support would be win too, I'd love to really drill down per object and dictate the quality of the shadow it's casting - it might go on the static shadow map or whatever, and we'd probably need to drag out a grid or use some kind of probes.

 

@rea: As far as I know, Sonic Unleashed on Wii uses such shadows. (I know, as it appears they baked a couple of the shadow animations with the wrong pose... )

And pre-baked shadows was something I thought of implementing myself, but atm, I don't have much time to do such things!

 

Brian Su already has done them and the source is on these forums if anyone wishes to mess about.

 

@hippocoder: Oh, I did mean an animated one that syncs with your character's animations... but anyway, I actually modified that to work in unity free.

 

I just released my Unity Implementation of NVIDIA's PCSS "Soft Shadows" open source on GitHub (MIT License for maximum permissions) if anybody is interested: https://github.com/TheMasonX/UnityPCSS
I also made a YouTube video showing it off/explaining everything I could think of: