FXLab - Unity Effects (Does NOT require Unity Pro)

FXLab gives the power of the Unity Pro RenderTexture feature to Unity (Basic) users.

This asset allows the usage of "RenderTextures" for Unity users with only the normal version of Unity.
Simply put one of the many render options to the camera which shall render first and FXLab will generate the needed data for the textures:

Available Renderers:

Screen
Renders the view of a list of cameras into your RenderTexture, ideal for screen effects or CCTVs

Depth
Renders the depth of the scene viewed from the list of cameras into a RenderTexture, ideal for Depth of Field, Screen Space Ambient Occlusion and any other kind of effects.

Reflection
Renders the reflected view along a given plane from the list of contributing cameras into a RenderTexture. Use it to create stunning water and more.

Normals
Render the world normals generated by your scene into a texture and use these to create stunning post processing effects, like Ambient Occlusion or Raytraced Reflections.

Custom
Enhance the system by creating own renderers, the full source code of FXLab is included!

Capture Screen
Capture the current screen content right after the rendering has finished. This is combinable with post processing effects and multiple other Capture Screen components.

Post Processing
Render postprocessing effects right after your camera has finished rendering.
​

Every aspect of FXLab is perfectly integrated into the Unity GUI. Every aspect can be configured, for example:

RenderTextures:

Update Interval
How often shall this RenderTexture be updated, set this value to increase the performance.

Size Mode
Set how the size of the RenderTexture should be calculated, choose between Factor which bases the size upon a given Size factor and the current Resolution or Max Size, which limits the texture size to a given value.

Priority
Which RenderTexture should be rendered first, this allows to specify effects which react to others.

Preview
Full Preview of the rendered content.

Export the RenderTextures to make them assignable to materials! When not done, it will work too, RenderTextures will be globally available in shaders so that materials will work without much extra work.
​

This package also includes following effects (FXLab 1.1.0):

• Water
  
• Glass
  
• Soft Particles
  
• Shockwaves
  
• Heat Haze
  
• Sucktion
• Motion Trails
  
• Generic Distortions
• Depth of Field
• Under Water
• Bloom
• Luminance (Grayscale)
• Pixelize
• Vignette
• TV Noise
• Interlace Lines
• Motion Blur
• Screen Space Antialiasing (SSAA)
• Screen Space Light Shafts
• More to come!

A full documentation is available, with setup/installation, and descriptions to some effects. Every effect has a separate sample included into this asset.

http://www.dras.biz/FXLab/Documentation/index.html​

Videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKldfg4sUyg​

WebPlayers:

http://www.dras.biz/FXLab/Samples/Ruins/Ruins.html
http://www.dras.biz/FXLab/Samples/DepthOfField/DepthOfField.html
http://www.dras.biz/FXLab/Samples/SoftParticles/SoftParticles.html
http://www.dras.biz/FXLab/Samples/UnderWater/UnderWater.html
http://www.dras.biz/FXLab/Samples/Bloom/Bloom.html​

Big WebPlayer samples:

Icland Scene
Project Files Island Scene
Mountain Scene
Project Files Mountain Scene
​

AssetStore Link ($30):

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/11614​

Buy over Payloadz ($20):

http://www.payloadz.com/go/sip?id=2381084​

Facebook Page:

https://www.facebook.com/UnityFXLab​

 

I tested the demo and the affects are really cool! I like the shockwave and the water effects!
Question: Does it work as well on mac? I had some issues with other tools ...
Keep up the good work!

 

Looks really good!
does it use any better shader functions when using unity pro?

I mean are there still benefits to be gained from pro when using this assets?

 

Hi there

@Rynns:
Unfourtunately I am unable to test it myself on this devices, but a good friend of mine tested it on Mac and there it seems to work like expected
One reviewer even tested it with a mobile device and said that it works there too.

@Lars Steenhoff:
FXLab does not give any benefit to Unity Pro owners, FXLab does bring RenderToTextures to Unity, but it is not equally to the RenderToTexture System from Unity Pro. One can change the shaders included in FXLab to work with Unity Pro, this will work, but I dont own Unity Pro, so I am not the right person for this.

Greetings

 

Great work!
Fantastic effects for the Unity-Indie Developers. Thank you!

 

I uploaded a video demonstrating some of the effects by capturing the Ruins sample (available as Webplayer demo):

Suggestions about new features or effects, videos, eg are all welcome.

 

I followed this from the beggining and i think it's awesome !
Here is my suggestions :
- Add SSAO (if possible)
- Better Depth of Field :

I think do it in 2 times can resolve the problem (one texture for near objects and one for far objects)
- Bloom
- Others post effects
- If possible, for high-end computers, allow to have a full resolution texture (to have more accurate effects)
- I think i dream but shadow mapping ?

 

Hi there,

everything you mentioned may be possible. But the DoF effect is not that bad considering it uses only one pass, the screen texture and a depth texture

For SSAO I will need to create a pass which extracts the surface normals, thats no problem at all, maybe even a 8 bit depth is enough, so this will only require one FX texture, wheter its possible to create the effect in one pass or not is still something I am not sure about as I have never implementes SSAO myself, well we will see.

Bloom should be possible, I will test it later.

Other PP effects, well why not, I think I will rework the PP class to allow a separate grab of the rendered scene just to make it more precise (but this will cost some performance, every grab is expensive).

Shadow Mapping should work too, we are already able to extract the depth from the view of an camera, so there is room for shadowmapping, volumetric lighting, eg.

Greetings, Mark

Edit:

A first quickly made version of the bloom effect.

 

You have made my day.

This essentially gives me all I wanted from Unity Pro for about $1480 less.

 

How easy is it to add in more post processing effects? Would be great to get some of the default Unity ones integrated into this.

Thanks for a great product

 

Well, I made a simple boom PP effect yesterday, thats the full shader code of it, its very easy to write custom effects, one just needs to remember that fue to performance reasons multi grab effects (nultiple blur passes for example) should be avoided.

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. Shader "FXLab/PostProcessing/Bloom" {
3.     Properties {
4.         _Contrast ("Contrast", Float) = 1
5.         _Brightness ("Brightness", Float) = 1
6.         _Bias ("Bias", Float) = 0
7.         _BlurRange ("Blur Range", Float) = 0.2
8.     }
9.     SubShader {
10.         Blend One One
11.         Tags { "Queue"="Overlay" "IgnoreProjector"="True" "RenderType"="Opaque" "FXTextures"="Depth, ScreenBuffer"}
12.         Lighting Off
13.         Cull Off
14.         Fog { Mode Off }
15.         ZWrite Off
16.                        
17.         Pass {
18.             CGPROGRAM
19.             #pragma vertex vert
20.             #pragma fragment frag
21.             #pragma target 3.0
22.             #include "UnityCG.cginc"
23.            
24.             //#define SCREENGRAB_BLUR_STEPS 8
25.             #include "../FXLab.cginc"
26.            
27.             float _Contrast;
28.             float _Brightness;
29.             float _Bias;
30.             float _BlurRange;
31.  
32.  
33.             struct appdata {
34.                 float4 vertex : POSITION;
35.                 float4 texcoord : TEXCOORD0;
36.             };
37.  
38.  
39.             struct v2f {
40.                 float4 pos : SV_POSITION;
41.                 float2 uv : TEXCOORD0;
42.                 float4 screenPos : TEXCOORD2;
43.             };
44.                                    
45.             v2f vert (appdata v) {
46.                 v2f o;
47.                 o.pos = mul( UNITY_MATRIX_MVP, v.vertex );
48.                 o.uv = v.texcoord.xy;
49.                 o.screenPos = o.pos;
50.                 return o;
51.             }
52.            
53.             #define ITERATIONS 3
54.                    
55.             fixed4 frag( v2f o ) : COLOR
56.             {
57.                 SCREEN_UV(o.screenPos);
58.                
59.                 fixed3 color = 0;
60.                 for (int i = 0; i < ITERATIONS; ++i)
61.                 {
62.                     color += SAMPLE_BLURRED_SCREEN(0, _BlurRange / ITERATIONS * (i + 1));
63.                 }
64.                 color /= ITERATIONS;
65.                
66.                 color = saturate(color - _Bias);
67.                 color = saturate(color * _Brightness);
68.                 color = saturate(((color * 0.5 - 0.5) * _Contrast) * 2 + 1);
69.                
70.                 return fixed4(color, 1);
71.             }
72.             ENDCG
73.         }
74.     }
75.     Fallback off
76. }
77.  

 

Great bloom effect
For SSAO, if you dont want to use surface normal, you can use the crysis 1 implementation or the uncharted implementation : http://fr.slideshare.net/ozlael/hable-john-uncharted2-hdr-lighting (page 179)
But i'm a beginner in the programmation of shaders.

 

Thanks, I will have look into it

My colleague finished 2 bigger sample scenes, which are also ready as a project download (you need FXLab for it, the included readme file will contain a how to install documentation):

A island scene in which the player is able to walk along the beach, view the water from different angles, watch into a camp fire and can discover the depth of the water.
Project:
http://www.dras.biz/FXLab/Samples/FXLab_IslandScene/Free_FXLab_Karibic_IslandSample.zip
WebPlayer:
http://www.dras.biz/FXLab/Samples/FXLab_IslandScene/FXLab_IslandScene.html

A mountain scene in which the player can shoot some barrels. This scene includes soft particles (switchable to display the difference). A motion blur effect, shockwaves and a custom scope effect.
Project:
http://www.dras.biz/FXLab/Samples/FXLab_MountainScene/Free_FXLab_MountainSample.zip
WebPlayer:
http://www.dras.biz/FXLab/Samples/FXLab_MountainScene/FXLab_MountainScene.html

Would also be nice when people who bought FXLab can give a review and a rating at the AssetStore, this will give us a motivation boost and allows us to focus on the requests and problems.

 

hello marrrk
i m a happy costumer who bought your asset even i have a unity pro, i can t find the fire effect shown in this page, do you mind to include it in your asset if it s not already the case?

cheers

 

This package seems super useful. I would've needed something like this 2 months ago.

 

Its not part of the asset yet, but I can add it of course.

 

Great work man it's look awesome.

 

It would be great if you could add in all new effects into the asset!

 

Well we have following things planned for the next version (1.1):

• ability to allow post processing effects to be rendered into FXTexture content
• ability to allow the post processing class to grab the final scene in full resolution
• improved water plane handling when using view depth and water depth for the water effects
• improved water transparency calculation (currently only the water height will be used to determine the transparency near shores)
• Bloom PP effect
• SSAO PP effect
• HeazHaze sample (moving fireball as requested)

I am still open for more suggestions/ideas.

 

Fish Eye would be awesome!

Im pretty useless when it comes to shader programming, how much work would it be to port over one of the Pro Effects into this system?

 

This depends on the type of the effect. What effects would you like to see in the future versions of the package?

 

Well, depending on whats possible, the following would be superb:

- Edge Detection / Edge Detection with Normals
- Fisheye
- Antialiasing
- Noise and Grain

Nice to haves, but would be brilliant

 

Edge Detection: Possible.
FishEye: Possible
Antialiasing: Possible but may be slow
Noise and Grain: Possible without the need of FXLab at all.

 

Ok thanks.

How would you go about doing the Noise and Grain in Unity free?

Would also be interesting to know how many of these would be possible in FXLab:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/3842

 

Noise and Grain can be archived by moving a noise texture over the screen with a simple blend effect. The hard part is the moving, which should not be visible as moving but more like a random.. well noise. But its doable.

Most effects from your link are possible, but only FXLab 1.1 will allow full resolution post processing effects as the current version only uses half resolution textures.

 

Thanks for the info Looking forward to 1.1

 

I think you've just made a purchase. Ima give it a while to scope out, but it looks fantastic. How easy is the system to integrate into current projects?

 

Its very easy (well this may differ from what other say):

1. Add the FXCamera component to the camera which renders objects which utilize the FXLab shaders (like a crystal or the water)
2. Add FXTextures (ScreenBuffer, Depth, eg.) to the same GameObject as the FXCamera and setup the settings (every FXTexture has a set of cameras which should be used to render this texture and cullingmasks to prevent for example the water to appear in this textures)

or:

1. Click on the material you want to use and hit the button inside the material inspector which will create the required components automatically for you.

Inside of the documentation is also a step-by-step tutorial to how to setup FXLab.

i tried my best to make it as easy as possible, by also providing many options.

 

Well this looks super interesting, render textures for 20 bucks?!

I has questions:

If you dont mind me asking how are you grabing camera content? are you using getpixels()? Have you any benchmarks to indicate how much slower than unity pro your system is?

How practicle is the system for full frame/resolution realtime compositing?

You seem to know your way around shaders would anything like this be possible?

 

Hi there,

ReadPixels is the method you seek, but its really slow if used wrong, so the trick is to use it right. Grabbing the full resolution is slow, more so when grabbing more than one time, so FXLab does use some tricks to reduce the amount. I work with a very very very slow laptop (its really slow) but do test it on a desktop PC once in a while which is ~3 Years old. I hit the FPS VSync limit of 60FPS with it.

But I cant compare it to the UnityPro R2T solution as I do not own UnityPro, but UnityPro should be faster.

Full resolution realtime compositing is possible with an good enough system, FXLab 1.1 will include full resolution capturing for the post processing effects, but I discourage a heavy usage of it as every time the full resolution will be grabbed a big performance hit occurs, so massive usage of PP effects is possible but will be slow (so keep the number of PP effects low and/or try to reuse as much as possible.)

I know my way around shaders, but what exactly do you want to know which is possible?

 

There is the free trial period for unity pro? Anyhow it would be useful to know what we're getting into here not have the wrong expectations.

Ah, there was a link hidden in a word check this http://www.catalinzima.com/2010/07/my-technique-for-the-shader-based-dynamic-2d-shadows/ this sort of thing has been requested by many unity free users.

 

Well there are also the several demo webplayers I linked at the startpost, I recommend the Ruins and island demo:

http://www.dras.biz/FXLab/Samples/Ruins/Ruins.html
http://www.dras.biz/FXLab/Samples/FXLab_IslandScene/FXLab_IslandScene.html

These both should show very clearly the expected performance.

The 2D Shadow thingy would be possible but very slow, many passes need as I read, this will kill the performance. As I said lower grab count results in better performance

Can I somehow enable the Pro trial after I have already enabled it (did enable it after i first downloaded Unity a long time ago, but never used the pro features)?

 

Send an e-Mail to the support and tell them should help: support@unity3d.com

 

Sold. Great product and a perfect price. I couldn't pass it up. I'm excited for the next version.

 

few suggestions that i'd love to see implemented
-color correction
-chromatic aberration
-night heat vision

 

How are the effects actually applied after you grab the rendered image? Is it a shader?

 

Hey, I don't know how much interest you'd have in this, but currently the Unity SDK for the Oculus Rift is pro only, based on two things i can surmise - its use of a native DLL for headtracking information, which can be overcome with other basic-friendly methods, and the second it using post-effects to do the distortion of the images to work with the headset. I wondered if you were interested in writing such a shader as it would be very useful! If possible of course

There's a GLSL treatment of it, for example, here http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=140&t=17081

 

@shaderx:
I will keep that on my ToDo list.

@phort99:
Yes a shader, which needs to include a special cginc which provides all functions to access the stuff. The documentation holds a section for this (How to..).

@lazygunn:
When it is UnityPro only, what would be the benefit of using FXLab there? That said, yes its possible to convert the shader (throw a quick glance over your linked thread).

 

It's not an actual Unity Pro feature, it's that the some aspects of the SDK for Unity require Unity Pro, as described above. The DLL problem, you can use pipes to get the data from the Oculus for headtracking without having to use the DLL, which is the first reason the SDK needs unity pro. The second reason the SDK uses Unity Pro is because lack of post effects, which your contribution here seems to do a brilliant job of overcoming. There are more details of workarounds here:

Workarounds created by the VR community

Their current workaround involves using another external application, when having it as a Unity shader would definitely make it much more convenient, and easier for Unity Free users to consider purchasing this excellent technology (I find it quite unfair in this regard, not that i'm really asking for myself i've been using my OR for various other things). As the current resolution of the oculus is 1280x800, it shouldn't be too taxing too i'd imagine.

I guess certainly if you can provide the effect, you'll possibly help your sales a bit, maybe? I'd hope so, i'm sure people would be very keen on a Unity Free usable Rift

 

I don't know why, but it seems like I'm missing the link to give a rating. Anyway, just wanted to mention that it's great. Though that heat haze effect isn't in the package. Will that be a separate purchase? That was what I really wanted.

 

@lazygun:

I can add such shader, or provide it separately if you want. Is this really only a PP shader?

@AnomalusUndrdog:

Hi there, the rating is at the AssetStore page of FXLab, right above the description
To the HeatHaze effect: The shader is included, but no sample, I will add the fireball effect to the 1.1 version which will show the effect a little better. The setup in the ruins demo, which currently displays the effect uses the "Distortion" shader, which is included in FXLab, on a simple particle system. Thats all.

 

That's the current avg rating for it, there's no link to give a rating.

 

I see, you must be logged in, after that below the current asset rating a new field will appear with a "Your Rating:" prefix. But I wont nag you to write a review, just to have fun with it

 

I am. If you look, it says there "Import". You can't do that if you're not logged in.

UPDATE: Well, here's another screenshot, this time on the browser. I'm logged in but it's not there. I remember there's another set of stars below that should be there.

 

Sorry about that. With this unnecessary problems I don't wonder anymore why the review numbers are so low (not only at mine assets). Maybe one need to write a review or something like this, its really strange.

 

Superb product, I've just bought it and I will add a great 5 star review tomorrow (my English is poor and I wait for my wife to make a nice review, she is an English teacher).

Now, to get to the point.

I already got your Indie Glow pack, and there you have a control on how many times you multiply an object to create the glow... (I think there is called Factor)

Can you add a "Factor" or "quality" or "passes" slider to the current Bloom and Dof shaders please?
I want to increase the number of passes of the blur in those shaders for a better quality on powerful machines.
I kind of need a wider and stronger yet smoother blur/bloom...(sorry for my description)


Also... I know this was already requested... but...
Can you add more full screen shaders please? (it is a great help for us non-shader guys to have as many premade shaders as possible)
Here are the shaders I think of right now...
- FSAA it will be great
- A simple full-screen Blur (without bloom) but, again with a nice blur control (strenght and number of passes/quality)
- Another Glow (without blur), with controls (quality, strenght...)
- Tint and Color, with rgb controls and strenght (and even overlay mode (multiply, dodge...)
- Contrast Enhance (or something similar)



Again, thank you for your work! You really really help us, the free indie users.

 

Amazing work !!
Question: i use lots of assets in our games as SkyShop, Playmaker, Shadow Softener... i would like to use FXLab for screen effects as bloom, dof, etc. So what do you think about compatibility/performance between them?

Thanks

 

Hello,

@cristims:
I can add more passes, sure, but keep in mind that every pass will reduce the performance. The factor from IndieGlow only changed the texture resolution used, a broader blur was a positive side effect. I try to add this feature into v1.1 for every texture.

More fullscreen efffects are planned, but I need to work on some subsystems first (which makes it possible to actively use the generated textures).

@nukeD:
Well, as long as the graphic assets (Playmaker is something else, right?) will render through the normal camera system, it should work. For the performance, I doubt that it will have a large, I am sure that FXLab has a bigger impact on the performance than the other assets (I still need to work in the Unity Basic environment.).

 

Aahhhh, this is insanely cool. Come payday you definitely have me as a customer

Do the postprocess effects require special materials at all? I'm especially interested in the depth field effect for my game, how adjustable is it?

 

For the post processing to work you need to do the following:

1. add the FXCamera component to your camera
2. add the FXPostProcess component to your camera
3. create a material and add one of the post processing shaders into it
4. follow the instructions the material will present you (most likely: "Click this button to setup")

After that, you can play with the material settings presented to you.

The DoF has following options:

• Blur Range (how much should be blurred)
• Focus Distance (where lays the focus)
• Focus Range (how far away from the Focus Distance should everything appear sharp)
• Focus Falloff (how fast should the sharpness decay)

Every shader is uncompiled, so everyone with a little bit experience in shader development can enhance it or create new variations of it.

Currently it is not possible to work with a full resolution image for the effects (for example a negate PP effect will look pixelated). I change this for the next big version (1.1) so that this is possible.