UPGEN Lighting (Standard, HDRP, URP)

​

Documentation | Windows Standalone Demo | Asset Store - HDRP | Asset Store - Standard | Asset Store - URP​

UPGEN Lighting is an optimized for maximum performance framework that aspires to provide a fully dynamic approximation of Global Illumination to your games (requires no precomputations). Initially designed for VR games, this solution provides high execution speed, produces great visual results, and uses a minimum of system resources. Emulation of indirect lighting could be made as fully automatic, in a semi-automatic way, or by manual designing light to save extra performance.

Under the hood, the solution is based on the idea of making an ultra-fast type of point light sources (10 times faster than standard ones) and using thousands of them to approximate light propagation for the scene in realtime. To achieve this we made a special kind of screen space effect, which bakes each frame hundreds of most valuable lights and applies combined lighting inside G-Buffer for the current camera.

This framework provides several workflows for building lighting in your scenes. You can use such Fast Light sources to automatically transfer bounced light from standard light sources using Ray-Tracing. Or you can combine a standard type of light sources with Fast Lights to manually approximate GI in complex scenes and achieve the best performance and a beautiful visual look.

More Videos: Setup Guide | Practice | Sponza Demo​

Limitations:

• In automatic mode it could be very innacurate (to stay fast) and some manual work still required
• Lighting does not affect transparent geometry
• Ray-tracing uses colliders to detect ray hits (geometry without colliders will not produce bounced lighting)
• Only light types supported with Fast GI and Ray-Tracing are Point and Spot Lights
• Direct and Area type of lights is not supported by a realtime ray-tracing
  
• Does not take into consideration shadows and light cookies
• Ray-Tracing cache has a certain amount of inertia and will have visual delay for fast-moving light sources
• Ray-Tracing will produce light leaking

Features:

• Do not need precomputations and just works in few clicks
• Do not use any special graphics features and can work on any platform
• Fast light has special math inside so it is combination of point and ambient light types
• All framework is written in C# code and the source code is included
• No GC allocation garbage
• Supports hot recompilation (during playing in editor)

Documentation | Windows Standalone Demo | Asset Store - HDRP | Asset Store - Standard | Asset Store - URP​

​

 

(Where) can we try and buy?

 

Now you can try windows standalone demo (see link in the description). Package now is on approval, so hopefully soon it will be available on asset store.

 

"Supports recompilation during playing in editor"

Any features that support full runtime?
I mean can this thing light a 3d-modell loaded at runtime?

 

All features are fully runtime, especially GI.
All parts of framework can be recompiled without crashes during playing in editor without stopping it, including Ray-Tracing cache.

Yes, it does not use any light-mapping-type approaches where some lighting info is stored as part of the model - all it does it does in fully dynamic way in runtime or designtime inside its own internal data structures.

 

The image is very nice and soft. FPS is nice too.
Why did you need HDRP, what function is it tied to?

 

Only function of HDRP it use is Deferred rendering (as lighting is building inside G-Buffer).
Soon I am planning to make support of standard pipeline in deferred rendering and probably limited version for URP (with forward rendering).

 

Are you on discord?

 

nope

 

Package now is approved and available on Asset Store !
Version for Deferred Renderpath of Standard Render Pipeline is in testing.
Version for URP is in development and will come a bit later.

 

Huh, this looks pretty cool. You wrote that for large outdoor scenes with a directional light, the semi-automatic workflow should be used. I didn't really see that being described in the manual, how does that work?

 

Now you can use ray-traced GI with directional light only in small area around e.g. in front of cave entrance. When you see how lighting looks like in some particular area, you can remove ray-traced version and put manually Fast Lights to approximate it. Another way you can use script to make directional light follow your camera smoothly along XZ plane. Both solutions of course are far from optimal and hopefully in future fully automatic way will be implemented.

 

mm_ASH,

I am a sucker for GI and given Unity's current GI state, I m super interested. However, it is very hard to get a good idea of what this is - it is great that you included a standalone demo, but it is near impossible to actually see what is going on as the environment is very static and too simple. Good enough to prove something is working but not enough to make me decide. The information provided is just too little and walled off.

I have a few questions

1) When you say "ray-traced", does it work on pre pascal cards? Is it getting accelerated by RTX cards?
2) Based on the post above, I am assuming this is more or less for approximating GI for a small area, correct?
3) How would this work for a procedural level? I couldn't find detailed information about it.
4) How would it be implemented in an open world first/third person level? Is it even feasible to begin with?

Sorry for the questions, but I am stoked...so please, help me

 

Hi, jjejj87!

No need of RTX, it can run on any card. For sure it was tested on almost all NVIDIA and AMD cards from last two generations but in theory this should also work on mobile and consoles. Ray-tracing is based on physical colliders, not by real meshes wich are too heavy to do this in realtime.

Yes, this is not a real GI, it is very-very rough and approximate imitation (but also very fast and fully run-time). For sun light it works in small area around, for point and spot lights - well they ware made to cover small areas by their nature. But any huge world is just a set of places where you can setup lighting as you need using this three main types of light sources (no limits by world scale and amout of lights). By my idea this not just a GI library - this asset is a framework, that should take care about all key aspects of lighing in your games, from doom-like corridor based level to huge terrains with caves or even space scale scenes.

It will be a perfect solution for procedural levels. It just does what you expecting (if you provide colliders to your geometry). During last 2 years on this technology we made more than 10 VR games including ones with procedural worlds and complex terrains.

Yes, there is no problem, you can do what ever you want, it should work as expected in almost any conditions.

Sure. Thanks for this questions. Later I will improve documentation according to them. So fill free to ask as many questions as you have =)

 

Now you can extract Fast Lights from Ray-Traced components.

v1.1
* Ray-Traced GI: new button to Create/Destroy set of Fast Lights from internal rays
* Examples: hide next/prev buttons if you have no scenes in build settings
* Manual: quality improvements + size reduced

 

I'm saving this asset and looking to buy it for indoors and open world VR environments.

Does it work on 2019.4 ?

Can you link the sci-fi environment used in the trailer?

 

yep

we build it mostly manually from procedural geometry
but also there were used this packs

 

Hi
"Only HDRP and Standard piplines are supported (does not work with URP pipeline)" see first post.
I get some errors is I import it in a Standard RP Project, that HDRP is missing.
Is only HDRP currently supported?

 

Hi!
Sorry for this misunderstanding.
I am planning to use this thread for all versions of UPGEN Lighing assets.
Current status is:

• "UPGEN Lighting HDRP" suppors only HDRP.
• "UPGEN Lighting Standard" is still on approval from asset store admins.
• "UPGEN Lighting URP" is in development.

 

Looks amazing! Would there be a possibility for this to work in a Unity 2018 project?

 

yep, I should be backward compatible
just try and if you will have any troubles - let me know

 

Just Purchased and i was wondering where to modify the RayMatrixSize for the directional light , a ho can a reduce the space between rays with the directional light?

 

Hi!
1. Create a Directional Light
2. Add Ray-Traced GI component to created Game Object
3. In this component you can tweak "RaysMatrixSize" property
It will automatically correct distance between rays according to their count
But seems you want control that distance manually - i`ll add an extra option for that in coming version

 

New setup guide video:

 

New video how to use this package:

 

"UPGEN Lighting Standard" now is approved and available on Asset Store !

 

Any news on the URP version?

 

Ditto

 

please make for urp , works in mobile?? android example

 

still in development

 

I am actually dumb maybe to ask this question, but does this lighting tactic works in a similar way as that Lumen (which works completely in real-time without baking light) shown in the recent Unreal Engine 5 demo video?

 

Nope, it is very fast and rough technique (I believe that Lumen will do a real and precise calculations). But true is that this method can handle almost any runtime changes of environment like day-night cycle, procedural generated levels, open worlds, massive walls destruction and so on.

 

Just bought the standard version on assetstore! I never have seen real RTX myself implemented into video games. So how does this method compare to NVIDIA RTX? Can you make a video or image comparison?

 

RTX is much better =) but much more expensive (in terms of money and performance)
Almost done with sponza atrium demo. Will publish video soon.

 

New video sponza scene demo:

 

URP support is in development for forward renderer or are you targeting the deferred renderrer?

 

for forward

 

How does this work with directional lights for large outdoor nature scenes?

 

Not perfectly. Directional Light produce Ray-Traced GI only in small area around. Depending on scenario (if you have day-night cicle or not), in most cases manual Fast Light placement + ambient light will give better results. Or you need to move Ray-Traced GI with camera.

 

Do you know if Unity built in pipeline supports RTX? If yes, where can we enable it?

 

As far as know - no, it does not, only HDRP supports hardware accelerated ray-tracing (for now in preview mode with DX12).

 

I am very interested in this, but the listing for the standard version only shows a video for the HDRP version. Can you please post an appropriate video showcasing the standard version?

 

You are right that looks confusing - will update information in video.
HDRP and Standard versions produce almost same visual results.
Only difference is internal infostructure and setup for different rendering pipelines.
So what you have seen in trailer is true for both versions.

 

@mm_ASH @RadioactiveBullfrog

I also asked the same question about HDRP vs. Standards when looking for access to the Documentation. I took a chance anyways and bought it, and it is really really good. Still waiting for access to the documentation though!

 

Sorry about access to documentation. Now should be accessible.

 

What would be really helpful is a tutorial video or two. Your documentation doesn't really give much information on exactly how to do certain things. I mean this for the standard pipeline.

 

Maybe you can ask that things here? And than I`ll try to wrap that in video.

 

So I had a little frustrating moment when I first started using this, because my lighting was set to Gamma and not Linear.
So I got like the faintest result ever and I was super disappointed, until I switched to Linear. Then I couldn't stop smiling. So we have been using it non-stop ever since we got our hands on it. Basically, put the component on the light and enjoy. Thats it.

 

Or perhaps you could just do a step-by-step tutorial? I mean it would benefit everybody that purchases your product. What I am telling you is that your documentation is incomplete and that the setup guide and practice video are for a different version of your product. It isn't reasonable for you to expect people to extrapolate one from the other. They may be functionally almost identical under the hood, but getting there is different for each version for the end user.

 

I see that the Upgen RayTraced GI doesn't work with Fog Volume 3 https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/particles-effects/fog-volume-3-81802