VertexDirt - Per vertex Ambient Occlusion baking [WIP]

@ZFarago
Is this live yet ?

 

not yet, unfortunately. I hope it will be accepted soon.

 

By the way is this realtime AO solution display or baking? I am interested in it no matter which solution it is but just to clear it up.

 

Well, it is designed for baking, so you have to wait out the progress. Actually this is just a cuple of moments, especially in a decent machine. (The spheres video recorded with a quite old Thinkpad T400, thats why it takes that long of baking).

I doubt it can be as fast that update a complete scene's vertices' colors with a playable fps. But I think with a small bunch of vertices it is possible to make it realtime in a game. E.g. Everything is static but a main character and a tesselated transparent shadowplane.

Maybe this can be change in the future.

 

On the Store : https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/21015

 

Oh, finally. Longest review ever Thanks for sharing.

About the Alpha:

As you see, VertexDirt Alpha is free. This stage hopefully helps the development, but for this, your reviews needed.


Enjoy

 

Any feedback guys? I would appreciate if you would write me your thoughts.

 

Yeah, one question. We make use of VPaint - alot. And I fear that your tool (although delivering real nice AO) might interfere with that other asset.
Can you add a method to copy the AO Information from your tool into a VPaint layer? That would be great.

 

Hello Marco,

I will see what can I do for it.

 

I have dropped the idea of providing a Lite version in the future .
Alpha version will be paid soon, so if you want to try it for free, you have to be quick

 

Hello ZFarago - I recently purchased VertexDirt and gave it a whirl on Mac/Unity 4.6 and ran into an issue with no ambient occlusion baked "shadows" displaying on the cloned object. Here's what I did:

1. Selected a low poly object with multiple materials.
2. Updated both materials to use a VertexDirt shader.
3. In the VD Ambient Occlusion Tool I used the default settings.
4. Pressed bake. Looks like it only took .5 seconds but the AO does not show up.

I'm sure I'm doing something wrong. Am I missing something? Are low poly objects not ideal?

Thanks for any help!

 

Hello fairchild670,

I am sorry for your inconvenience, I hope I can help you manage this. First of all, please send me a screenshot where the console is showing so I can read the error / warning messages. Or may be you can send me this project so I can check what is wrong. zfarago85 | gmail | com

 

Thanks, I haven't encountered any errors in the console. I'll send a basic sample project your way.

Much appreciated!

 

I just bought this plugin from AppStore and it works quite well.

Still, there are two things that bug me:
- If I bake an object and save it into a prefab, it loses the baked mesh and appears invisible after it is instanced.
- All the VD shaders seem to have render problems with realtime shadows, especially the Specular one.
Can you give me some advice? Thanks.

 

Hello DanjelRicci,

Thanks for buying,
I am going to check theese problems tonight and update the plugin as soon as I can.

 

New version sent to review. Available soon.

VertexDirt 1.4
- specular shader bugs fixed
- mesh save tool added. Prefabs will works fine with saved .asset meshes.
-minor bug fixes.

 

Thank you very much, I appreciate a lot.

 

simple tutorial would be nice

 

Hi,
I am a very happy user of VertexDirt which is extremely useful for the current project I'm working on.

I recently upgraded to Unity 4.6 (was still running 4.5) and now VertexDirt seems to be broken.
Even when loading the example spheres scene, if I remove the VDColorHandler script and then re-apply Ambient Occlusion, the spheres come up black.

I've tried in 4.6.1 and 4.6.3 and its broken in both.
If I load up the same scene in 4.5.5 the ambient occlusion baking works fine, and the results are as desired.

Any chance you could have a look at this?
Thanks!

 

Hi,

sorry I did not noticed that, I will check it soon!

 

i bought it yesterday and as expected, it doesn't support some 3rd party shaders..i was using core framework from echologin as i'm developing for mobile.. is it possible to support it?

 

Hi cjrussel14,

Actually this is the shaders job to support vertex colors, but dont worry, easy to implement vertex coloring to any shader.
I don't know the core framework shaders much, maybe you can ask the publisher for help.

 

Hello guys,
New version coming soon,

- [New Tool] Indirect Lighting: Similar to AO, but also uses the color & mainTexture of the surronding surfaces to get better, more realistic results as well as color bleed.
- [Bug] Very strange bahavior when immediately re-bake the same object after a bake. It has faster process(-50%!!!), slightly different(little bit weaker color bleed on IndirectLighting, almost the same in AO - still acceptable) results. Strange. Only happens if re-baking the same selection. I should call it as caching and introduce as a feature...
- Tutorials, as promised (actually these will out during march and independent from the plugin)
- simplified core, faster calculations
- New sample scenes
- more shaders
- available by the end of march
- maybe increased price. Get it now for sure

 

VD Ambient Occlusion - different parameters, different results.
If you change the sampling angle, you can modify the contrast of the results. Wide angles makes more details visible but with less contrast.
Occlusion distance controls the range of the occlusion. If you are using really small values, a specific verticle only shaded by the closest neighbours. Using large values can affect a vertex from long distances.

 

Hi,
Do you have an option to save (only) the AO Texture (JPG or PNG format)?

 

Hi ZJP!

Well, the result of AO stored in the vertex data, no textures used. I think I could implement a function to bake the results to textures, it is not hard to achieve, but it would still based on vertex data. I think using beast is much better way to bake AO to textures.

 

Fine for me. I'm looking for a solution INSIDE Unity's Editor.

 

Beast is an integrated lightmap baker with the ability to bake AO too. If Beast is really not your candidate, then I may make this feature.

 

I usually use an external tool for this (Knald for example). But i also need (for a particular project) an internal exporter and i really love the "simplicity" of your tool. Thanks.

 

I built a similar tool at work for baking in indirect lighting and AO into vertex colors for my procedurally created wires. When I bought your tool I saw that we ended up having basically the same idea for how to do it haha. I did the calculations a little different, but same general concept, works like a charm!

 

[Resolved]
Hey there I purchased the asset but it seems not very compatible with Unity 5. I would like it to work with the Standard Shader in Unity 5. I also tried it with a legacy diffuse, the AO does not show up at all even after clicking bake and I am getting all these warning errors. Please help this asset is really amazing!

 

[Resolved]
Testing in Unity 4.6 shows no errors but no actual change to the object.
Tested with default material, diffuse and vertex lit. It bakes and no change is visible.

So this rules out different versions as the cause.

 

Alright I finally got it to work. I must have missed that you need to apply the VD Shaders for it to work.

By the way I got it to work with the Standard shader by grabbing this shader and pressing render, it looks phenomenal when applying it and I can skip the VD shader stage!
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/standard-shader-with-vertex-colors.316529/

So far VERY pleased with this shader and its performance!

Things go really well with it now! But is there any way to make the effect even better without adding more polygons like Beast Lightmapping did?

 

Bump, has this product been abandoned?

 

Come on.... 17 days since the last dev's post. To short for this conclusion.

 

I think being in the asset store and seeing so many good support reviews while emailing others about their product and getting instant replies has made me expect nothing less....In any case while I did get the plugin the results only look good if the object has a high polygon count. My purpose for this plugin was as a replacement for the beast lightmapper in Unity 5....

However I noticed something interesting, since vertex data is baked into the vertex colors....well I saw some Tessellation shaders....anyone thinking what I am thinking lol.

 

Tessellation can't be stored or queried in that manner though... it's strictly shader. This needs to store information in vertex colours, and those verts don't exist anywhere except on GPU.

 

I noticed theirs a new version, but theirs no mention of whats new in the release notes.

 

I just purchased this. Looked very good. Good reviews. I launched Unity 5.1.0f3. Studied the manual. Opened the example: chair model. Looked nice, loaded fine. Went to re-generate. Took 100 seconds. Now, the whole thing is grey.

Any ideas, please?

 

Hi

i'm getting the same as the post above - 5.1.0f3. Tried multiple settings, no colours visible after baking, checked on both supplied and custom shaders.

verified as working okay on 4.6.3p1

 

Have you tried selecting Uv Channels in the standard shader? That worked for me. For me it didn't show until I changed the UV channel.

 

I guess you have my same problem: I need to bake the occlusion twice in order to get it right, also without moving the editor camera between the two bakes.

 

Lol verry fun so it's look interessing but how mutch take it's take to rendering

 

Depends on the selected object's conplexity, but I think ita quite fast. Try it, it is on sale now

 

Any idea if this works with alloy's shaders?

Edit: find my answer from doc: "Please note that vertex colors only visible on mesh if you use a shader that supports them."

 

Imolementing vc support on existing shader is quite simple anyway, I could help with that if you wish

 

Hi ZFarago, I purchased this asset and it surely has its uses but as I feared, it just replaces any vertex color that was already present in the mesh before baking, conflicting with current behavior of most vertex-coloring assets on the store like VPaint and Polyworld.
Is there a way to bake AO on a mesh while preserving its vertex colors, like baking only the grayscale information upon the already present vertex colors?

 

Hi,

This is something I am working on, my idea is to bake ao to the alpha channel, and using modded shaders to multiplicate the rgb with the alpha on it.

 

Perfect, thank you!
Then I'll wait for an update on the matter.

 

Not having a good experience with this. I opened up the demo scene and the VD Ambient Occlusion Window, selected the ship wheel and pressed start. At this point the editor locks up and I don't know if the plugin has crashed or what. I try again after restarting and eventually after 3 minutes (on i7 laptop) the process finishes but the steering wheel is now just a dull gray color all over.

So please at least display a 'processing...' message while the system is working but ideally do the work over many frames, giving the editor a chance to respond meanwhile - like when scripts compile.

Also let me know how to actually make it work as I just get gray meshes at present! - unity 5.1.1