[Coming Soon] SpectraGI Advanced Real Time Global Illumination For Unity from Livenda

Hello Unity Community!

Greetings from LIVENDA

It is with great pleasure to announce the first details intro video of our
soon to be released Unity Plugin

SPECTRA GI
Advanced AAA Real-Time Global Illumination Irradiance Simulation
Dynamic Path Tracing Plugin for Unity Software

OFF-LINE QUALITY GLOBAL ILLUMINATION IN REAL-TIME

​

SpectraGI delivers unprecedented quality with up to 20 indirect light bounces at unrivaled performance levels redefining Real-Time Global Illumination Technology. Proprietary hybrid dynamic Path Tracing is also utilized elevating the final output to new levels of realism only matched by unbiased off-line renderers.


SpectraGI provides the ability to light the entire scene with physically accurate HDR real-time skylights at pixel perfect accuracy with up to 20 bounces. Dynamic Day/Night cycles have never been this easy or looked so good.


SpectraGI package will also include advanced dynamic Shadow casting physically accurate Area Lights in the GI loop together with the ability to use textures for light color luminance plus colored projection. Video demo coming soon, which will show what SpectraGI Area lights can do.


SpectraGI for Unity Pro works in all platforms DX11, DX9, OpenGL in both Deferred and Forward rendering paths.


SpectraGI will be available soon on the Unity Asset Store.

We will update this thread as often as we can with further details, video's, technical information and release date information, so keep checking regularly.

You can also visit the Livenda website for further details, release date announcement or to join our newsletter for the latest progress. You can also follow us via Twitter

* Features are subject to change until final release

 

Take my money!!!

 

This is really astonishing!

 

Awesome trailer!

 

looking good now I'm waiting to see it in action

 

^ Seconded...

...I very much desire to see that pool room transition from Sun up to Sun down into that nighttime, artificial-lighting shot, as in the stills that room was utterly spectacular.

Cheers

-Steven

 

What does the Off-Line mean?

Seems like a catch... Will this be better than Enlighten?

 

Off-Line renderers such as Mental Ray or V-Ray used in 3D applications for lighting simulation. Basically means not real time.

 

Looks promising. At first I was like "Would pay even 1000USD for this!" but then I realised that there were so many projects like this and none of them actually meets my expectations. Nevertheless, I can't wait to see it in action.

 

Unity 5 Integrated into Unity 4

 

I just shipped my pants...

 

Hahaha...loved that commercial

 

Looks amazing, very much looking forward to it.
Bookmarked!


BTW, what's with the "Alienware" logo?

 

Well.. could do with a bit more to go on, and hopefully coming soon doesn't mean Candela's version of coming soon, that pool did look very nice though

 

The only question would be the performance. Would it run smoothly on mobile devices?
Looking forward for more updates!

 

Because they are aliens???? seeing from what the selling to us
*jk

 

cool

 

Awesome

 

Looks awesome!

Can't wait to use this in conjunction with your Reflections.

Will both your products have continued support and work in unity 5?

Cheers

 

I don't need to comment on how good this looks, however I would like to point out a few things.

I literally had to pause the video to get an idea of the quality and to my surprise, even though this is labelled as "dynamic", the scenes looked 100% static (correct me if I'm wrong but I checked multiple times). If you are only to that stage in development that's fine, but it seems more appropriate to show WIP screenshots rather than a marketing video. The scenes were shown for ~3 seconds in a 79 second video, the first thing that comes to mind is that you are trying to hide something, not saying you are but that is the impression it gives.

Next thing, the FIRST thing that I want to know, and I assume most people also do, is how does this compare to Enlighten in Unity 5? I realise this is hard due to it not being released yet, but surely you have a general idea on a few points of difference?

Anyway, looking forward to footage showing it in realtime.

 

I know this is a WiP and things may change in the future, but perhaps you can speak to work flow/integration?
Will this require the use of specific shaders or will this be more something we can just drag into a project some what like your SSRR?

(edit) ... I know this is likely much more involved than a Screen Space effect, but I mean, will we be able to just replace the lights in our scene? Or might this impact other parts of a project (ie shader replacement/merging required)?

 

What about normal lights such as Point lights and/or Spotlights?
There are only HDR real-time skylights (through HDR images?) and Area Lights mentioned in the entry post

PS: I've send you a PM ^^

 

I will have an heart attack!

 

HOLY CRAP... that is all.

 

So, I'm very curious. Does this work similarly to Enlighten, where it's path traced and then it generates a glorified lightmap on another thread (in real-time, on any device), or is it closer to other GI solutions like LPV and VCT (and therefore desktop/next-gen console only)

 

i have SSRR i love it and although we actually seen nothing i trust that it will be as good as SSRR
i already got GI asset and that was a waste of money, hope we have a real solution here.

 

Yes, Absolutely!

We will post more specific details / Technical Videos etc. very soon. Enlighten is primarily a re-lighting system with very 'specific' requirements for the workflow. With Enlighten, Dynamic objects (well almost all small scale objects relative to the environment) will not contribute to the GI solution, they will only receive bounced light, just like the current Unity baked probes. We will talk about these in more depth soon as there are significant differences compared to SpecraGI.

More details to be released soon, thanks again for your interest.

Yes, all lights are supported including our Advanced shadow casting Area lights, video coming soon demonstrating the Area lights alone. Any custom 'sky system' ( IBL is of course supported if you like to use it, be it static or dynamic) can also be used to light the scene. SpectraGI also comes with a very advanced Dynamic Sky system with full support for Day/ Night Cycles.

First, Enlighten does not do Path Tracing, however there is a pre-process 'workflow' for the initial GI solution for all static objects. If they change, it would need to be re-calculated. SpectraGI is not based on LPV / VCT or VPL's , more information coming soon.

Cheers!
Livenda

 

Looks great! Can't wait to see some footage!

 

So if you had to guess, does coming soon mean weeks, months or years?

 

Looks great, cant wait for a demo

 

I need to buy this !

 

I assume you'll be able to light with emissive materials?

e.g. for light bulbs, florescent tubes, neon tubes?

 

Any update or eta?

Thanks

 

Will it run on mobile?

 

Yes it is possible in the most part, it's good not to assume anything with GI It took Unity three years to get Enlighten working for UT5.

Hi, we will be announcing the release date this coming week.

Thanks for your question, we cannot provide a comprehensive answer at this stage regarding mobile compatibility however we are certainly aiming for it!

Cheers.

 

I cant sleep after know that this week we will get more news, many thanks for that !

 

Are you sure this is a 100% real-time solution? No data bake or something?
No performance cost @20 light bounce, no light leakage, sounds too good to be true!

 

Hi,

SpectraGI utilizes multitude of advanced methods in order to achieve its dynamic global illumination results. There is a small amount of data processing (which is your friend, where visibility and light transport is computed) and everything is real-time after that. Unlike the Enlighten solution, SpectraGI also uses Real-time Path-tracing which provides the ability for dynamic objects to bounce light/color bleed back into the environment! and this is very significant. Enlighten is unable to get bounced light information from dynamic (small scale) objects (they will only receive bounced light), there is also a much, much longer pre-processing involved.

The 20 light bounces is the theoretical limit, however this is definitely not necessary as the GI solution will normally converge after 2-4 bounces. The bounces are also amortized over a number of frames so there is no impact on performance. There is also no light leakage as visibility is pre-computed.

We will be posting further information regarding the workflow including a few more videos shortly.

Cheers.

 

Don't tease us now ... This is gonna be awesome... also will you be taking advantage of the HDR nature of skyshop? The latest version uses reflection triggers and box projection so I can imagine with a few clicks, we will have Spectra GI set up.

 

Any news on the release date and comparissons to Unity 5 system ?

 

Can the data processing / pre-computation part be executed in runtime?

 

<looks around...taps monitor> "Hello...?"

 

Here here. A tad more info, or better still, a release date would be fantastic. Anything?

 

No release date for you!

 

Awesome

 

This looks very interesting and highly advanced, perhaps a bit too advanced to be 100% true to its advertisement and

I have two technical question regarding its capabilities and general usage:
1. Will this be more advanced than CSSRR though in the sense that it works with Stereo Rendering and Occulus as I've had to find out the hard way that all the 'neat reflections' vanished the moment I wanted to make use of it in its real project which is a occulus based visualization.
2. will it work with Alloys Shader Framework so we can get not only lit materials but accurate materials too (leaving out U5 PBR here as too little is known at the time)

 

Hi LIVENDA,
probably many other people are checking here a few times a day just as i do , we all need some new information on this... Most important, performance and expectations for release date... - everything else looks and sounds just cool
Regards!

 

yes ! killing the F5 key everydays !

 

Hi Everyone,

We greatly appreciate the response and are working diligently to bring an advanced Global Illumination solutions to Unity. The question everyone has been asking, the release date... well this is not set in stone however at this stage everything is looking good for a 'tentative' release date for late July or early August.

We cannot wait to share with you what SpectraGI brings to the table.

Thanks for your questions, and in relation to your first comment, all of it is true. SpectraGI did not just happen over a weekend, we have spent a better part of two and a half years of development and research (much before we started doing plugins for Unity) on this project. There are no hacks for 'proper' and 'dynamic' GI, technically speaking it is an O(n2) issue. There is also no point on developing a GI solution when it does not scale to real game level scenes, and without resorting to external DCC tools to make GI work, plus many other considerations.

Also, to answer both your points, SpectraGI is not comparable to Candela SSRR in anyway (Candela SSRR is a ScreenSpace based post process) we will be proving more information regarding the workflow soon.

Cheers!
Livenda

 

We appreciate the effort our alien brethren, im sure this will appease the indie folk. As a quick parting question however - how have you tackled screen grain? This appears to be the major issue related to path traced GI solutions.