Lux-an-open-source-physically-based-shading-framework

Lars, you are truly a shader magician, amazing what you can make in a few days work : D

Edit: Btw, did you think any about making a hair shader to compliment this as well?

 

Days? If i could type faster Lux would have cost me not more than 5 minutes ;-)
And hair mens anisotropic specular highlights means even more work…
We will see...

Lars

 

I suspected there'd need to be some adjustments. Looking forward to the results!

 

Whatever i'm medium term faffing with atm (not entirely sure what it is yet) is intended to pimp out loads of good stuff, nice awareness and i get to learn lots of things for a long term plan. What I was thinking was having all the systems i figure are great work, even if they oppose, will be given a chance, with an interface or something, so hopefully that should result in the ability to see lux, skyshop, jove all get a look-in in decently different logical situations that infers gameplay, even if there isnt a game, as such, and these not so much opposing (Unlike my water things) as seemingly causing a lot of confusion as to what people need, although I cant factor in alloy atm as I don't have a copy and not so sure with Jove as the creator has taken on quite an ambition away from pbr shaders atm

I'm hoping to see that there's not a ton of difference from one to the other, other than what just feels 'right', and they all do look great, and i'd like Lux to get a decent look-in a lot because it's definitely not slacking.

Luckily all my other things i say i will do will end up being useful here so its all to one goal, and it will get done just time involved.

Also regarding Unity 5's possible threat to these kinds of packages, i think its minimal - its nice of Unity to provide this approach and surely do a good job of it but they won't be able to update things constantly and won't be as flexible as Lux etc, i mean seriously who expects Unity to provide a configurable eye shader? So yes, i think these things can have a long life and no doubt broaden their horizons as they feel necessary, and remain 'agile', in mover and shaker speak

 

Days! Github never lies and it says the entire project was created less than a week ago!

And I'm sure this is your first attempt at shader programming on top! Probably picked up one of them learning pamphlets "Teach yourself shader programming in 24 hours."

 

It's nice to see some code person bravado going around! If you got it, flaunt it

 

As you can see UMA have no problem integrating with LUX, it's merely a matter of having the right specular textures. The wings are using Lux Bumped Specular and the rest of the character is UMA default shaders.

Please notice the last two sliders, they uses uma to affect the specular channels of the atlas!



Large webplayer
http://glscene.com/unity/wings/wings.html

Smaller webplayer
http://glscene.com/unity/wings/wings800.html

 

WHOA! That sir is impressive, except the wings look a bit out of place in your screenshot... is that due to the atlas adjustment?

 

It looks different because:

 

The goal is to get specular maps for the rest of UMA as well so the lighting can look consistent across the character. I could have balanced this scene a little better by toning the specular color down a bit and such getting a more consistent lighting, but since I'm aiming at using only lux shaders I'll wait with tweaks until it's all there.

 

I'm assuming Lux uses gloss maps? Those specular highlights definitely need toning down a great deal and roughened up especially in the thin skin of the wing membranes. An idea for a Lux shader might be a transmissive/sss one, I think Alloy has such a thing, it could get the wings looking really nice, perfect use for it really. Even after importing i havent had a go because of distractions but i'll get to it soon i hope

 

Great looking screenshots you guys this asset looks great

 

Awesome stuff!

Can't wait to see a uma character fully rendered with lux.

 

thanks!
but i think it is mostly the model and its textures...

lars

 

Looks great lars. Incredible detail. When is the Asset Store going to post Lux?

 

i don’t know. i am waiting for it to be approved for about a week.
may be it is due to gdc?

but you will always get the latest version from the repository: https://github.com/larsbertram69/Lux

lars

 

@UnLogick niosop2: fair enough. what does UMA stand for again? I am presuming it's the PBR implementation in Unity 5 that you're talikng about.

@Lars: A HAIR SHADER?! Or is that just very cleverly modelled strands?

 

UMA = Unity Multipurpose Avatar

It's a way of assembling unique humanoids in the editor or in the game at runtime. Procedural people.

 

Interesting I found this thread. I actually need a hair shader that is PBR and lux looks like it's up to the task. I should ask you Lars if these shaders will work properly even though I have Alloy... thanks a bunch, and great job here man.

 

@hopeful: HUH?! I had no idea this was possible! Just saw it, and i now know where they got 46 values from...

@Neptune: isn't alloy a metalness workflow tool? I am so sure i read in a recent post that Alloy works ok with lux...

 

It's another PBR framework/shader pack that also includes some tools, and uses metalness. I would think that having Lux installed w/ Alloy might cause the Alloy shaders to look a little different since I seem to remember that Lux modifies the way Unity handles stuff in deferred a little bit. So, it could work, but you might have to adjust the Alloy shaders/textures to account for that.

 

Yeah, I am not gonna risk that right now

 

Geezz....Lars....don't you ever take a break....????

 

Lux will "break" alloy – or alloy will "break" lux as both ship with a modified prepass lighting shader.
Where "break" means that thinks will look slightly different after having installed one package over the other.
But that only happens if you use deferred lighting and on shaders that uses the deferred lighting pass.

The Lux hair shader however is forward for it comes with its own lighting function giving you anisotropic specular highlights.
So it just works completely independently and does not interfere with alloy.

Lars

 

Unity Multipurpose Avatar, it is a free open source package. Version 1.0 was launched on the asset store 25th of December. It requires Unity 4.3.1 or higher.
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/13930

It is open source in continuous development and there are multiple publishers offering cheap content, character editors and other extensions.
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/search/uma

Since then thousands have downloaded the package and played around with it. The latest release 1.1 correctly handles additional bones, like the wings I showed in a previous post.

The uma shaders have always been a weak spot. The quality wasn't amazing and it required special pre-processing of the textures. Many people have been looking at Marmoset and Skyshop, wishing for a higher quality. And now with Lux being open source we can finally reach that higher quality. We will still support the old uma shaders for mobile and other weak platforms.

Now that Lars have made shaders for skin, eyes and hair, we have our work cut out for us to create the needed specular maps to harness the power. Unfortunately it feels like we have three coders for every artist, so it may take a couple of weeks before we're fully there.

I suspect we'll do the integration in two steps, first we convert everything to the lux bumped specular shader to get the one draw call advantage. And then we add skin, hair, eye shaders one at a time.

 

Sweet man... And hair is all I needed . Do you think you could create a package of these shaders and put them on the git?

Nevermind, downloaded the shaders...about to have a play

 

hi there,
right now im am still finishing the first version of the hair shader.
i will upload it to the repo as soon as it is done. may be tonight, may be tomorrow.

lars

 

Cool... and I will definitely play with this... Needed a hair solution that can handle many shells

 

well – it uses alpha cut out. so shells are no problem…

 

Hi there,

the hair shader is available at the repo:
https://github.com/larsbertram69/Lux

please make sure that you read the "_Lux Hair Shader.txt" – especially if you want to use this shader along with solutions such as skyshop or alloy.

lars

 

Amazing work Lars! =D

I´ll have to focus on recording some extra tutorials for UMA, but as soon those are done, I´ll take a good look on providing the necessary textures to get UMA + LUX fully working.

Cheers

 

thanks fernando!

 

@lars: YES! a hair shader! turns out i was right... And thanks for pointing out the Alloy workflow compatibility, i obviously heard wrong...

@UnLogick: Yes, i saw that in the asset store: amazing looking asset! and i reckon i know where you got the 46 values from!

 

Ehhh, I was hoping to avoid that... I have VERY detailed hair (taken from zbrush, and the cutout shaders are VERY ugly to look at

 

sorry about that, but anything else would be more than rocket science...
how would you handle transparency in deferred? or even in forward? and still provide correct real time shadows?
all there is to hair rendering i am aware right know is using post processing effects.

lars

 

hi there,

i have completely rewritten the hair shader and added some more features:
- support for specular shift and noise texture
- setup the shader according to your uv layout / tangent orientation: it is now a bit less picky (and much more accurate).

so that is how it looks now:




lars

 

Can I use Lux alongside Substance Designer PBR substances in Deferred Lighting mode? I know the docs say that it overwrites the specular computation, but so far the highlights on both Lux and Substance objects seem to be ok, but I haven't really spent much time testing. If not, is there a way to export the maps from Substance to match up with Lux and use Lux shaders on them? I'm kind of an idiot at Substance Designer so I don't know how to correctly export specular and metalness maps to make them work in Lux.

PS - That hair shader looks awesome!

 

Yes you can, in fact I highly recommend it. Do you have designer or did you just want to use substances? If you have designer you can use the channel Shuffle node to combine the channels to the required layout. There's an SD shader you can use to get results similar to what you'd get in Unity inside the SD 3D view. It's somewhere either earlier in this thread or in the original thread in Showcase. That shader uses the specular workflow, not the metalness one though.

When it talks about overwriting the specular computation, it does that to work w/ Lux, so using Lux shaders will be fine. It just affects using non-Lux shaders.

If you don't have designer, I could whip up a substance that would take separate maps and combine them them into a format Lux likes if needed. If you need that, let me know which workflow you would prefer so I know what inputs/outputs to make available.

 

Thanks for the quick reply! I do have Designer, though I just got it recently and it still sort of scares me. Specifically I just bought their Indie Pack ( http://www.allegorithmic.com/products/substance-indie-pack ) which has Designer and also includes 30 premade PBR substances. Those were the ones I was wondering if I could use alongside Lux. I don't know how they determine their specularity so I wasn't sure if I could use them out of the box alongside Lux, or if I would need to mess with their specularity maps in Designer.

 

You'll probably need to mess with them a little bit since using either the metalness or spec workflow in Lux requires packed maps, while (if I recall correctly, not looking at it right now) SD outputs them as separate maps. So you can use the PBR shaders w/ minor modifications, mainly using the channel shuffle node to pack the inputs to the appropriate channels.

 

That hair shader looks absolutely beautiful lars, im falling increasingly in love with this thing with every day going by, its growing at a huge rate at superlative quality. I hoped to get to lux-ish stuff today too but everything takes much longer than one expects, but hopefully befire the end of the night i'll have all the relevant terrain maps in place to start trying out the vegetation shaders with RTP when i next wake, and it seems a whole load of fun stuff awaits after that with Lux. Really impressed

 

For anyone interested in working with Lux via Substance Designer 4, I ported the early version of the shader here:
http://forum.allegorithmic.com/index.php/topic,917.0.html

I haven't updated it with the new features in Lux, but it will still give you a closer result than the built in shaders. I may get around to it again when I need it, but if someone else wants to do it feel free to !

As was mentioned, you will likely have to tweak the substances you got with SD4 to match the Lux result, this is due to differences in the shader algorithms/parameters/inputs between various physically based shaders.

 

You mention using the hair shader with the likes of Alloy and Skyshop. Do the other PBS shaders you have work with Skyshop?

 

Yup the cubemaps generated by skyshop work great w/ Lux. I'm assuming the spec on the Skyshop shaders would be a little off if you used those w/ Lux installed though.

 

Thank you niosop2 and hd_!

 

I re-textured an old model of mine to test Lux shading, and I got to admit I never expected it would work that well, LUX IS AMAZING.

 

I highly doubt they would work out of the box, cubemaps in skyshop are convolved in a different manner, Ibl and scene lights wont match.

you can still capture hdr cubemap probes with Lux, from Skyshop skyboxs.

 

How does that compare to this shader? Isn't the Lux one a bit more dull? Or is that just a difference in the models / lighting?

 

Do they use a different convolution? I was under the impression they were compatible. Could we get confirmation one way or the other from Lars?

 

i think lux alters the light prepass shader (only vaguely aware what that is but picked it up while reading things) which affects the specular

alloy does this too, meaning alloy and lux can kinda break each other, apparently, and im guessing the alteration would change marmosets specular too