Unity Realtime Reflections and GI and realism Exploration

Heliossss uaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa I can´t believe my eyes!!

 

Slow replies. I think HeliosDoubleSix burned him self out with too much awesome!

 

Due to the ue 4 being open source this guy is implementing a technique he calls approximated hybrid raytracing, it has completely dynamic GI and reflections. He is also giving it to the community for free:https://forums.unrealengine.com/sho...Dynamic-GI-Reflections-AO-Emissive-plugin-AHR

 

Ok let's not drag this off topic. Enlighten is much faster (can be 60fps on mobile) so it's clear which approach is better overall.

 

oh that's a blog post all to itself, a nightmare of poison dart throwing and rendering at 4k, they are adding better capture into Unity at some point of course, but I had to write my own custom render to texture doodad that steps thru selected animation clips with desired start and end range and then a script to watch and compress the huge images as they are rendered and then encode with ffmpeg to a movie per clip and then a script to have ffmpeg assemble those clips in any order with audio to a final movie

Probably going to be busy doing that for Unity themselves, but if my plans to clone myself pan out, sure!

Unity own it, so that is a possibility, it needs some cleaning up to be more sane for average machines, I'd like that though if I can, probably not include the 7gb of compressed lighting data, but it still looks good at more reasonable resolutions, just I am an idiot and set everything too high the night before

I hope to do that yes, theres a lot of work flow stuff I had to custom write from Python exporters for C4D to spit out multiple FBX files for sanity, simpler things like custom Exposure shader, and automation for applying materials and changing probes and Gi settings per object based on name or material type and so on so I could work iteratively moving back and forth between C4D and Uniy, staying flexible to changing things all the time.. oh and I made a basic Cubic Pano capture tool so you can look all around in HTML5

 

These are all things you're doing that will improve Unity for us. Unity and we both will learn from it and improve the product for all of us. So, thank you.

 

Nice VRay renders!

Are you trying to murder Unity?

 

That's not vray - glass refraction is missing.

Also notice shadow artifacts on the ground of that image

 

Spoiler

It was a (misinformed) joke

 

Just making a point,wasn't saying the solution is better for unity than enlighten.(unity needs to be scalable from mobile devices up to high end PCs) was just saying that its a good example of what open sourcing cab achieve, sorry for putting it a bit off topic, love that someone is actually showing off unity 5s improvements with some good art

 

People have done things like that in Unity too but yes some things are held back a bit by not having low level access for sure but that's nothing that could'nt be also achieved with better frameworks to add functionality yourself, open source doesn't mean everything is magically possible, also if someone did have to change really low level things for a cool feature, do you want to compile your own build of Unity that combines multiple things every time and then merge updates from Unity each time... nope, I'm not saying Open source is useless, I'm saying the net gain is fairly low for how many more things it makes worse or more dangerous or more time consuming etc, also Unity is not aimed at people who want to compile there own engine, it is aimed at people who really don't want to do anything like that ever nor should they have to, for people who want source access and cutting edge well.. go use UE4 as it's aimed right at you with all the cons that come with that too - A Product is ultimately a series of compromises and decisions what to not do so you can do other things with your time and resource, open sourcing Unity for many reasons is not something I see them doing suddenly, but more incrementally as and where it makes the most sense in a controlled fashion, you'd probably only have nightmares if you saw the unity core code base

Thanks, I bleed so you won't have to ;-)

that's now my new top testimonial on my CV

 

I'm actually using both unity and ue4 atm, love both of them for different reasons(and hate at the same time). Your argument does make sense, its just that as a gfx programmer I would love a bit more lowers access , but yeah I am a minority case I understand

 

Thanks for showing your awesome work, Helios! It finally convinced me to buy Unity 5 for my game, Last Life.

Looking forward to hearing more about how you achieved that stunning look! In particular, I'm quite curious about the C4D to Unity workflow improvements you mentioned...

 

Thanks!, Welcome aboard the Unity 5 train - now how to claim my sales commission ;-)

Yah workflow importing and exporting is a real sore point I want to talk more about, I cobbled something together that kinda mostly works and occasionally explodes so would like to spend more time with it and do it properly and not like a frenzied ape smashing at the keyboard in desperation, you know, really break out the whole Programming to Interfaces, Model View, View Model, Object Orientated, Single responsibility, Open Closed, Liksov Substitution, Interface Segregation, Dependency Inversion stuff I learned all about but never have the time to actualy use properly because life happens.. so yah, that

 

I remember was doing the same with PureLight, .... very real sceneries,... like yours..
but all baked.. ..

good work

 

This thread sold me on Unity 5!

 

Hurrah, famousness awaits my work is now immortalised in blog post form by Unity, you can tell I had no involvement in writing the blog post as it is legible and under 50 pages long

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/02/24/gorgeous-arch-viz-in-unity-5/

 

@Alex Lovett is there any converter written in C# for converting photometric data into raster image

 

Hi Helios,

Thank you for the inspiration!

I'm trying to locate tutorials on realtime GI/reflections with animated characters/lights on ios, but to no avail.
Any chance you could direct to relevant source or perhaps, is it possible to request a 3 min tutorial on getting a GI light moving across dynamic geometry - like the orb in your ach-viz demo? I'm sure it would be appreciated by the community at large as well.

Trying to create more natural lighting for my app, that's almost ready to go.
https://twitter.com/PosetasticApp

Thank you.

Mark

 

That there is pretty impressive!

 

Hi Helios,

Congratulations for your immortalification, great work !

You said somewhere in this topic, or on your blog, that you use a software/plugin to capture the pictures/videos at a higher resolution than your screen.
Where can I found that, please ?

Because we all know the current antialiasing sucks in deferred...

If someone know how to improve the antialiasing, please let me know how.

 

I just want to know how you got the res so high without the clustering or light transport crashing.. I have a rather high end desktop and still get failed opening gi file light transport failed blah blah after 2 precumputed res

 

I'm having a similar issue as DaveDno.

If my scene is too big it creates a multi-gig file to store all the GI data and then the materials start to freak out and behave in unusual ways...

 

Ok small update, I helped with this a while ago with Arch Virtual:

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/unity-5-realtime-medical-environment-for-virtual-reality
http://archvirtual.com/2015/06/05/virtual-realism-with-unity-5


Also check out the work of talented people working for Unity tweeted here by Veselin Efremov the art director on the Blacksmith demo ( https://unity3d.com/pages/the-blacksmith )
https://twitter.com/vesseff/status/613805518818287616
The project is released publicly with runnable EXE also, custom shaders for soft grass, atmospheric scattering, cool assets, awesome stuff

Video here, make sure 1080p!

I'm now going off to stick grass on everything!

EDIT: ok voting has been removed now, they get the point!
And a call to vote on prioritising work on adding distributed LAN / using multiple computers to help speed up calculating lighting / Enlighten global illumination in Unity 5: http://feedback.unity3d.com/suggestions/global-illumination-distributed-lan-lighting-builds
You can share Jespers tweet on it here: https://twitter.com/pigselated/status/615451669623611392
Or use your votes on other issues on the feedback site! thanks

 

"Woah. That's incredible."

I realized I just said that out loud, which I don't do very often. Great job.

The Blacksmith demo is amazing as well. Virtual reality will not disappoint by the time we grow old. (Main thing I'm watching the progress of, tech-wise, alongside organic/hard AI (specifically, neuron/physical-brain emulation).)

 

@HeliosDoubleSix

I'm a 3d guy (Here's my site http://digitalmeat.uk/) and i use C4D, one of my biggest gripes with the FBX exporter is there is no option for "Export Selected", The ideal situation would be the ability to select a group, and export all the objects in that group as it's own FBX, just like in 3dsmax, does your python script address this? and if so, Gimme

 

awesome, just awesome

 

This Blacksmith video is unbelievable! I have been experimenting Unreal Engine just because there has not been good way to create grass for my golf course visualizations in Unity. Anyway, this is the first time when I see really good looking grass rendering in Unity.

 

Actually, I don't think the grass looks good at all. It only looks good from certain angles and at a certain distance. But if you rotate the camera a bit to the side, viewed from above, you can clearly see lots of intersections. And the grass blades are all transparent and translucent at the same time, which looks a bit weird from close up.

 

been following your progress on this project and its ace work. However my attempt to do similar with baked only lighting is a bit of a nightmare especially when using Directional Specular lightbake setup. Hoping and would really be cool if you could please look at my thread and share some light on the matter. Thank you

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/directional-specular-issue.344332/

 

Sorry only just replying now! been quite the busy bee I have, Scion looks really cool! that totally slipped passed my radar

 

Custom script, was a nightmare of failed attempts and slowness, from using regular screenshot to a custom build of unity with poison dart throwing tricks to achieve anti aliasing and renderToTexture method for high res, spitting out 4k png's as frames then custom script running to watch the output folder to recompressed and resize them to not run out of disk space, then ffmpeg script to compress to video

Unity also created a custom tool for Blacksmith video capture, not sure if it will ever be put out publicly, I have been using it over the past few days on a project for Unite and it can capture direct to video which should make it less messy and a bit faster without that disk thrashing over head

In the end for best quality it takes hours to output still, funny, when its a realtime engine :-D

Simply due to do aliasing issues, it's just not acceptable to have a video with artifacts, game play its tolerable as you control camera but a video with slow pans and cut scenes makes it seem so much worse, thankfully there are a few options coming for anti aliasing in the future and super sampling and what not

 

Directional spec is broken I moaned about it during beta, I have had access to a tweaked standard shader that make it much much better and less error prone with black weirdness and overly strong speculars, not idea when that is going into Unity officially though

 

Yah I need to get it together and package it up, I have been contemplating putting out some typical environment toolset to help people with typical repetitive workflow tasks and such, having spend that last few months making environments and hacking up pretty ugly but useful code, it seems like it would be worth rewriting it with all I learned into a cohesive package that is cleaned up and wont explode so much on touch ;-)

 

Thanks see my reply to MartijnDekker above

Livenda has a new anti aliasing thing they are teasing ( they love to tease ) and other things are in the works... for now I'm still cheating by rendering everything at 4k and I resample/resize at the end to video

 

A lot of luck of perseverance I think, many bugs are being fixed and some crushingly life destroying ones were fixed in the middle of the project I'm doing now for Unity coming soon TM many awesome things on the horizon as always, but we need it yesterday ;-D

 

Oh bit late to post this but my work for Unity went live, hurrah, I can now go lay down for a week!

This plan is to release EXE publicly ( which was on show floor at Boston to try ) and the source project with some cleanup, and a blog post.

Video here:

More images here:
https://www.artstation.com/artist/heliosdoublesix

 

@HeliosDoubleSix

The arch virtual one looks great and I'd be proud of it, the err last one looks a little ummm yeah :S..

Needs some proper material and texture tweaking, a lighting re-balance and could do with proper colour grading (as in shadows / mids and highlights).

It's a good start, quite interesting. Still needs a lot of work...

 

It looks epic. I would love to see source just to click compute butt an see if this has evolved as lifght computing times where ridiculous.

 

Source project will be available in a few weeks, compute on my machine ( 12 x 3.5 ghz ) takes an hour at the quality you see above which is quite low compared to what I normally aim for ( 0.5 texels ), there is an upcoming update that may improve speed by 40% or so also. But yes it can get really slow with higher detail, and greater surface area.

So while working I set it to much lower quality with 10 minute build times, then leave it going over night to check for glitches that usually only show up as you get higher res )

 

@HeliosDoubleSix

This is stunningly beautiful work! I'm chomping at the bit to download and learn from it

Any update on when it might be available?

 

Source project and playable EXE is available since Nov 5th, with blog post here:

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/11/05/awesome-realtime-gi-on-desktops-and-consoles/

 

Great work @HeliosDoubleSix ! But I'm curious about your future projects?

 

Good work.
Could you make some option to lower quality and display the frame rate ?
I runned the demo in GTX 960 and it was running good, but not as smooth as i would like for some game prototype.
Perhaps it's nature of real time GI to be more demanding and geared towards next gen hardware.
I'll try downloading the source and see if i can lower some settings to get some smooth frame rate on lower hardware.

 

@HeliosDoubleSix I know this is a very old post now (well over a year), but I was hoping you would share some of your settings with us, so we would all be able to set up lighting and shadows like that.

A portfolio piece I am working on at the moment (a private thing) relies heavily on effective/realistic lighting, which is something I am REALLY struggling with in Unity.

The lighting I am trying to achieve is very similar to the left image with the desk (I think it's a desk), the third image in this post I am quoting.

My scene looks quite similar to this concept on Artstation(closest thing I could find):
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/VgvAN

 

Hi Alex thank you for much needed help regarding lighting in Unity. Sharing my result here

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/arch-viz-guide.380384/