Assets [Unity Awards 2018 - BEST ARTISTIC TOOL Winner] Aura - Volumetric Lighting

This looks amazing, very kind to release this for free. I'm curious, does it play nice in VR? (single/double pass)

 

Thanks, I don't think I am gonna stop now (although documentations are not the most enjoyable piece of work to be done)

Thanks. For VR, no data about it. I don't have the hardware so didn't work for it so far.

 

OK then I'll test it as soon as it's released and will let you know.

 

lol yeah!! is there a eta when it will be released?

 

Yes, stay tuned...

 

anxiously waiting for the release! just one question, can it be used on mobile devices? SM3.0 devices to be specific.

 

Nope ComputeShaders only, sorry :/

 

Thank you!

 

Nice work!

 

Thanks!

 

Aura will be released on Monday 12th February 2018
Spread the words!​

 

Will do!

 

Yay!!

 

\o/

 

Can't wait!

 

Very excited for this release

 

my body is ready

 

+10

Counting down the days.

 

How can I miss this thread?! Looks very good!

 

The time is near gentleman. Shall we all join hands and begin our chant?

 

I think its coming really close!!

 

Hey,

it’s maybe a weird question but why are you not selling this asset?

 

Looking forward to it!

 

I'm right beside you

KUMBAYAAAA-KUMBA-KUMBAYAAAAA

 

Woo woo! Today!! XD

 

Download Aura - Volumetric Lighting now on GitHub:
https://github.com/raphael-ernaelsten/Aura​

 

Thank you!!

 

Awesome. Thanks, and happy birthday!

 

Awesome, I'm testing it now. See you in about an hour when the ComputeShader finishes compiling

 

Took about 20 minutes on an i5-6600K to compile the ComputeShader. Works great! I also tried it in VR and it works with multi-pass, but it breaks with single-pass. I did notice some stripe patterns when my head was inside the volumetric light. I can give you some information about what's broken with single-pass if you'd like. Hopefully we can get that working soon.

Thanks so much for making this!

 

Awesome!!

Happy Birthday @raphick!!

 

I also wrote about it on Twitter, but right now Aura is simply unusable if you want to create a realistic global fog with mie/rayleigh scattering due to a lack of cascaded rendering. Like, I wanted to create a scene with a huge terrain that used blueish tint for rayleigh scattering and directional light as a mie direct scattering, also coupled with clouds on the bottom of the scene made with a plane zone and noise. And it didn't work at all, obviously. Incresing distance will drastically reduce quality and upping the resolution to improve quality will also drastically reduce performance.

Once cascaded rendering will arrive, do you think we'll be able to have scenes with 3000-5000 view range to fully use Aura to effectively create such scenarios that won't be too costly to render? This is such a great opportunity as aura already looks extremely good!

 

Thank you! Everything works great, exept I,m using NGSS (next gen soft shadows), and probably for that reason I have this error:

Shader error in 'Hidden/Aura/StorePointLightShadowMap': undeclared identifier 'SampleCubeDistance' at line 80 (on d3d11)

So point light volumetric shadows don't work for me

[ImageEffectAllowedInSceneView] doesn't work either. Is there any way to show effect in the scene view?

 

Actually i'm getting that shader error with stock shadows as well. Unity 2017.3.1

Seems from the reddit thread he knows about it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/co...ic_lighting_for_unity_is_now_free_on/du4uc2z/

 

Hi the problem is only occurring for Point Lights' Shadows on 2017.3.
As stated in the ReadMe and the FAQs, the released was planned for 2017.2.
There will be a fix.

For the distance, this is a known limitation of the technique. Although you use very exaggerated distances!
While waiting for cascades, you could either use impostors or old solutions.

 

Those are not really exaggerated. If you truly want an accurate atmospheric scattering representation, then you'll need to use those distances so that the fog would have a better attenuation and won't make close objects affected by fog (which is unavoidable when using close distances while having a high density to achieve some kind of fog). Also, in some scenarios (when you are high on a mountain, for example) you'll need such big distances to have height fog properly displayed and not cut off. So, yeah, having high distances is quite important for achieving full atmospheric scattering emulation.

 

Anyway there will be cascades

 

Oh, yes, I saw that you replied on twitter. What do you mean by impostors?

 

Simplified techniques or pre baked assets.

 

Ah, imposters. No, I didn't and I fail to see how they will allow me to fix the current problem of not having a global fog capabilities in Aura.

 

Global approach is a thing right

 

Congratulations on your release . Hope some people post pics!

 

Why hope for other people what you can do too?

 

Because Aura wasn't made for me but for the people

I wish to see how they use it, what they achieve with it and more importantly in their own projects

PS: thank you very much for the donation

 

Your asset is awesome!! being used well!

Picture of my main menu game: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8l8y02iosrqmluz/test333.PNG?dl=0

 

I will when I integrate! In the meantime I hope to see the various current uses!

 

Just imported it into my project - looks good so far (other than the point light shadows, that seems a strange thing for Unity to change?).

Performance is honestly a lot better than I was expecting. I know these volumetric things can be massive hogs, and there's a whole field dedicated to ways of getting them to run faster on ever-increasing resolutions, but I needed basically everything turned on and maxed and it's got no trouble, running fine.

 

Testing in game. Works beautifully. Is pretty fast, renders in correct order compared to other solutions, and most importantly, does not break anything for now (exept point lights)

 

Issue not with AURA

Exept: just noticed an issue. i am not sure if this is a deliberate thing or a bug or what: When moving too high or turning away from the light source, the shadows disappear from the volume completely, turning it not a volumetric effect with shadows but just a haze.

For our top down third person game this functionality is a dealbreaker, which is a shame. I hope there is a fix to turn off light shadow culling somehow.

EDIT: see explanation in next post