Official [VFX Graph] Introducing six-way lighting for smoke, dust, and clouds VFX

Looking forward to seeing this in URP

 

Thanks for doing this.

Should there be a TX_Pyro_Clouds_A_2x4_P.tga in the ready to use library? It seems to be missing for me.

 

At this point, they might be better off adding simplified lighting paths to HDRP to make it more 'universal' (more performant on lesser hardware), and deprecate URP.

URP just seems to be getting left further behind. Still waiting for TAA.

 

Behind what? in what category?

 

TAA is now in URP, but I get your point. It wasn't a good idea to make two render pipelines, as now the developers have to either choose which pipeline make something like this on (and risk upsetting some people) or spend extra time to port it so it works on both.

Six-way particle lighting for example. Let's hope that changes soon.

 

So we shall scrap whole pipeline, because there is no six-way lighting.

I get the point, and it's not like I am fan of what unity higherups doing, but HDRP is one to be scraped in favor of URP

 

Great stuff.
Here's some feedback to inform of some common VFX workflows that cannot be done right now. If ShaderGraph support is in the works the following feedback might be moot, but until then:

• Separate UVs for emissive textures - I usually use way shorter flipbook textures (fewer frames) for emissive, this cannot be done as there's just one UV channel available.
• Emissive Texture per channel multiplier - A common workflow is to use multiple channels in an emissive texture. For example, in an explosion it's useful to be able to have soft scattered emissive in one channel and sharper flames in another for more beauty and more control. The content of these channels are then of course gradient mapped, which right now we can't do for separate emissive textures.

 

This looks extremely useful, but only relevant for us once urp is supported.

I hate the fractured pipelines*so* much.

 

I like this test project:

https://github.com/keijiro/SixWaySmokeTest

(you still need to download the ready-to-use maps and put them in the right folder before loading this project in Unity)

 

There are some advantages of this, they implement various features in HDRP in messy way, then they do it again in URP, but better.

 

Thanks for including some tips about generating content for this using Embergen in the blog post. I was able to get it working with minimal effort. Though I do need to do much more testing to make sure I actually got completely expected results, its a promising start.

 

Hi there,
I’m noticing a significant drop in performance when this is viewed close to the camera. We created some smoke effects for bullet hits. Look and perform e great when viewing from a distance even with multiple instances of the effect. But when it starts to take up the whole screen we drop like 50 frames. Any idea what is going on?

 

Hi, Orson, good to see you again.
Yes I too suspected that overdraw was the culprit here, so I switched to octagons as you said and made a distance to camera cull in the graph that kills the particles. Fps drops are fixed now .

 

Thank you very much for sharing. I am not using VFX Graph so I implemented myself based on your ideas, and it works like a charm.

 

What's the license on the library textures? Can we use it in commercial projects?

 

How can we suppress far clip artifacts for cloud VFX?
We need very large far clip distance only for cloud VFX.

I want disabling far clip (by saturating depth) option for cloud VFX.

 

The smoke is awesome indeed. It's really sad you still did not add semitransparent shadows for it, even though it's supereasy to do using dithering effect.

 

Any update for URP?

 

Awesome progress. Any chance it might end up in any 2022 lts version?

 

Hello! Great news about 6 Light to URP. So I tried to make 6 light to UPR. But I need content to understand it. It differs from HDRP. In UPR it seems like you should make your own "6 way light shader graph" and plug it into your "Output particle six-way lit mesh" (after you toggled it to be 6 way that is) So now I have a vfx urp output linked to my empty shader graph node. Whats next? I have textures and that stuff.

 

Are there some good looking examples to download, for example this effect that is shown on the gif in first post in this thread ?

 

Does anybody has a 6 light shader for URP to share

 

Can someone direct me to the information on how to use the VFX Toolkit HDAs in Houdini to bake the maps properly? My default Labs Flipbook and Mantra setups do things quite differently, apparently, and bake out a series of maps that don't correlate to the inputs in Shadergraph. It looks like Unity wants a lighting buffer encoded into R, G and B channels? I'm not even clear on that, as the information is quite sparse and only "as-is" examples of finished work shown. I'd really like to go nuts with these effects in Houdini and VFX/Shader Graphs but there's no obvious path to using it ...

 

Hey there!

I've figured out how to render frames but it appears there's no sort of compositing settings for selecting the row/column sizes for a texture sheet, I just seem to get a ton of single frames in individual textures. Also looks like maybe I'm only getting one channel? I'll watch/re-watch that video you've posted and review the steps again, try to sort it out myself, but if you have any more tips about it please let me know. Very close now.

 

I've managed to get it to the point of rendering sprite sheets, found it kinda tricky to position/setup camera and stuff because it's hidden inside the node/otl from VFX Toolbox ... however, I can't really tell what is going on with "lightmap B" ... it looks like I'm just getting an empty/blank image, and it's not clear how to control the lighting rig position/setup either ... would really appreciate a bit of explanation on how to use this. Gotten quite far on my own but still seem to be short on one of the lightmaps ("B") ...

 

If I use mplay to make a video of the sequence frames and convert it to a gif you can see what the animation looks like ...



Problem is we don't seem to be able to touch the lights, the "lightmap B" is empty/blank and it's unclear how to address this ... only alternative I know is manually building my own setup from scratch lol

 

Thanks so much for the response!

However, it seems like you're more or less describing exactly what I've done. Is there any chance that clicking that "Compositing Network" button or having an additional camera around is interfering/confusing the OTL network ? Or maybe creating things in the wrong order or something?



The light rigs are definitely on/enabled and I've been through just about everything, tried changing everything. Maybe the .hip scene has something screwed up or misconfigured in it. I'm gonna try a brand-new scene, simple smoke off the shelf and see if I can get this to work correctly in a different .hip scene. I've dived into and unlocked these nodes and even tried messing around inside them to get something to show up, to no avail. One thing that confuses me is I get a ton of "missing frame" messages if I try to composite a spritesheet unless I render the entire frame range ... ideally, I want my sprite sheet to be 8x8 and skip 4 frames but it seems like it forces me to render all 256 frames into a folder before compositing anything no matter what frame range and increment settings.

Thank you for the additional information/explanation on things, and let me know if you have any other ideas. I'm hoping that I'm just overlooking something painfully obvious, haha. In the meantime, I'll try a brand new .hip and quick fx smoke to see if I can make something come out!

Thanks again,

Aaron

 

I just realized there seems to be a 6-way smoke rendering node for both the object and stage context that are a bit different. I was messing with the `stage` context, and haven't tried the node for `obj` so I will give that a shot right fast and if it doesn't work out I'll post the .hip files

 

So at first it appeared the same thing happened ... I got two .tga file outputs, lightmap A looked OK, but lightmap B was blank ... but I went to the other folder (`\render`) and found there were 3 `.piclc` (Houdini image) files in there, and those appeared to have captured the information. I converted those to png and attached them, and let me know if these indeed captured the information (looks like it to me).

I also zipped the brand-new Houdini .hip and output folders and attached that, so we can try to figure out what is going on. I mainly left things alone other than making a more interesting smoke source and some slight tweaks to the DOP net and pyro setttings so it wouldn't be the "default" shelf tool smoke. Perhaps there's some kind of little bug/glitch in the compositing or exporting setup, not really sure. And if you can explain the intended usage and differences between the `stage` and `obj` context versions of the 6-way render node, I'd also greatly appreciate that! I've got a long history with graphics and game development but this is only my first year working with Houdini, so I doubtless have many gaps in my knowledge of the tools to fill in!

Regards and thanks so much!

Aaron

 

@OrsonFavrel forgot to tag you in my previous response so I figure you might have missed the above post. If you haven't had time to look into this yet though no big deal, I will wait.

 

Still nothing on this? I guess maybe @OrsonFavrel has been super busy or away from work or something. I'm still really interested in the subject and VFX Toolbox in general and curious if that was all working correctly. I'd also really like to see the package get some TLC and maintenance/updates, and would be willing to help out. I've kinda had this on pause while waiting to find out and have been working on custom Houdini Engine integrations

 

Ah, yes, that definitely brings some clarity to it and explains why there are two different nodes!

Sorry to hear about the complications with Karma and licensing! I know that sort of stuff can be a real pain, especially at an organizational level where you have to go through other people to get something taken care of (worked in some tech director/engineering manager roles before and those kinds of issues always got piled on me, haha). Hopefully you guys can iron it out sometime soon so we can resume some Houdini/Pyro fun!

I had a couple other big technical hurdles to deal with in pre-production though, so I've been chipping away at those and waiting patiently for more information about this. And I can keep myself occupied a while longer with those other things (mostly character/animation pipeline and tech art stuff -- been making a facial animation pipeline with Omniverse + Houdini --> Unity!) ... that being said, the OpenGL renderer is actually still pretty good and sort of analogous to using OpenCL/Sparse Pyro sims for quicker iterations, so I'm very glad to know the purpose of those nodes/contexts!

I'll be hanging around here though if you come up with any more interesting information (the documentation for VFXG is a bit "sparse", lol, pun intended) and will be thrilled to hear of it!

 

Thank you! i did not understood this feature but now i see and i must say it is pretty good! i like it, specially how it looks those clouds on that test project, it is kind of heavy on performance tho...

i think i can use it in a scene with a dense fog on a interior, kind of a terror scene