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

I'm actually getting this error as well, and it doesn't seem to matter how when or where I save the scene. Before trying to ever bake the cubemap, after the error, before the error..

 

Anyone tried Lux in Unity 5 beta yet? Just porting a whole scene worked fine but the problem I have now when converting to the U5 lighting is that the mesh dont respond to lightmaps.

 

hi dweep,
what do you mean with "converting to the U5 lighting"?
lux will most likely not work with with the new deferred rendering mode as it does not fill all needed outputs.
it may work with forward rendering but will probably give you dull specular highlights due to a missing normalize (either in lux or unity 5 – you can choose ;-) ).
and to be honest: unity 5’s standard shader should replace the need for lux in most cases (although it is a bit more expensive to render).
for other cases i think about implementing lux features on top of the new standard shader e.g.: wetness, texture blending according to vertex colors, skin...

lars

 

Sorry I was being unclear, meant something like "Using Lux shaded objects with Unity 5s new lighting system". My bad

Yeah the standard shader is pretty neat (except that I miss the metalness workflow) but the advanced lux features are really nice. I got used to having the SSS around, would get excited to see it in Unity 5 as well

Don't remember if the scene I imported was in deferred or forward but it looked ok so I guess it was in forward.

 

There's gonna be metalness workflow built in support in unity 5 btw, and for the lighting system since unity 5 switching to enlighten i think it's better if we wait for it, also it seems(possibly) they keep changing something in rendering in the beta version.

 

Hello,

I am quite new to the whole PBR Shader stuff and want to get deeper into it. I bought Substance Indie package and wanted to create some PBR Models for Unity. Since I am not lucky to have Unity 5 or Marmoset or all that fancy stuff, and I know that Lars made some really good shaders (using ATS and I love it) I would like to try Lux (For models and maybe terrain).

Right now I am digging myself into Substance Painter and it is very handy. Does anybody know what kind of channels I need for Lux? Is there maybe also a viewport shader for Painter (I know there is one for Designer)?

These are the channels I can export from Painter:




I really would appreciate your help!

Thanks a lot!
Cheers!

 

hi there,
what you need is:
- diffuse
- normal
- unity5: specular (rgb) + glosiness (a)

exact the same you will need for unity 5 ;-)

lars

 

Hi Lars,

thanks a lot for the very quick answere. I will give it a try during the weekend. Hopefully this will work! I have one additional question regarding the Lux Terrain. Do I also need PBR textures for the terrain, or will it work with normal textures? If not, which software do you use to create PBR textures for a terrrain?

And maybe a second question. I would love to use Terrain Composer for the landscape creation, do you know if it is compatible with Lux, or maybe your ATS (delux)?

Thanks again!

Cheers
Ingo

 

hi ingo,
what do you mean by "pbr texture" of the terrain?
you need diffuse (including a few lighting information as possible), normal amd gloss/roughness/smoothness - just name it as you like. specular color is defines per splat using a color picker if i remember correctly: that should just be fine as regular terrain materials are dielectrics (0.02 - 0.04).

and it should not be a problem to use terrain composer. it does not offer direct support for lux but that is not needed anyway.

lars

 

Hi Lars,

thanks again. I thought, that I had to create a specific specular map. I didn't know how to do that.
I will give it a try. Hopefully everything will work the right way !

Have a nice weekend!

Cheers
Ingo

 

This is probably a dumb question but do you bake lightmaps with pbr shaders? I'm pretty new at all this stuff

 

Of what I remember you have to disable the IBL and AO settings in the material. Just check those three boxes at the bottom of each material. Then it should bake like normal. Will not look half as nice but will work.

 

So I don't have to bake it if I don't want to, right? I'm more intrested in making them as nice as possible rather than be optimized to run on low end platforms, my focus is pc. So do I skip the lightmapping all together in a pbr approach?

 

For best quality leave it in real-time. Especially if you are using Unity free. Besides getting rid of the normal texture you also disable IBL. Not sure about Unity 5 but for now if you want it to look great keep it in real-time.

 

Ok got it! Thanks for the help!

 

Your welcome. Post a screenshot as it progresses. Love screenshots.

 

Hy!
Not really relevant, but does anyone know how to set up post effects?
Pbr looks really good with some proper bloom and tonemapping, but I couldn't achieve anything convincing.

 

So I've been having a lot of fun with Substance Painter and Lux. Been working on this guy for the last couple of weeks. He'll be in the asset store soon, and thanks to Lux I can provide him with a PBR solution that just works out of the box. =) Thanks so much for your work Lars.

 

@ trideka: your screens look very nice!

@Chanhy: i do not know what your problem is, sorry.

 

Hi,

this looks really cool. I am also using Substance Painter to create content used by the Lux shader. Which shader are you using? I can only use the "Bump Specular Metalness" with base color, normal and Unity 5 output. Are you using the same?

@ all / Lars

I have a question regarding the "Lux Bumped Specular Parallax" shader. Is it possible to create also a "Metalness" variant of this shader? I looked at the shaders (Bump Specular, Bump Specular Metalness, Bump Specular Parallax) but can not figur out how to change the shader to also accept the metalness workflow.
Could somebody please help me?

I wrote in the normal Bump Specular Metalness shader, that it is darkend:

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. // We have to "darken" diffuse albedo by metalness as it controls ambient diffuse lighting
3.      o.Albedo = diff_albedo.rgb * _Color.rgb * (1.0 - spec_albedo.r);
4.  

Is it possible to expose the "darken" value to the inspector (slider, value) to adjust the darkening value?

Thanks a lot to all!

 

hi there,
it does not make any sense to expose any "darken" value.
when using the metalness workflow you have to adjust the albedo according to the metalness value. that is how things work.
lars

 

Thanks lars,

i thought it would be possible to adjust the darkening value a little bit. But if it is not possible it's ok then

 

nope, it is called "physically based shading" – so no magical sliders...
if you want to darken the output, darken your albedo texture ;-)

 

Could anyone explain me how do i use lux with rtp? no matter what i change i can't seem to turn on the cubemaps for the terrain

 

Hi, and thanks!

The Unity 5 output from Substance Painter shouldn't be used with the Metalness shader. It's for spec/roughness.

I was using just the standard Lux/Bumped Specular shader. Plugging Painter's diffuse export into Lux's "Base (RGB) Alpha (a)", and . Unity5_specgloss into Lux's "Specular Color (RGB) Roughness (A)" slot.

If you want to use the Lux's Metalness shader, use the Substance Painters "metallic" export.

If your colors look off, be sure you have the latest version of Substance Painter. The last update fixed a bug where the Unity5 export wasn't being properly converted to sRGB.

I actually now use a modified Bumped Specular shader that also has a self-illumination slot for glows and lights. Was easy as pie to alter, even for a non-shader-programmer like me. =)

 

Hi Trideka,

many thanks for your answere. Thanks to your post, I went through my whole setup and found the error. It was not the wrong exports from substance painter, it was the cubemap setting in the Lux setup file. I checked, that the cubemaps are HDR. Therefore the specular bump models looked way to bright and the metalness shader seemed right (cause he is darker) but a little bit to dark .

Long story short: Thanks for getting me to check everything again. Now it is looking fine! Yeah!!!

Cheers
Ingo

P.S. Could you post a screen from your modified shader beside the normal shader? Would be interessting for me

 

hey guys, how do you get a double sided hair shader with soft edges?. I hope lux hair can achieve that.

 

double sided: double geometry and flip the normals: there is no better way than that.
soft edges would mean rendering hair as transparent object which would mean: no real time shadows on hair.
so no support for this.

 

Hi OneWayRoad,

To help: code to flip normals
void vert (inout appdata_full v, out Input o) {
o.uv_MainTex = v.texcoord.xy;

float3 Normal = v.normal;
float3 viewDir = ObjSpaceViewDir(v.vertex);

float ret = dot (viewDir, Normal);

if (ret<0)
v.normal *=-1;
}

If alias in the alpha is hurting the hair, you could use a distance field shader to do the cutout:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/unity-signed-distance-field-textures.61243/

 

hi eddie,
i did not check your code, but in all tests i have ever done flipping normals in the vertex shader i got pretty noticeable lighting artifacts at grazing angles, so it is no alternative.
the only method that worked out was using a 2 pass shader – which in the end turned out to be more expensive than just doubling the faces.

lars

 

I had this problem too if I do not calculate the binormals of the mesh.

 

Hi Lars,
does button to get meshes in cube mode probe got discarded? I do not see it in my fork.. Only way to assign objects to use cube is manual now?
Thank you
Peter

 

and does calculating the binormals help?
i thought it was an interpolation problem...
how would the code look like?

 

i never found the time to add it to the official repo. it is only present in a custom fork.

lars

 

With Transparent/Cutout/BumpedDiffuse shader:

With twoSided shader:

 

what happens when you slightly rotate the camera?
don’t you get some strange popping in the lighting?
or even artifacts regarding specular highlights?

 

Has I said, I don't know why, but the problem pops when I import the normals.
I put the backface in red to acentuate the problem.

 

ok, thx for the info.
how do you get aniso like you did here



I have already tweaked all the settings but all i get is rim. tried Aniso direction to (0,1,0,0) and (1,0,0,0). Still no aniso.


@ Eddie: thx

 

all hair strains have to be laid out parallel to each other e.g. parallel to the v-axis.
this has to match your aniso direction.

 

it might be the smoothing angle: hard edges mean: vertices along those edges are doubled.

 

this is the map i use in the model. can you show me the map you used in your hair model?

 

hi onewayroad,
ALL strains have to be parallel like in the texture sheet below:

 

should it work if I test it on a plane?

Edit:

I tested your whole map in a single plane but still no good result.
I dont know but in an experiment, I painted hair vertically as you said but still no aniso.

 

If you can paint anisotropic direction on a texture, you can paint them in any direction and use the modified shader I shared some page before, however I have never find a solution to do the painting so lol

 

I've also been struggling with getting the anisotropy looking good, even when the hair strands are all oriented vertically. Has anyone had any luck with this, and if so could you share some tips?

 

Show all the map channel you are using

 

Hi lars i've been following this thread for awhile now and am considering finally making the jump to Lux. Before I do so I have a few questions of course! First off I am using your AFS shaders for all of my foilage and it has become an essential part of my project. I am wondering if these will work nicely with Lux and what changes I may need to make. Secondly I am wondering what the performance impact of using Lux will be. I am using Unity pro 4.6.

One last question that maybe someone here might answer. I am also using RTP for my terrain shaders and mesh blending. I am wondering if anyone has used this successfully with Lux as well? Thanks.

 

Not sure about RTP but Lux and AFS get along pretty well. You can let the Setup AFS script control IBL but I usually use the Lux script to set up the IBL. Either way it works and looks great.

For me there is probably a 3-6 drop in the FPS using Lux. Nothing major. Considering the quality gained it is well worth it.

 

So I went ahead and took the plunge and installed Lux. A very big decision since my project is so far along but so far things worked out much better than expected. Worked great with RTP and everything else I am using. AFS as well but I have one simple problem someone might help me with. When using deferred(Unity Pro 4.5) I can see through my trees using the AFS shaders. I know this has something to do with the transparency and is easily fixed by switching to forward rendering but I get a slight performance boost in deferred as well as being able to use many lights which is important. Any help is greatly appreciated!

 

hi there,

i have just started to port some lux shader to unity 5 beta (v17).
the first one is the lux pre integrated skin shader – which got a little update and now supports "deep subsurface scattering" or translucency.

if you take part in the unity beta program you can grab the shader from the git repo:
https://github.com/larsbertram69/Lux_2.0

others might follow in the nearby future.

lars