Real Time Global Illumination For All Versions Of Unity! (W.I.P)

This thread has been moved to: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/233919-BG-Light-Engine-(With-Real-Time-GI-amp-Area-Lights)

Custom Lighting Engine With Real Time Global Illumination​

This project has come a long way since the start and is nearing completion. It started as a simple cheap global illumination system that used Unity's point lights combined with raycasts to fake gi.

This project has now evolved into a custom lighting engine. Add custom area lights and point lights(with advanced settings like attenuation adjustment) combined with Image Based Global Illumination while seamlessly blending with Unity's lighting to create perfect and beautiful lighting for your world. Near 100 lights can be processed in a single pass in both forward and deferred rendering, and practically unlimited lights in multiple passes. Efficiency is the name of the game, area lights are still somewhat early but a recent test compared performance of 120 Unity point lights vrs 120 Brilliant Games area lights and the area light performance was about 3/4 the speed of Unity's simple point lights!


Built In Shaders With This Package Are Now Physically based With Surface Roughness And Image Based Diffuse Lighting!!






Demonstration Of Surface Roughness On Metal




Rectangular Area Light(Still in development)





Circular Area Light With Specular Reflections







Demos for the new GI system are coming soon!



Old Demos

Web Demo: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/65183439/GIDemoLIVINGROOM/GIDemo.html


New Sponza Demo! (Unoriginal I know) https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/65183439/SponzaDemo/WarLandsGI_Data.html



Web Demo Instructions: Press 'R' to toggle sun rotation. Press 'G' to toggle GI.



Videos


NEW VIDEO! Conference Room with new Image based GI system

Official Trailer

NEW Warland Update!

Older Warland Update

Here are some screen shots on progress so far.


RIGHT AND CLICK OPEN IN NEW TAB TO SEE IN HD


Mansion Living Room Scene




Day time area lighting, orange brown walls.




Sky Light Ambience




Day time area lighting, green walls.




Day time area lighting, no gi.




Night time spot light lighting. Green walls.




Night time spot light lighting. Glorious redness




Night time spot light lighting. No gi




Sci-fi shooter Warland, GI on.




Sci-fi shooter Warland, GI off




Robot Labs, Real Time GI On



Robot Labs, Real Time GI Off






GI on large outdoor scene




GI off




Inside Building shot

 

Would really like to know your thoughts on this everyone.

 

This seems interesting. Can you provide a setup tutorial. What about the perfs ? Like you said, a demo would be very nice !

 

Its not far enough along to show tutorials yet, cause it will dramatically change. However, yes I will have an interactive demo soon.

I was also wondering if anyone can give me any insight as to how I could possibly change the light attenuation on the point lights used for illumination. If I could make this more linear, I could make this run 10 times as faster. The fall off is just so huge on unity's point lights.

 

Bump! Lets hear some feedback peeps!

 

Looks very interesting. Would love to see a Youtube video or a web demo.

 

Uploading one right now.

 

I would also like to see some example (pictures or video) where there is nature scene including different trees, vegetation, rocks, mountains, etc.

 

Living room demo up! https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/65183439/GIDemoLIVINGROOM/GIDemo.html

Web Demo Instructions: Press 'R' to toggle sun rotation. Press 'G' to toggle GI.

 

It looks pretty good
I hope it will work for outdoor scenes

 

Thank you. Yes, I am working on that. Outdoor has definitely proven to be the most difficult. Just in the past few hours though I have dramatically improved cascading for long distance. So thats one step closer, I just won't settle with draw distance, looks horrible having a black background around the player.

 

Hi,

Nice result and good performance. As i said here, a GI is a very important thing in a project. If I take a look to your competitors, you combine two advantages:
a) You are on this forum for a long time.
b) You make a very good "backup service" of your previous products.
So, if this one is affordable, why not?

And, +1 for a outdoor demo.

 

I purchased dynamicGL, but your system may be used as a lightweight-GL (for weaker PC).
200fps at what resolution and hardware?

 

is this sm2, sm3, es2 compatible? es3 compatible?

 

Nice demo, it works fine also with my home pc with GeForce 7600GT

 

Thanks for the feedback everyone. Yes I have been testing in a variety of scenes. If anyone wants to suggest or send me a good 3d scene to use and test this in, I'm all ears!

One thing I have really failed to mention about this system is it is also possible to bake this GI. Now this offers a significant advange being that it would bake alot faster than Unitys gi, and you could get seamless blending between real time and baked GI.

Honestly theres really nothing its not compatible with. If it can process point lights its ready for this. Just a matter of how fast it runs now.

 

is it on the asset store yet?

 

Is there a way to change the number of pointlights projected in the scene in runtime as well, maybe per-source-light control? Do we also get different algorithms to choose from with different calculations methods? Could be an interesting and different alternative to play with. Price in mind?

edit: does it also work in the editor?

 

Not for a bit now.

Yes you can change all resolution and quality settings in real time. You can also limit point lights to a max amount. When it reaches the threshold it just recycles them to where they are most needed.

Currently it only works in game. But it will work in edit mode very soon. I also want to create a 'static gi' creator for combining baked gi with real time gi.

 

Impressive. Runs beautifully on an Intel 3000 on a dual core mobile i7 (yeah, work gave us the crappy i7)

I agree. Some of the lighting looks a little bit odd and not as accurate, but this looks like a really fast solution.

 

Does anyone know if its possible to get beast lighting to bake cookies on point lights..?

 

This sir is impressive. Definitely a lot better than my approach (I faked GI by using 14 directional lights set to not important and adjusted them accordingly)

If you are a unity indie user, i suggest coming to my thread: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/198568-Epic-Radial-Blur-Effect-for-Unity-Indie I have posted a fake image effects package for those who want to try it.

 

I was an indie user. But your image effects look awesome.

 

New screen shots. Showing just how physically accurate this really is!

 

Screen shots from the game Warland this is being built for.

Warland Real Time GI On




Warland Real Time GI Off

 

Really impressive.
How close until release? How hard to setup?

 

Hopefully not too long. Theres still lots to do, while developing Warland. Setup is pretty simple, it depends how detailed you want to go with colouring your surfaces.

Besides that, its just a matter of tweaking settings to make it look perfect with your scene.

 

Point light bounce?? hey that's neat, it's remind me of how ND did for their flashlight bounce for The Last Of Us..

 

This is rather impressive, not gonna lie.

Can we get, and dare I say it, the Sponza demo to walk around in? Since that's be the de facto environment to demonstrate GI, why not right?

Cheers!

-Steve

 

If i understand correctly it does not work with directional light?

 

All of the screen shots and the demo are directional lights. Works with every light.

 

Your wish is my command! Sorry everyone, I had to do it. Sponza demo is now up. Contains a rotating green plane to show off dynamic objects.

Sponza Web Demo: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/65183439/SponzaDemo/WarLandsGI_Data.html

 

Haha gracias sir, whomever is lurking behind the mask...

...and I'm embarrassed to admit that a couple months ago, in Chris's GI thread, I asked for any demo other than Sponza, and here I am asking for you to supply one!

Thing is, I've been playing with nothing but Sponza GI demo's that for realtime demonstrations, it's a fair comparison to test the different realtime solutions, so I will never speak ill of Sponza again!

So, I have to say two things stuck out for me:

• Performance is excellent, and then I realized I was using my old 2009 iMac(8800GTX, 4 gigs ram) to test it...on my Alienware m17xR3 (580m GPU, 16gigs ram) the performance is ridiculous, dare I say in excess of 100 fps. It's CoD smooth with my faux-math addition of 40 frames per second, haha...(it could be 200 fps guys this machine is very fast despite there being superior mobile GPUs)
• ...and the reason I'm rather impressed by the performance on what you're calling a faux-GI solution is that short of missing a bounce or two here and there (e.g. the floor behind the curtains up to the wall gets no light whatsoever where indeed it would...rotate sun to either lion head to see what I mean) the effect is remarkable. There such a subtle balance of lighting, transitions to and from shadow working in concert with the SSAO, and the 'expectation of color energy' that I buy it (literally and figuratively when you make it available!). This feels good to me that I'm not going to miss the precision when you factor in the sheer speed of this damn thing.

Why do I feel this is the peanut butter to your chocolate?? Make it happen!!

Oh, and since you're granting wishes, I'll take an early copy of your asset to help you test? Mmmmm?


Cheers man


-Steve

 

Haha, thanks for the nice feedback. Yeah, this runs fast because there are alot of tricks behind this system. Its actually really low resolution which is why you can see some bounces are missing. The spots in which it chooses to place the point light sources is pretty precise, in that they are sparsley placed and none too close to occluded corners.

About no light behind the curtains... Heres the thing, why would there be light? Theres a complete wall blocking all the light. Unless the curtains were transparent there should be very little light behind them. Also remember we still cant dream of having more than one bounce in real time. So yes in real life light would eventually make it back there, but not on the first bounce for the most part.

 

Oh no I know we can't have the true fidelity afforded multiple bounces, only that the sunlight does make it through the top of the curtains, and it clearly causes the adjacent wall to collect light, and that right there is why it feels incongruent.

No biggie, just the only real standout thing in an otherwise fantastic solution.

Cheers

 

New detailed debug feature showing bounce light reflection directions. Also, note the 'smart' light placement. Lights avoid occluded corners and only place where needed for lightning performance.

 

Yeah for sure. Well it really depends how high of resolution you want to go. All the settings are public so you can go as nuts as you want. I am developing this to actually perform in a game, so I need it to have lightning fast performance. So all the demos I make are going to be in lower resolution because its designed to look good in low rez. Though unfortunately things are missed once in a while because of this.

But of course I give everyone the choice.

1. Fast performance while still looking good.

2. Slower performance but more accuracy(Something players are less likely to notice).

Next demo I will have quality settings so everyone can see its true potential when dealing with high performance machines.

 

Please do correct full screen in the demo. Resolution in it is very low.
I want to see how it will be at 2560x1440.

 

Sorry, this is a bug in FireFox.

 

Here is the official video trailer for Real Time GI. Really proud of this one.

 

Nice video!
There is a small error though, around 1 minute it says "no real time illumination". This should be 'no real time global illumination".

 

Nice one and well done.

Seems believable enough!

Can you make a demo with an fps counter?

Also what is the draw call count with and without real time GI?

 

Wow!!! Insanely impressive....for sure buy!

 

I wouldn't be able to give you a valid number. All depends on the scene and settings you have.

 

Real Time GI now works in edit mode!

 

Pics or Shenn!!

 

Sorry, Pics or Shenn?

 

Shens!!

 

So not only is this fully functional in edit mode, you can also choose to sample from the scene camera perspective.

 

One of my favourite set of images so far. Cascades are working very well(Theres very little illumination on the backdrop buildings in this shot cause they are completely shaded). The scene only dropped 15 fps when GI is turned on.

GI on large outdoor scene




GI off




Inside Building shot