Unity Realtime Reflections and GI and realism Exploration

Do you have any screenshots to share?

 

I dont want to derail this thread as its mainly Helios research posted, but in case if i am allowed to i would post this video of Enlighten test(not mine):

 

pretty straightforward enlighten for DarkfieldVR, because of the physics and deferred shading performance boost we're near 75fps for Oculus DK2 .

 

HeliosDoubleSix it would be great if you can post some settings you use for Dynamic GI (also for baked).
Please, i think it will be very usefull for the comunity!
Thanks!

 

Yes I'd love to post some more stuff, I'm working with / for Unity at the moment with every intention to present this amazing technology as well as I can, and hopefully be part of making it easy for you produce the same results without all the head ache I am going thru!

 

Wow congrats. Can't wait to see what you are working on.

 

Some of the more important things about enlighten are do we need reflection probes, light probes etc - and what is the correct workflow - things like that. It's pretty tricky via trial and error to figure out how to reduce leaking and so on as well, so if Unity's reading I think people mostly need hard data.

 

Thanks, I can't wait to show it ;-)

Right, they will have blog posts and tutorials and such, I wouldn't expect that material while they are still changing how it works and it is in beta

The end goal is to get the tech to the point where it just works and requires no genius setup; from reflections to lighting, but in the mean time theres still a lot of work arounds needed for real world projects that will quite frankly make some people incredibly furious with the release version of 5, leaving some waiting for 5.1.. 5.5 who knows till they finish rounding off the features really needed, many will be keeping copies of 4.6 around for client projects. I'd say that was a mistake to release a product that removed a staple feature ( Beast ) replacing it with something sexier ( a lot lot sexier ) but not quite ready, not feature complete, it will sour what is an otherwise tremendous step forward on all fronts, I'm having too many conversations with Clients that go like "Should we buy Unity 5?... well yes and no, you will still need 4 for certain things, like A, B, C... and D and E, and often F" you tell a company they need two licenses of an expensive program that doesn't "look" as good as UE4 which is free for none games license, and you have a hard sell

 

Actually thinking about it,

AutoDesk own Beast, and are setting up to be one of Unity’s competitor with own game engine, so you can imagine the ship jumping has probably been expedited by licensing issues and costs

A bit like how Unity’s ambitious plans to FINALLY get out of the S***ty licensing deal with Mono that has been holding things back on several fronts ( by moving to IL2CPP ) has suddenly been rushed ahead by Apple's enforcement of 64bit in the App Store, forcing them to not only get an incredibly technical feature working well way ahead of schedule but having to also back port it to Unity 4 suddenly, in the middle of over hauling pretty much every major feature of Unity, these things I suspect together have caused quite a bit of stress for Unity!

Still A for effort doesn't help me sell it in the real world, Unity needs to realise the lives at stake here, if it is missing good baked lighting, managers around the world might all utter 'we are looking at UE4 as it is pretty, and cheap, can you just go learn C++ over the weekend' ... think of all the young technical artists you will send jumping off bridges to a watery grave if you fail to deliver!

 

Enlighten is the right way forward but how well it works must be optimised.

In particular once the dust settles and it's stable, I'd love to see some GPU compute taking care of some of the precalculation stage. I can see several ways this potentially might accelerate the editor precalculation stage.

 

I'm pretty certain that is the plan, the pre-calc stage can be removed entirely and done in realtime, then you just turned a semi realtime GI that works on low end, into a entirely realtime GI for high end and cover all bases and make me very very very happy

 

Those guys are working on realtime soft shadows, reflections, the works.. when that is all added, we can then go back to complaining about the animation system, the way it is supposed to be ;-)

 

Yeah - shadows will get some love in 5.1 last I heard, mostly optimising. Just give us fast precalc because it's the bane of existence atm

 

Well on the plus side, we all now have all this time to kill while baking, I have learned to play 12 musical instruments and Kung Fu while working on a 5 minute animation for Unity ;-P

 

That reminds me - if anyone's having abnormally slow prebake times, just clear the gi cache. We went from 2 hours to 1 minute flat in some scenes.

We did have 25 gigs of enlighten cache data though.

 

Why is it the caches almost always make things worse, what a cruel twisted reality we exist in

Also error logs cause more problems than the errors by far

 

I only hope they manage to produce a light leak free solution without requiring geometry optimization and a way to manage the inclusion of geometry that can cast shadow for example but doesn't save any lighting data for it. If they fail on these features I will still need to import custom lightmaps from 3dsmax/vray . I wish they allowed you to import custom lightmap and convert somehow the data to the dynamic lightmap stuff.

 

SSD

 

This is what I'm hoping for as well.

 

Same here, still waiting for GPU calculations and the use of CUDA on windows.

 

New in Unity Beta 21:

• GI: Added final gather feature for lightmap baking (vastly improves baked lightmap quality, even at low precompute resolutions).

Well that should fix the issues people have with Baked lighting, this has no impact on realtime GI it is a baked only feature that should make it possible to get to higher resolutions and quality faster than realtime GI currently can achieve. No time to test it ATM but this should allow the static lighting quality to go thru the roof

 

still waiting the direct link for B21...

 

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/unity-5-0-beta-21-available.293554/

 

Yep got it already, just after i post above

 

Wow. Beta 21. Is there anything besides enlighten changing in these late(hopefully) betas?

 

http://unity3d.com/unity/beta/5.0/release-notes

 

Hello,

Congratulations for your work, Helios. The visual quality is impressive.

Probably as most of the ones who tries Enlighten, I have some issues with my UV's. Mostly with the "irradiance" ones.

How can you do that, please ?

I import my models from Blender. I made a 2nd UV set (in order to use my cleans UV instead of the distorted ones generated by Unity ) for lightmaps/dynamic GI but I dont know how to make Unity use them.

I also want to be able to set the resolution of the "irradiance" (dynamic GI) per object, but I dont know how to do that.

Can somebody help me ?


Basically I m an architect and I try to manage thought the issues but I dont have any "deep technical knowledge", at least in that field.


PS: sorry for my not awesome english

 

Thats very nice! I really love what your doing. Cant wait to get myself a new GPU to try with Unity5.

 

Thanks, you can set 'preserve UV's' on in the lightmap window under the object tab here:

That will do as it says keeping your man made UV's intact instead of calculating it's own leading to possible chaos and running and screaming

Next up you have the Advanced Parameters where you can specify per mesh custom GI settings, where by you can specify the system tag, so setting that number means any other objects with same number will be handled together if possible / put in the same lightmap, the goal being it wants objects near each other to be in the same system, but sometimes having one object have a system all to it's self can help prevent bleed onto other objects, worth mentioning bleed can be caused by various factors so don't think you can just stick every wall and floor in a separate system like a nutter, you might need to tackle other issues like higher resolution, better uv's and breaking your mesh up into segments in some cases and creating single consolidated meshes in others ( e.g. not having one cube stretch for miles in all directions as your floor ) :

 

Thank you for your very helpful answer,

I'm so glad you point at that godly New LightmapParameters window. There I found the parameters I was looking for.

So, full glory to you for that.

I'm using Candela for the reflections, because currently the reflection probes doesn't do the job for my purpose.
But I can't tweak the reflection intensity or the reflection glossiness per object via the alpha from the albedo and specular.
It works in Unity 4 but in Unity 5, modifying these parameters just do nothing.

Can you explain to me how did you make it work and be tweakable per object, please ?
You look like a Candela's veteran.

 

Right Candela have failed to even answer any of my personal emails, and have failed or refused to deliver anything to Unity's own requests for an update on that, so various important aspects are missing in Unity 5

Also, what ever happened to Livenda's realtime GI... *image of tumbleweed blowing past in the wind*

Unity are themselves working on a solution to this with all singing and dancing bells and whistles which I hope to be bending and breaking an early early version of in a couple of weeks, this of course creates a sort of conflict of interest when they eat their young ( NGUI , Marmoset ) so if anyone is even still working at Livenda, either out run Unity or work with them, or else be eaten, adapt and change, after all the meaning of life.. is to end! *evil laugh* ahem

 

Just show us more sexy pixels, valentines day is coming up.

 

I just bought Candela in order to replace the unemployable reflection probes and it finally doesn't work in Unity 5. But in your video with the plastic chair you used Candela, right ? And the reflection intensity/glossiness are not the same on the chair and the floor, right ? Do you pratice the dark arts ?

Your video brings me hope about the Candela reflections and now I have to comfort my wallet about the 125 USD for nothing. Sadness everywhere... T.T

I have to pray the virtual gods for making them whip the Unity's butt so they will make their own wonderfull solution. Quick.

Have you a suggestion to deal with reflection in the current state ?
Regular reflection probes maybe will work on small objects, but for the floors and walls ?
You wrote something about "Box Projection Cubemaps on Probes", does it work for that and how to set it ? Is it the "Box Projection" in the probe's inspector ? When I check it, things get worst. But maybe I have to generate a cubemap somewhere, or maybe I have to sacrifice a goat during the full moon.

 

This sums up my experience with Candella as well. I've send them 2 if I recall and neither got answered. At this point I wouldn't be buying any of their plugins. From what I gather they aren't really big into answering customer/potential customer support. I'll pass. Their Realtime GI looked interesting but I guess it's a lot of talk and no action at this point.

 

Yah, you might want to exercise the 30 days refund policy Unity has, I want Livenda to succeed but they are giving me every reason to doubt them

It might all work out in the end Unity 5 is released and suddenly they release updates to all products and everyone sings and dances

Also I practice dark arts, in that demo I had no control over the strength and roughness really

Worth re-iterating Unity's solution for SSR and such will not be in 5.0, it will be later 5.1 or 5.2 perhaps

Box Projection only works well if your room is a box and has nothing in the middle of the room also

For large floors you need to use something like the planar mirror reflection camera trick which I think is part of the Water shader in samples, and available on Asset Store, but again won't work in 5, doesn't support roughness and you can really only have one of these in view at a time, as it doubles your draw call count as if you had 2 cameras on at the same time, so basically you are screwed for now

If anyone is good at this stuff, post effects and materials please get in touch, will pay with money or food to solve these issues, Unity are seriously under staffed in this dept

 

SSR is the key. Unity seriously need to address this, it will unlock a lot of potential realism in the renderer.

 

They are, SSR is still rubbish when it comes to shiny floors and mirrors, a floating object in the middle of your view will screw it all up, so forget SSR it is old news already ;-) now the Enlighten powered reflections formed from the GI precalc data combined with PowerVR ray traced reflections, that's what I want to see ;-)

Real shame, we are short on real talent for this stuff in the Unity community, to be fair you forget how small some of these operations are, often with just 2 people and no time to get away from doing the actual work to handle my complaints ;-) bad customer service and PR though will seriously shorten your life span, it already cost them my money

 

Of course but it's the best we have, according to UE4. Other techniques can be used for shiny floors and mirrors though. It's a shame Unity is so far behind in this regard.

..yeah and Unity haven't caught up already! Even to the old, more dated ways..

 

My feels, why did you have to remind me again?

 

Unity would probably catch up a lot faster if it was open source like unreal engine...

 

Most of it is probably a business decision on their part.. At least thats my opinion. Everytime a community member makes an asset.. to address what they lack, they get 30% of it and dont have to technically increase the price of their engine.

 

Simple answer, nope and nope, It's a complex problem, Unity is a complex piece of software using many none open sourced parts, even if they could easily open source it ( which they cannot ) the net gain would be small given the make up of the Unity community at the moment, a few places already have source access to Unity and they use that to add stuff only they can use, not to give back to the community

About the only thing open sourcing would help with is more eyes would be all over the source code finding potential problems, but as for adding features I don't think that would happen

The correct approach is to make the very nature of it more extensible, and they have already shown they are following that approach with Unity GUI being open and Command Buffers allowing control at a lower level but not completely uncontrolled

 

Cat is out of the bag, where my life went for a while working for Unity: http://shadowood.uk/UnityPano/

 

WTF I can't press the like button more than once! sterling work, Helios.

 

Haha, thanks

 

Will there be a write up on the challenges and difficulties of doing decent gi setups, since I don't believe this to be straightforward

 

The video looks awesome, but what will you do with it in the future?

Are you going to put it on the asset store as an example project?

 

That is looking really cool Helios. When I finally get to integrating Enlighten into my plugin, would you be interested in teaming up and trying to get some spectacular looks out of it? I really need to get Enlighten and most probably depth of field in first though

 

Awesome stuff! How did you record that movie from Unity ?