VFX Editor

Hi,

Any news about visual vfx editor?

 

Seen a few posts asking about this, it's not in 2018.3, but there is a git repository that has the current setup if you want to try something out that isn't ready for prime time (I wouldn't recommend it).

All things considered i'd guess you could expect this to be released in a worthy state some time next year about this time, give or take. It's a ways off.

All this said as a fellow effects artist i'm really excited for what the new prefab systems will allow me to do with my particle setups and workflow.

 

Thanks for infromation.

 

Currently theres an VFX editor branch for SRP on github side and it's likely it'll be bundled with SRP there in the future too as it's HDRP specific thing. It will eventually find it's way to package manager but that will take a while as it's not even in PRs for SRP master yet. See this thread:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/general-hdrp-vfx-thread.554326/#post-3692257

or if you want to try other things along with it, I have experimental branch that also includes VFX editor here:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/experimental-srp-for-testing-new-features.554455/

 

This may be a silly question but is this meant for games or more so for film? The demos they have previewed look gorgeous but also like they would melt modern consoles. I realize that you could make it more performant by reducing beauty settings/number of particles when creating a graph. Mainly just posting to see if this was going to be aimed at and be a viable solution for real time games/vr.

 

A lot of the recent upgrades to particles are GPU based upgrades, which means lots and lots of particles for very little cost since GPU's are workhorses at making many many many calculations, combined with draw call reduction for duplicate particles. Long story short is these are particles that don't interact in gameplay and the GPU is able to take 100% of the load. They exist in their own simplified reality of 2.5d and are overlaid on top of the project towards the end of the render pipeline.

You'd be surprised how performant these systems are and are absolutely viable for real time, in game use for many platforms.

 

Worth noting that there are two things happening here, particles that are computed on GPU and node based editor.

Competition has had GPU particles for years already and those are used in those games running with those engines already. It's not a new thing for anything but Unity. It does enable way more simulated particles on the screen on upcoming Unity titles.

Node based editor is what industry is going for as well, Unity is not the only one here. It's a different worfklow and combined with GPU compute, it'll bring new kinds of advancements.

In general, these both will bring benefits for both games and visualization use cases and they don't rule each others out.

 

I know why you would put it like that, but I think it could give the wrong impression to some people. But I havent spent enough time with the VFX system yet to be able to give clear and simple examples of what I mean. So for now I'll just say something like 'interaction in one direction is certainly possible (CPU->GPU), several different sorts of collision are plausible, and I dont think I would quite describe the world they live in as being 2.5D'.

I know, I know, if I'm going to be pedantic about this stuff then I should really provide more info than I am able to in this post.

 

I've loved compute shaders for years, as well as the work Unity did to make compute shaders in Unity work with a range of platforms despite differences in these platforms graphics APIs (the days when this stuff was DX11 only are long gone).

So to have a system that effectively turns graphs into compute shaders is very special to me. You can even see the compute shader code that is generated by the graphs in this system