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

Discussion in 'Works In Progress - Archive' started by LIVENDA, May 22, 2014.

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  1. Stormbreaker

    Stormbreaker

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    Realtime graphics are based upon fake effects. We don't have the hardware yet to simulate real world physical interactions, which is why we have algorithms to simplify the problems into things which require less computation. Will 99% of players notice that dynamic geometry isn't casting bounced lighting to surrounding geometry? I doubt it.
     
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  2. nasos_333

    nasos_333

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    Depends on the game i guess.
     
  3. Stormbreaker

    Stormbreaker

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    Well, unless the game is based on bounced lighting I doubt it. I didn't even realise The Last of Us had GI on the player flashlight till I read an article on it. And as all lights and static geometry will be simulating GI, unless the dynamic geometry is large and/or strongly coloured, it will be very hard to notice that it isn't reflecting light.
     
  4. nasos_333

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    Indeed, but i can imagine scenarios where this dynamic effect could provide an extra cool factor. Rare as might they be :)

    Imagine a monster comes in the sun light, i would expect it to bounce light based on its color. In some cases would make a big difference (depends on surrounding, scale of space etc)

    But i bet there will be a solution for this in both this asset and Enlighten
     
    Last edited: Aug 30, 2014
  5. blueivy

    blueivy

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    In Livendas old pos
    quoting because this post says that spectra does pre-proccess and not baking. Also that dynamic objects will bounce light back into the scene which enlighten does not. But I guess all our concerns will be answered Monday.
     
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  6. kurylo3d

    kurylo3d

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    Your always goign to be faking something. I am looking for ways to make things easier and more cost effective for artists and designers.
     
  7. mrbdrm

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    the faking i am talking about here is what we have seen when the shadows where faked and instead of making the game better looking it did the opposite.
    my point is if you're going to make GI do it right or stop wasting your time and disappointing the users.
    and talking about the hardware, the current PC generation can and with playable frame rate.
     
  8. JecoGames

    JecoGames

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    To do GI "right" real time ray-tracing would have to be used which is not possible on today's hardware,the closest we are to it is by mixing it with rasterization e.g:Approximate Hybrid Raytracing - Build 3:

    But even the above technique does not perform that well. Games have been faked for nearly all their lives and will continue to be for quite a while yet.
     
  9. JecoGames

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    I wasn't responding to you,and I can agree where your coming from in terms of how intuitive it is for artists. But the baking being talked about in enlighten is the same baking that spectra is doing(from what I can tell) they just bake all static geometry. A bake like that shouldn't take too long(few minutes at most) and after that you can add,move and remove lights as you please
     
  10. blueivy

    blueivy

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  11. Pulov

    Pulov

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    OK, its monday!
     
  12. Stormbreaker

    Stormbreaker

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    Bring it on Livenda. Time to prove those nay sayers wrong :)
     
  13. nasos_333

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    Indeed,
    Do they use baking in the system from the video ? Does it support moving objects ?
     
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  14. Thiago-Crawford

    Thiago-Crawford

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    The suspense!!! I wonder how many people have checked this thread today...:D
     
  15. Pulov

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    Meanwile as entertaining... I found this stuff related to the voxel cone tracing.

    it runs in unity, not bad no?

     
  16. blueivy

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    @nasos_333 no, no baking whatsoever. And yes it works for dynamic objects.

    @Pulov the guy who made that video never released anything after that. It's a shame vct seems to be the most promising of all the gi techniques.
     
  17. nasos_333

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    Has this been released on the store ?
     
  18. Mauri

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    I read somewhere that Voxel Cone Tracing is an expensive technique and thus needs high-end graphic cards to run smoothly. Is that right?

    @nasos_333 No, this was never released by the creator.
     
  19. LIVENDA

    LIVENDA

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    Hi Everyone,

    We have completed the first batch of videos however they are taking longer then anticipated to compress and upload, we should have the first one up by later today or latest by tomorrow and the rest will follow together with the other relevant information mentioned in our previous post.

    Cheers

    BTW. That video of VCT is DX11 only (also not possible with DX9 and OGL in Unity at this stage) & single bounce
     
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  20. Pulov

    Pulov

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    To compress video use a software called HANDBRAKE it is free and makes MAGIC. Simply drag the video and click process. The output is 1/10th of the original size and the quality is practically the same. I use for uploading my captures to youtube.... At least give us an image!

    https://handbrake.fr/
     
    Last edited: Sep 1, 2014
  21. Thiago-Crawford

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    While we wait, I was wondering what country Livenda is based in? And how many developers are you?
     
  22. blueivy

    blueivy

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    Ugh I'm so hyped for the video, you guys don't understand! :D
     
  23. nasos_333

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    Will the system keep the initial plan to allow use in non DX11 games ? How long after the DX11 will that be available ? And what perfromance should we expect in non DX11 vs DX11 ? Will the non DX11 be usable in heavier games ?

    Thanks
     
    Last edited: Sep 1, 2014
  24. Mauri

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    @Thiago Crawford Australia

    Can't wait for the videos either!
    And Livenda, please check your PMs and/or e-mails if you have time :)
     
  25. LIVENDA

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    Thanks! will take a look.

    We are located in Sydney Australia and currently a five person team (does not include admin personnel) plus few other developers working overseas involved with our other projects.

    I think you miss understood, I was referring to the video posted by Pulov, Spectra GI works in all platforms DX11, DX9 and OpenGL !
     
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  26. Vagabond_

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    i got the popcorns already, only waiting for the videos :)
     
  27. nasos_333

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    I see, i though it refered to the soon to be released video :)

    Great, cant wait for the video
     
  28. blueivy

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    On their website they have three pictures showing their screen space path tracing. I need it D:
     
  29. nasos_333

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    The pics with the pool in the video ? Or other ones ?
     
  30. blueivy

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    It's under candela ssr and it's like a spaceship type of scene
     
  31. FogGobbler

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    They must have long working hours at Livenda ;-) He wrote the last post at 01:45 , if I´m not mistaken..
     
  32. Thiago-Crawford

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    That's why I was wondering where their office is based, so yeah its pretty late there :eek:
     
  33. blueivy

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    Oh wow it's almost 3 in the morning in Australia. Glad there dedicated to getting the video out there!
     
  34. JecoGames

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    Problem with the demo you showed is that it will only work in small scenes as the sparse voxel octree technique is not used,also hybrid raytracing can also be used to compute real time soft shadows which this cant. Anyways,both techniques are still too slow,both are running in small scenes with not much else happening,it wouldnt run at all in games,next gen will be when the truly real time stuff comes out(for consoles at least)
     
  35. janpec

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    Waiting for videos, first screenshots look promising.
     
  36. Stormbreaker

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    Where are the screenshots?
     
  37. blueivy

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    Their website, it's the spaceship environment pics under candela ssr. You'll probably have to click on them to expand them.
     
  38. Frenetic Pony

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    That's just the much vaunted "screenspace pathtracing" which is frankly still screenspace and of questionable usefulness at best. Plenty of other people have done screenspace diffuse GI before, and it's not temporally stable and so ends up being worthless other than a neat tech demo.

    I'm interested in the videos of whatever lightmapping scheme they've come up with, but I suspect it's something along the lines of other schemes I've seen over the years. The problem with GI is it's an O(n) squared operation, and the more actual bounces you have the more time, exponentially, it takes to compute. And there's no possible way around that.

    At a guess I'd say they were just doing some bi-directional thing with light inter-reflection going into extinction, which could and should produce some really weird and unexpected results when you actually use it. Along wiht a bunch of other hacks like only storing limited range occlusion or geometry information at all. Which will work under the exact right circumstances, but will break completely under others.

    While I'm always willing to be proven wrong, you can't beat the math, GI is hard and even Hollywood has spent the last decade struggling with it, and they get huge render farms. So I'm always doubtful of a "new wonder solution that does it all!" Especially if it's being packaged and sold, if and when new awesome solutions come out it's usually in the form of a paper that says "hey this is neat and might work."
     
  39. KRGraphics

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    I just saw the screenshots... it's pretty imrpessive... I would love to see the videos in motion too... to see if there is anything kind of flickering or noise in the renders...
     
  40. Thiago-Crawford

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    How are the videos and stuff coming along Livenda? :)
     
  41. nasos_333

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    Maybe would be much faster if they just exported a webplayer demo, than try to make a video

    It is always many times faster for me too, making videos takes a huge time in order to get them right

    Plus with the demo i could tell the performance and see exactly where i would use it in my game, a video wont mean much in that regard and is not exactly what i would like to see first.
     
    Last edited: Sep 2, 2014
  42. Pulov

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    THe spaceship screen is quite old.

    I'm also concerned about this being screen space effect as I've found tons of limitations with the SSRR. Hope the SS is only limited to dynamic objets or to an specific technique.

    My popcorns ar cold by now.__
     
  43. StaffanEk

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    Livenda never posts webplayers, I think it is against their religion or something. They probably consider it strictly haram.
     
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  44. nasos_333

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    I did not know it is screen space, interesting
     
  45. nasos_333

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    I cant buy an asset without a webplayer in this case, i tried another asset here in my laptop and was barely playable even at the small demo, so the performance is the most basic factor to actually buy and use this in my game.

    I am sure there will be a demo though.
     
  46. HappyCoder84

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    Having fiddled with Unity5 beta, I can definitively say that UE4`s lightmass, hands down, produces much better results.
    Enlighten does work. But only for water-tight meshes. Any lightbaking method has light bleeding issues where meshes are not connected without any gaps. But, for now, Unity5 Enlighten poses some light bleeding issues.
    And in general, Its GI effect is not as strong as UE4`s lightmass.



    I`ve tweaked every setting and option there is to get it to look as good as UE4. Unfortunately, It`s not possible.
    GI is stored in the form of cached data, which is used at runtime(just my opinion,,). Which are saved in atlas maps, the resolution of which varies from 128 all the way up to 4K. You can up the indirect lighting resolution of individual objects by scaling up its UV map space. But it looks horrible right now, so it`s better to just leave it at the default setting.
    And that makes adjusting the GI resolution of the objects individually very difficult.

    No matter how you teak the options, it doesn`t look anywhere as good as UE4`s lightmass.
    You can find almost V-ray quality UE4 scenes in the UE4 community. It`s for arch-vis, not game. But still, it`s quite an achivement.

    Opaque shader is a big dissapointment because it doesn`t look that impressive.:(

    the video shows Enlighten GI wokring at runtime. It works good for something as simple as that.
    But, for anything complex, you have to divide the model into several different meshes, otherwise you wouldn`t even notice the GI effect because of the inherent GI resolution problem mentioned above.
     
  47. Thiago-Crawford

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    Well it is still Beta 1, so maybe some things will improve before release. How much they will improve I don't know.
    Also, enlighten is used by other studios to produce great results, I don't know why Unitys implementations should limit that.

    It's a bit early for me to judge, but if Unity's visuals don't improve, switching is something I will probably do. Retrain for a month and have great visuals, or spend loads of time trying to tweak Unity to make it able to do what other engines can already do.

    But who knows, maybe Livendas solution could be a better alternative all together, lets hope they give us some details soon.
     
  48. Pulov

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    That video does not look that bad. If the quality is map resolution based sure they will find a way to solve. Something like a megatexture that loads higher res or parts of the texture as needed.

    About the screen space. THe only thing I know is that in tha screen shot it says Screen Space Path Tracing. May be other techniques are not limited that way.
     
    Last edited: Sep 2, 2014
  49. Pulov

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    It has to bee quite late in Australia by now, looks like it is not going to happen today either.
     
  50. FogGobbler

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    oh, the videos, screenshots and things are coming soon... :-( .
     
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