Discussion Unity's another shiny new demo

It gives you a 5x-10x improvement in quality for the same cost so it should be very useful for lower end devices.

 

ReStir isn't magical, just clever, it's basically sharing data across fragments. Blur does that, so if your low end can handle blur, it can probably handle ReStir.

I'm oversimplifying kinda, but the core is similar, the difference is that it's also bundle with sampling structure, like temporal reservoir, which might have a too big overhead, especially memory. This the part where I have no profiling on and haven't looked in depth.

 

Ray tracing already has large memory requirements. I doubt the overhead of this surpasses an extra 5% of memory of what you already need for the typical case scenario.

 

Raytracing is tangential to this techniques, it's been created as a way to accelerate rendering convergence of raytracing but isn't fundamentally tied to it. That mean if you have another way to sample, it would work, notably if you find a better occlusion test over a point. This could be used in voxel tracer and share data with over voxel as an example.

 

Man, seeing this brings me back to my Unity 3 days, when the original lightmapper was Beast and the results were stellar.

@hippocoder I don't know how much influence you have, but pass this on to the Unity devs. This would be amazing replacement for Enlighten

 

I would LOVE to mess with this for path traced lightmapping

 

Absolutely no influence but it looks cool. @LeonhardP might be able to pass notes on.

 

Usually devs are aware of emerging techs from the major players (Nvidia in this case) in their fields of expertise.
Getting the capacity from management to actually make use of a new tech on the other hand, is the tough part (and to a degree it has to be, since new tech comes up all the time)...

 

What happened with the Beast? Problem with contemporary Lightmapper, Enlighten, ... is that you need powerful PC for 4K lightmaps. Software doesn't scale well with hardware.
With Beast would light building would be extremely fast even on average PC whihc wouldn't require 12GB or 16GB GPU.

 

Unfortunately, Beast is owned by Autodesk so they had to remove it. And I was really loving the progress with Enlighten.

Just learned the company behind enlighten was shutting down

 

Enlighten switched over to being owned by another company and Unity pulled some real shady S*** there too. They said that they were removing Enlighten because of the first company shutting down but soon it came out that Unity had no interest in licensing it from the new one.

 

Are you serious? What company was this?

 

The original company was Geometrics but now Enlighten is maintained by Silicon Studio.

 

And I just read about that too. Definitely side eyeing this because they should have been upfront about it and said that building their own solution, which would be cool. If they have something in the pipeline, stop with the experimental S*** and get it out in full readiness

 

Why is that shady? Likely the new company saw their chance and demanded tripple the licence cost or something (and of course they cannot say that publicly since unless Elon Musk is involved, business negotiations are normally under NDA).

 

They were never "required to remove Enlighten" as that's a lie by omission. On top of that, most of the complaints about Enlighten were always due to Unity using a profoundly outdated version, even by the standards of the version Geometrics had been maintaining. In all their communication to developers using Unity, UT simply said the only reason was because Geometrics was out of business.

The actual reason stated to Silicon Studio was that they were pursuing their own internal solutions, something that was never actually stated to anyone using Unity until those communications came to light. That is extremely shady, especially when Enlighten was the only "functional" lightmapping option for so long that basically every project relied on it. Given that Unity planned to have Enlighten be completely removed after 2020 LTS, it's pretty clear their internal solutions were long in the pipe.

Of course, their internal solutions were also so poorly implemented that we still have Enlighten in the 2023 version.

So yeah, this S***? Entirely shady. Developers who use the engine were not given critical information once again that included lies by omission with information that only came out when people actually looked into it.

 

Yeah the whole enlighten thing really hurt my older project that was in Unity. Luckily, I don't depend on Unity for GI these days.

 

I feel you. I was DUMBFOUNDED when I learned GI wasn't working properly in my project and now I'm using the HDRP post processing for indirect lighting, for now

 

The current state of the art for GI is around 4ms for realtime GI on a 2080 card or less. It's a fairly fixed target that engine developers should quote numbers for. You've got EA doing it, you got Epic doing it, both are quoting 4ms for their realtime GI solutions on this gen of consoles, so I would expect the same from Unity, a 4ms GI solution for that hardware.

It matters to be able to set budgets to all these things if you're planning the game beyond a demo.

 

Agreed. I'm going to be rocking a 4080 or 3090Ti, and need to ensure the real time gi is quick enough to handle any changes in lighting. 4ms for real time, and not disappearv when I hit the play button

 

What alternative solution you used instead of GI ?

 

Unity's SSGI is alright but it's still got a fair amount of setup (lots of reflection probe volumes) and APV is just not here yet or proven it scales well with SSGI. I tried it for a while but you can tell it doesn't quite perform that great due to it's latency. If Unity were able to build a world representation each frame cheaply, it could help it a lot. Still, we must accept it's early days at Unity for that kind of work.

I'm using Unreal 5's Lumen for GI work at the moment as it satisfies the criteria for those projects. In Unity I don't use GI at all but art direction instead, which is still really nice because in HDRP you can remove the hot spot in the light's attenuation to create soft fill lighting.

I'm expecting Unity to carry on building on what they've got and given time it should be worthy to do GI in realtime, in Unity as well. I think everyone can agree some work will need to be done first. Once APV is production ready and SSGI is properly tuned for it, we should see some fun results!

 

They definitely need to get that working and ACTUALLY READY, I agree. And most importantly, make it easy to setup and ARTIST FRIENDLY.

 

Well you can try it out today. Their solution is to use SSGI with APV as fallback. You may need to add a few reflection probes as well.

 

I don't mind that. Is it in Unity 2021? Or the 2022 beta release?

 

https://forum.unity.com/threads/ada...erimental-release-for-hdrp-in-2021-2.1238824/
2021.2+ with more updates in later versions.

 

I'll check what version I have when I get home

 

I'm wondering if the new hair system is compatible with the Skin Attachment system from digital human? I think that It was stated in some blog post or video that they work together but I'm looking for confirmation if the information is up to date. Is it possible to attach a hair instance to geometry and have real time updates for the hair instance when the mesh is deformed by animation/blendshapes/other manipulation?

https://blog.unity.com/news/introdu...on-in-high-fidelity-digital-humans-from-unity

EDIT: I found it. Here it is (35:35):

 

Wow... APV is impressive as hell and I was able to get this set up in no time. It even plays nice with Subsurface Scattering and assets like Enviro