Unity's new Area Lights etc

Thanks guys, I appreciate your medical assistance in this matter

 

Because I've been programming for years, and have no significant problem with codedives into Unreal 4? Nobody says anything about "fast" or "easy", by the way.

That would be a "beginner", not "average".

Either way, I'm done here.

 

ok.. thanks for your wisdom. c ya

 

You're correct that it's not easy or simple... for a novice like yourself. We're not all novices here though.

Same. My join date may indicate I've only been here for four years, but I've been a programmer for twenty.

It would have but some people like to hear themselves speak.

 

Those BU years don't count!

 

What's BU? My brain is deciding to flounder on me today.

 

Before Unity?

 

Yep.

A joke of course. I've been programming for a long time too. But ya know... some folks think all of the BU time doesn't count. lol

I actually remember seeing the source for one of your QuickBasic programs @Ryiah. Not sure from when that was but even then you had a very clean well structured code. That stuff makes a difference for sure especially as the project increases in size & complexity.

Anyway... was just trying to make a funny... not derail. Please no lightning strikes from mods. lol

 

WOW Ryiah!! LOLZ ... well im not a novice but you sound like you're the solution for unity's problems. Unity needs to hire you for sure. Unity are you listening??? this ones special!! hire her please

oh and judging by the number of posts i think its you that loves to hear your own voice

 

If I recall correctly it was early high school. Approximately 1998 and roughly three years after I started learning.

 

So in a hail mary play to save this thing...

How does one get this lighting? Will this just be in the new version of Unity? I don't totally get it

 

https://labs.unity.com/downloads

 

So this is just an experimental feature. Will this eventually be part of Unity proper?

Also, am I the only one who spent a disproportionate amount of time playing with that little mouse pointer thing at the top of the page......I feel like that is a little too amusing for what it is...

 

:-(

 

This is only a tease. Lagarde's part of the wishlist presentation covered a lot more and considering the work he did at DICE we can be pretty confident that Unity's PBR framework is going to improve massively over the coming year.

 

What is performance ? Can this replace Enlighten for some games styles ? How does it works with a nature scenes (grass, trees, water) ?
What about workflow , it is complicated to use and adjust ?

 

A very quick test with an ocean system (Ceto).

 

Hey, really didn't intend to derail your thread, was asking a perhaps strongly worded question believing you may have some more insight, but unfortunately things didn't quite go as I'd hoped... Just was really hoping there would be feature announcements at Unite.

Where did you get the unity package? I see the download on the link hippo posted, but it seems to contain only c++ files and no unity project. Am I looking in the wrong place?

 

https://labs.unity.com/downloads

 

Preview (based on 5.4) in a couple weeks if all goes well, from here starting at 28:45.

 

well it's still preview tho might perform good, might not, and possibly not the same version of what they actually use in adam demo which high chance in adam demo was integrated as Cpp into native unity rendering

maybe. . . .

 

Oh gosh... no one knows about multi-projection and directly after no cluster rendering, both features I'd love right now

 

I will try to make some scene level similar to Doom 3 that used lights projection system and se how it performs.
So i must use 5.4 only ?

 

Someone said waffle? I very much like waffle. Waffle lightened by the area lights.

 

Cough, cough... Blender game engine 2012, custom branch one guy...

 

Waaait a minute. Perfectly flat squared oriented surface in 3d space, no shadows. You can do something very similar via a simple raycast of a reflected vector vs target plane.

 

Yup a bit like the youtube demo hippo posted in #7, didn't see any shapes other than perfectly flat, unless I'm missing something.

Is that what you're doing in your blog @neginfinity?

 

No, but I think I can reapply the principle to get something similar to the video. lemme check...

 

Yeah area lights have never been a problem.... if you want rubbish performance. That's the big difference. Also they've never been a problem if you didn't care about PBS, again big difference.

Area lights have been around a while but a few things prevent them being widely used in games with PBS.

The techniques involved in the new area lights are work with PBS, have good performance targets and so on, wasn't the easiest thing to solve, plus aren't just rectangular.

 

Yeah the paper says they can do spherical shapes and such so, we'll assume they can otherwise they wouldn't have published it, plus it probably works on all OS's and has better PBR, like you said.

 

Is their techniques similar to this?

 

BTW isn't most unity problem is to make it work on all platforms as equally well as possible? while ALSO being as friendly as possible to workflow and pipeline? I'm no programmer but it seems like a huge hurdle to integrate correctly? So maybe problem they have are solvable in isolation but multiplcation of edge cases kills it?

Asking for friend

 

Alright, here's a quick test with bruteforce approach and artifacts.



As hippo said, rubbish performance, but there are couple of ways this could be improved.

For solid light sources you could probably derive a correct lighting forumla using integrals... and for free form/textured surface, it would be possible to approximate the result using several textures with variable degree of blur (like what unity does with metallic surfaces).

Man...Now I lost interest.

 

There's no magic way you can speed up shadowmapping, specially if it's already basic shadows like the ones in Unity. You can either add more shadowmap filters to make it look a bit prettier (thus it will make it slower to render) or try a different shadowing technique such as screen space raymatching shadows or maybe planar shadows (we use a combination of all those). But shadowmapping in it's basic form requires scene to be re-rendered for every light POV with shadows no way around it.
Speaking of rendering, I think it's a good idea Unity will open up their CPP renderers, so people can make custom renderers easier and a lot faster. I'm waiting for it.

 

I was wondering could this simplify GI equation? I mean to accumulate light more efficiently from area above a point

 

oh what I mean is by using different techniques ie ue4 distance field shadows and not rendering shadows - rendering them, storing them.

That's what I mean by faster.

 

Aye, Ray Traced Distance Field Shadows.. It has it's drawbacks (like having to generate the distance mesh fields), but I use it for larger scenes and it works pretty well especially when in conjunction with directional lights..

In 4.11 I noticed a 50% increase over CSM.! (Well you use it conjunction with baked and CSM but you get my meaning).

Distance Field Based Ambient occlusion looks gorgeous too, which is based off the same mesh fields tech ..!

 

TBH I'd just settle for shadows that don't look bizarrely bad between cascades so here's hoping for 5.5.

 

@hippocoder,
I think it won't happen, they are pretty busy modularizing and opening up the renderer which they said it's a total mess and sadly shadows are hardcoded in their renderer. But I'm pretty sure once it's done there's gonna be a whole plethora of people's renderers with their own shadowing technique working seamlessly. Right now it's a real problem to create custom renderers, it can be done but it's hard to manage/maintain and very hackysh.
What I see in my magic crystal ball in the future, is more modularity and openness with more engine C# APIs in Unity so Asset Store Developers can create better core/engine/game systems for Unity easier and faster. Yes few parts of the Unity are already quite accessible and open but others such as the renderer, mecanim, even the terrain are still a blackbox without any API (or proper low level API) support.

 

This one?
https://bitbucket.org/Unity-Technologies/graphicsdemos

 

This is why using some approximation without such details ; or emissive materials will suit better real time games.

 

Thanks "Captain Obvious".

It is possible to speedup that mockup quite a lot while making it look better and smoother. Except that when I have a rough idea of how it can be done, it is no longer interesting to tinker with.

 

This just popped up in my email:

https://www.twitch.tv/gametextures (Introduction to Lighting in Unity)

 

The link at Unity Labs seems to be dead. Anyone would be so generous to share?

 

It's really up to Unity to fix the broken link and to be honest the early example version was mostly just a curiosity anyway, lacking features such as shadows that will hopefully be part of a fuller implementation somewhere down the road.

 

while waiting for that..
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u.../Unite2016-ExperimentalAreaLight.unitypackage

 

Thanks, sir! You are the hero this forum deserves