Livendas CTAA

Hi

have you guys seen Livendas new AA asset?

http://www.livenda.com/ctaa/

Looks pretty good, price is comparatively high to a lot of other store assets, but I guess it can be a pretty essential thing to have.

Was just looking for thoughts, opinions etc. Request the demo and they should send you a link to download them from.

 

The form to get a download link for the demos doesn't seem to work.

Compressed videos on youtube aren't all that useful to see how good it is

 

I wonder if it's using Unity 5.4's motion vectors or some internal solution.

 

Looks like it, they only support 5.4 and above.

 

Before doing purchases or having any interest in the asset do a background check here on the forums and re-think.

 

Interesting asset but I doubt I could ever trust this developer. He has a very shady track record.

 

Yeah, their reputation around here seems to be pretty bad. There's no way I'd risk buying a 249$ asset from them under these circumstances. Especially outside the official assetstore framework that might offer at least a tiny bit of buyer's protection. Them trying to sell it directly outside of the assetstore, is a giant red flag for me, given how unhappy some of their customers in the past seemed to be. It's a pitty, because it's quite possible that their CTAA is actually a great solution. I just wouldn't want to depend on them when a Unity update breaks the asset or something similar happens.

 

How does it compare to Unity's own TAA?

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/temporal-anti-aliasing.412482/

 

Someone mind filling me in on what this negative stigma is thats associated with the developer? Ive never heard of them up to now

 

Why not do a search?

 

Reviews on the guys existing assets on the asset store are also worth reading.

I have no personal beef with the guy. But this thread reads suspiciously like an advertisement.

 

id search if I had any idea what it was, it could be bad manners on forums or a scammer for all i know, sorry if i came off as super lazy

 

because when information is not immediately critically important it is faster to ask. Someone already know the answer and will be able to summarize it in 2 sentences, or just throw few links.

 

Lol, no advertisement, I just wanted to see what their product can do, so once in a while I checked its status. I think they can make some pretty good products, shame about how they've handled customer support in the past though.

Anyway since I hadn't seen any asset store thread or general thread about it since "release", I wanted to get peoples views on it.

And the form on the website did work for me, I filled it out and later received an email with a link to download their 5 demos which you can run and enable disable the CTAA along with a few other functions.

 

For all the guys to lazy to enter the name into the search form themselves:
http://forum.unity3d.com/search/6187738/?q=livenda&t=post&o=date

Thanks to the search I remembered why the name was familiar:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/re...tions-for-unity-5.342803/page-11#post-2451346

They were the devs behind Candela SSR... people got burned by them completly neglecting support for it. Seems to have gotten so bad they were kicked from the forum, maybe also from the asset store.

THAT most probably is why they are only selling their assets over an external page.


That price though.... holy ****!

 

Bit the bullet and bought it. Of course I couldn't determine if forward rendering or Valve renderer is supported as my intent is to use for VR. I'll let everyone know how it works out in the project I'm developing. The demo looked great though but I didn't see it in the Vive so I can't assess the quality in VR yet.

 

Oh, well until they make a thread about it at the store forum or something like that please share here impressions and experiences. Hope it's worth the bucks since it is on the pricey side for anyone who isn't looking to make a decent return on their project.

 

Because someone will eventually post a link. .

(Count me in the too lazy to search crowd)

 

bought it as well yesterday but haven't received a download link yet.. I've never had a digital download be this far delayed and it's frustrating especially when they send another email to you advertising to "buy it now" when you were expecting the download link.

 

Caveat emptor.

Buying a tool for Unity that isn't on the asset store is a sure sign something fishy is going on.

 

Well unless they are a reputable source that is trusted, (obviously LOL).
I'd honestly prefer to put my stuff on my website to keep my 30% lol. But, it's harder to reach out to people that way when you lack marketing skills lol.

EDIT: Just noticed you said that isn't on the asset store, that I can agree with too, if it's not on the asset store I wouldn't trust it either. Unless they actually tried to put it on there (and some proof of trying). Then a why for a decline would be nice too.

 

In many cases even if you offered the price 30% lower on your website, I'm likely to buy from the asset store. I tend to prefer larger, centralised stores.

So the 30% actually gives you access to a larger market share. There are a lot of people that won't buy directly off of small websites.

 

I'm the same way... But something like back in the day Normal Bump or whatever it was called. I enjoyed that program and was worth the purchase from their site... But I also do prefer a larger store. But at the same time, a larger store = more competition and can easily be pushed to the bottom and never heard from again.

 

I'd rather try to fight in a busy market than starting my own market. I don't know about others but it seems more logical for me

 

Oh no I'm not arguing against it. I'm only stating that if I could survive in my own market for just my products I'd like that more than anything. But until that day comes, I am very happy using stuff such as the Asset Store/Steam, etc.... Just saying, it's fairly easy to get pushed to the bottom and nobody ever find your stuff in big markets.

 

People get warned but only have themselves to blame. Not even sure why since TAA on bitbucket is really good for free.

 

If it's through PayPal you could file a dispute, but other than that nothing you can do

 

@hippocoder : After this dispute with not receiving his product, shouldn't it be safe to say to remove this thread considering the dude hasn't even come back to comment considering he was on at 5:50 AM yesterday. and this was posted on Wednesday + the bad rep they are having.

Seems like it would be safer to remove this from the forums in my honest opinion.

So nobody else gets ripped off. + this isn't even on the right section I think.

 

I received the PC version Friday morning. Apparently they process every order by hand and they are in Australia. I'm still waiting for the VR version of the asset to be sent to me. Also if you read through comments on their YouTube video they claim that they will offer through the Asset Store just not at launch.

 

If you remove the thread a) all the warnings here to potential other buyers are lost, and b) someone else will later open another thread most likely. If someone finds the link here but doesn't bother to read even a quater of a 1 page thread, before dropping that kind of money, it's their own fault.

 

Yeah but if there's no thread + crap marketing = no knowledge of it lol.
Just kidding aside, I completely here you on that. That's a good point.. I know it's a lot of money, but honestly it's not always the buyers fault. There should be some sort of regulations to be honest. As they say "Guilty by association". And generally it's always true. So being it's allowed to be advertised on the forums: it may give Unity a bad name + legal trouble. Yes I know Unity would win the court battle, not because of money and high class lawyers, but just because they have nothing to do with it, but I'd rather avoid it all together.

Where I live, people are constantly sue happy, if you so much as look at their expensive Lamborghini (Yes there are a few where I live) they will sue you for fear you're gonna rape them LOL (you get what I mean - not literally rape them).

I'm just the person to avoid situations altogether instead of turning a blind eye and then have to go to court because someone spent whatever it was and never go their product.

I do agree though it's weird to buy something and not get it within 30 minutes or so. generally these things are automated.

 

@contempt They wrote back to me about my order, they said the same thing about processing it manually. I told them that they've advertised that the download link would automatically sent after purchase.. they've responded staying that the link has been sent a few times and that it's bouncing back and asked me to provide them with a different email address.. I told them that's it's likely the email settings on their web store because I'm obviously able to reply to your emails.

 

I guess you did not read the previous warnings or links? see all the replies at this page for example.

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/re...ce-pbs-reflections-for-unity-5.342803/page-11

If you ever get the product or not, please tell us here what happens

 

@Ostwind a few moments ago they sent me a download link but say said "Please note this version is the for the PC/Console version and not intended to be used with VR, it will look wrong. You should receive the VR version download info very soon." I'm aiming for VR so I can't test this right now. It seems like their webstore may of had some technical issues , they've informed me that they just finished uploading the pc/console version and they would send the VR version very soon. (I'm receiving the files via drop box)

 

The usage of Dropbox for a store front worries me

 

Don't mention the S word!

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

I don't understand how Livenda can claim "best in class support for VR devices" yet is unable to immediately give you a download for the VR version.

In fact I wonder if it will arrive before Unity's motion vector fix:

- Temporal Anti-Aliasing

Can anyone confirm CTAA is using Unity 5.4's motion vectors?

 

@movra Livenda replied this morning and said I will get the updated VR download in the next 24 hrs with a few fixes and additions. lol whispering: "Soon" is a bad word, I remember.. hopefully not this time.

 

If I would be mean, I would now grab my popcorn and take a seat.

But having been a customer of livenda before, and not being that mean, I wish people who bought this best of luck. Hopefully you get a working product, even though I question if it will work better than other Temporal AA solutions until proven wrong (which makes that price pretty steep, given you get one for free from Unity).

I also hope livenda stepped up their customer support game, given that might be the ONLY thing setting apart this 250$ TAA Solution from Unitys free one.

 

Could someone who owns CTAA shed some light on how the asset works?

For example how well it performs, if it's using motion vectors and how good it is over other AA solutions.

 

Any news on the people who were promised a VR solution soon?

 

Coming "soon"

 

So they started to get some very concerned customers wanting answers in their own forums... and so they just deleted their forums. The livenda forum has been taken down. Today is the last day of their sale, and they have still yet to produce the VR builds as promised. This is all super shady. I'm sorry for those that bought this.

 

The VR builds are probably not going to come until Unity fixes motion vectors in VR so... good luck with that, I guess.

 

We were thinking about buying this, even with the bad reputation of Livenda we're in need of a TAA solution for our game and Unity's TAA is not working for our game right now (everything is blurry when moving).

Reading all of this comments it seems like Livenda is back again working on its bad reputation so we'll wait for now

 

Are you SURE that Livendas solution solves this problem? Because I have seen the same problem in Epics TAA they ship with UE4, its been a problem since the start and they haven't fixed it until I switched back to Unity this spring, so at the current point, until proven otherwise, I would guess it is a deficiency of the temporal AA approach.

There might be ways around it, IDK. But if Epic haven't implemented one 2 years after having shipped their newest game engine with that very same temporal AA as one of the main marketing bullet points I wouldn't get my hopes up that a small Developer selling Unity Assets will have found a workaround implementation, even disregarding livendas bad rep.


Could someone shed some light on wheter Livendas TAA solution solves the issues with massive motion blur at high settings that other temporal AA solutions suffer from? (With livendas bad rep, and the No Mans Sky marketing debacle just behind us, I wouldn't trust what is shown in livendas marketing videos)
If it would, that might put the high asking price into perspective, as neither Unitys nor Unreal Engines official implementation seem to have made any progress on that.

Which in my opinion makes TAA useless for anything other than static showcases. Moving from outright useless AA (FXAA) to AA useless as soon as ANYTHING moves in the scene (TAA) is not really such a great development.
Stuck with MSAA only working in forward rendering, and Downsampling being the only really viable AA method that works for deferred rendering, the wait for the AA "perpetuum mobile" continues.

 

Have you tried SMAA on ultra quality setting with a sharpen image effect after it?

 

The free MSAA from @Chman works pretty well for me, and i don't notice blurriness while moving. It also works with deferred rendering: https://github.com/Chman/SMAA

Also check the TAA Unity thread: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/temporal-anti-aliasing.412482/page-3#post-2768862
Seems like they know about the motion artifacts and are working on it.

 

Actually that is on my to do list. I did not get around to try SMAA because I THINK the new image effects were mostly limited to Unity 5.4, and I did not brave the upgrade yet (nor did I really have time for it) from Unity 5.3.

Testing the new AA options will be one of the first things I will do as soon as I have made the upgrade.

Is the free SMAA version also working in Unity 5.3? Might try that earlier in this case.

Yes. Epic also has known about it for two years, and were telling devs that they were working on it. As far as I know, nothing really has come out of it yet. Given there is not some breakthrough I am not aware of, I have little hope for Unity solving these issue in the near or mid future.
I would rather guess that TAA ends up on the heap of failed tech that was a cool and innovative approach to get around some technical barriers, but fell short of expectations.
And some other AA algorithm will show up and maybe achieve better results.

 

Yes it works in 5.3. I got it way back when it was first released in May 2015 (i haven't updated it since though. I really should update it since there are many new commits ).
I used it through 5.0, 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3. (it also works in 5.4)