[RELEASED] BOCS Shot - Photo Realistic Screen Shots

Asset Store Link:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/53774

Manual:
https://goo.gl/BqOs0h

Description:
Create stunning photo realistic screenshots of your game assets in just a few clicks.

Version 2


Support
Please post any questions in this thread.
​

Version 2 WIP Thread (Cycles):
https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/wip-test-released-bocs-shot-v2-blender-cycles-integration.416345/

Version 1 WIP Thread (Luxrender):
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/wi...listic-screen-shot-rendering-in-unity.377211/

System Requirements:
Unity 5.2 or later
Windows 64-bit
*Mac currently unsupported

Special thanks to the Luxrender and Cycles coders for their help and support
Visit them at:
http://www.luxrender.net/
https://www.blender.org/

 

Congratulations on your release. Asset looks great so far and I've already got an application in mind for it. Will the rendering work during runtime or is it strictly editor only?

 

Thanks.

I'm not exactly clear on your question so hopefully one of these will answer your question.

1. Yes it will continue to render if you run the game. I would suggest pausing the render if you need to test the game.
*You can change the # of threads the renderer uses to save a few for your game.

2. The rendering engine only works in editor, so you can't use it in a build.

3. You can pause your game and send it to the renderer. I used this method to let the physics engine simulate some objects, then sent it to the renderer.

 

How would this handle a more natural environment like outdoor terrains ?

 

Thanks for the reply bocs. I was hoping to be able to use this inside a build.

 

Currently it will work with any Mesh renderer or Skin Mesh renderer in the hierarchy.
I'm still thinking on how to handle Unity terrain.

So outdoor scenes are not really a limitation of the renderer.
check out some scenes done with it:
http://www.luxrender.net/forum/gallery2.php?g2_itemId=211

If you have a scene you can share I'll give it a test, it would help me see where I need to improve the asset.

 

What would be your use case?
technically it could with a few changes to be used in a Windows 64bit stand alone.

I assume everyone understands this is not a "real time" rendering system, as a single frame could take minutes to hours.

 

This was generated with Gaia - its vanilla unity terrain and speedtree and a few other models.

When you can support terrain it would be really interesting to see what your system can do with something like this

 

I work for an enginering company that fabricates and installs pedestrian bridges and shelters for public spaces. I've written a product configurator that allows clients to configure our products for their own use. It would be really cool for them to be able to generate a photo realistic view from inside the program after their selection is complete. The program is currently widows 64bit stand alone.

 

True. However, for anyone not familiar with LuxRender and GPU path tracing in general, you can have interactive rendering like this one:

It is not too far from real-time rendering and usable in some interactive application/context.

 

A customer asked for recording support...
Next update will have basic recording.

It's as simple as dragging a prefab to your scene...and pressing play.

Excuse the bad example, I'll try to post something better soon.

 

I have it working at runtime now (ie the AVI recording), but stand alone build I ran into an issue.
I send the renderer textures by path..and it loads them from the harddrive, but stand alone has them packed into an asset file.

Ideally sending textures from ram to renderer would fix it, and something I would like in the editor version too.
would it be acceptable in your app to dump the textures to a temp directory?

 

That would be fine. I can see no problems with it. Purchased your asset yesterday and it works perfectly. Thanks for a great system, I'm excited about the possible usage into the future.

 

an attempt at doing outdoors....

 

I updated the first post with a Demo link.

Demo:
http://bocs.site/BocsShotDemo1.1.unitypackage
*Preview limited to 256 x 256, doesn't have Screenshot or AVI recording.

 

Version 1.1 Accepted to Asset Store:
Added: AVI recording prefabs
Added: Assign Render Camera
Added: Custom Render sizes
Added: Stop render on Pass, then auto save image
Added: Texture UV Scale, UV Offset
Added: Matte Translucent Material Type
Added: Sky Light Type
Change: Default Tonemap to Auto Linear Bug Fixes and some code refactor

 

Any news on terrain rendering conversion? I can't really use this program without terrain.

 

Hello?

 

Forum thread owners don't always receive a notification of a new post in their thread. If you need a timely response, best to use either the dev's (@bocs) support email or send them a PM.

 

*Unless you quote , like one of my posts or tag my name with @bocs, I don't get notified when someone posts(you can always email too)

I have the terrain working (as you see from the images above), but haven't added grass or trees. Paused work on terrain as i'm working on a huge update, and even switching render engines.

Very early preview...notice i'm switching to cycles and coding a node editor.


Just saying next update should have terrain, and a new faster render engine with visual shader editing, and hopefully runtime support.

No ETA yet...I will post as I make progress and submit to store.

 

Sorry.

Damn, I actually purchased specifically for LuxRender. Oh well, Cycles will probably be much easier to work with.

Would it be possible to use the full Blender node system? Perhaps as an optional text input file?

Would it be possible to use Unity point light cubemaps?

It is possible to use an equirectangular cubemap with Cycles. But Unity 5 uses a "six frame layout".

Spoiler: Here is how the equirectangular projection works in Blender.

 

Lux will still be included..but not developed anymore. (trust me you will like the new system better)

It will use all the nodes available in cycles.
Keep in mind cycles is not blender, you do not have to have blender installed or know how to use it.
Just as before everything will be included in the asset package.

As for your other questions...if it can be done in cycles, it should be possible.

I'm currently in the process of adding all the nodes to the editor, here are the ones I completed last night.


*Remember it's early WIP and not the final look of the interface, just getting things working first




Also @Everyone
May 23,2016 - May 27, 2016
I will not be around to answer emails or respond on the forums (Moving)

 

Fantastic work. This asset should be in every archviz developers toolbox.

I see you added the texture generators. Would it be possible for both Unity proper and Bocs Shot to use these textures?

 

I hope your move was painfree.

Have you had time to work on the asset? I'm curious if you could use Cycles lightmap baking directly in Unity. Cycles is worlds less painful than Enlighten.

Here is some info on getting directional lightmaps with cycles. The problem is that lightmaps are 8bit per channel and I haven't been able to clamp emission to a single color in Cycles. Also, only the strongest ray should influence the directional pixel, not a combination of them all. (emission power shouldn't influence color. Emission power should only affect light ray "importance")

Here is a panorama render to spherical harmonics converter.
With this one could potentially populate the light probe data and ditch Enlighten for good.

I'm not saying these things should be part of this asset, but it would be great if one could implement these changes with the help of your asset.

 

Sorry, didn't get a notification someone post to this thread.


I have worked on it...turns out it was alot more work then expected, but getting there!
found out cycles was missing a few things, for example it depends on blender calculating the tagent space.
*What this means is normal mapping didn't work.
It's missing some nodes, and just buggy too for example they forgot to expose the distant light enum. (Means directional light wouldn't work!). They refactored the code from a month ago, so I had to do alot of fixes and changes. Point is, I've been fighting their code alot more then I expected.

Lightmap baking is exactly why I switched to cycles. It will be a different asset if I can get it working.

This is nothing fancy, but think I finally fixed all the issues so I can start to polish the code and submit the update (no ETA yet, still lots of work to do)

 

I finished up the camera settings:
Setup Enviroment shader
Ambient Occlusion
Exposue
Depth of Field
Bounces, and other settings...


Again nothing fancy, just some standart unity prims...
Set some DOF and had it focus on the sphere. (you can focus on an object or set a distance)

 

Hi,

i was wondering if you made any progress recently. The Asset looks very promising and i have already bought it.

I hope the switch to cycles is going well. Maybe you could even give an E.T.A. ?

 

Hi, @bocs
It seems that you aren't using LuxRender anymore, but Cycles instead.
One advantage of using LuxRender was to have a spectral-based renderer, which isn't available for Cycles AFAIK.

Do you have a solution to bring back that to Cycles, or do you plan to stay in RGB ?

 

LuxRender will still be included...(just not updated for now)
I don't think cycles has an experimental branch or anything equivalent for spectral rendering.

Hard to pick "the best" rendering engine, and I looked at alot including yafaray, OSPRay, Mitsuba, Cycles, LuxRender and others.

In the end cycles had a few features I wanted that the others didn't.

Check out the WIP thread, I did release a public preview version:
https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/w...ender-cycles-integration.416345/#post-2854299

 

Version 2 has been submitted to the asset store
*message or email if you would like the update right now

This version has been completely rewritten

*Cycles render engine
*Full Shader Node editor
*Runtime support
*Cuda GPU acceleration
*Image Filters
*Realtime scene sync

Check the Orignal Post for more info, and new images!!

Click Here to view: https://goo.gl/lbAKXA

 

Wow i'm impressed, they approved it in 1 day!!!

Version 2 Now available on the asset store

http://u3d.as/ny7

 

Version 2.1 submitted to asset store

Improved: Shader/Light Conversion
Improved: cycles scene sync time
Added: Camera Lighting presets (Sky,Soft White,HDR)
Added: Material presets (Shiny, Glass, Chrome, Metal, Checker, Wire, Light)
Added: Scene View render
Added: Auto Sync Lights
Added: Mesh Cache
Added: Colorspace warning
Fixed: crash if no camera tagged as Maincamera
Fixed: proskin icons

check here for more info in WIP thread:
https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/r...ender-cycles-integration.416345/#post-3077082

 

Hey. Could it be possible to call per api the cycles bake command (combined pass) per material (e.g. all geometries with leather material.

You could expect that alleather geometries have correct light map uv set in uvset1.

Output would be the combined bake as texture.

 

Hello!

I am trying to use BOCS Shot for a particolar context and i have few issues:
I got my object in scenes generated in runtime. This means i build meshes and download textures from my server: when i try to take a render shot i got two major problems:
-Light component seems to not work. If i go to inspector and change intensity it seems to work. I just add Bocs light component, i just have to call some refresh type command?
- All the scenes go purple. By the editor it seems BOCS can't see or use the Texture on the materials. As i say materials are created at runtime and Texture are downloaded, created and assigned.

There's a way to make it works?

 

@Nevade
if your updating the light in script, I believe you need to call this function:
BocsCyclesServer.UpdateObject(target);

as for the textures, they need to be saved to the harddrive so cycles can load them.
currently no memory to memory transfer.

if you want to put together a simple project, I can take a look.


-----------------

Since i'm posting, thought I'd share a sneak peek at a new feature:
AI denoiser

Same scene rendered @ only 32 samples!

 

Yes, i saw that in your editor cache code you use guid to get internal path url. I got my textures in a folder so basically trying to do same things using my urls.

Light: yeah i did it, is really strange, i add component, call and update but nothing happends. If i just move the intensity it seems to sync for real.

Great for Optix!! Look for it! just what i needed
Really cool work!

 

Nothing: i can write my textures in runtime/cache folder but i presume that all the flow try to using GUID/ASSET editor system to achieve information, assuming that they are inside the project and not in a external place.
Can i write you like a mail to explain better some of the code i'm working on?

 

sure email: dabxoom@gmail.com or support@bocs.site

 

Hi,
There is attached Unity 2018_3_2f1 error on every testscene.
Do you have an solution?

 

I'll take a look, have not tested it in 2018.3.

 

Is this a new project? I can't seem to reproduce any errors.




Make sure you click this on import:

 

I checked again in
2018.3.1
and
2018.3.2
on fresh 3D projects.
API updatet.

Same Format Exeption
occurs after hitting Render.
The render window stays black. Sync window is in freeze.

 

I don't think the problem is unity version.

When you click "Render", check the task manager to verify "Cycle.exe" is running.


the error message does not help much, so I can just give a few suggestions to try.

start Unity with "Run as Administrator"

try CPU version:
open Preferences in Unity, BOCS Shot...change Computer Device to "CPU"

Maybe an anti-virus program is interfering. What do yo have installed?

Let me know if any of that worked.

 

Oh. I see. We have an very restrictive firewall and anti - virus solution. I will check with our IT and give you feedback.

 

Hi
Is there an example of skin rendering. Also can it render a char on a transparent background

 

You can make a skin shader using cycles nodes with the built-in editor. Example here is a shader to show wireframe.




You can render a transparent background from the camera settings.

 

Hi is there a demo or trial version of this for testing??

 

I only have a demo right now of V1, give me a few days and I'll try to update it to V2.

 

Can´t wait. BOCS Shot needs some further development.


Makes me really sad as you stopped your work on the BOCS Lightmapper with upcoming octane as one reason.
Out of my view it would be the best futureproof preview an baking solution for Unity with unlimited scalabiltity for free.

Is there anything we can do that you develop the Lightmapper further.
Or when you don t have the plans, making it OpenSource would be cool.

Think in a few months we could have an solution who totally outperforms progressive and there should be a lot of blender user who would like this Unity integration.

Bakery has shown another great approach.

 

Octane is S***. Getting octane installed itself is a big challenge. Entire assest store review for octane is filled with one st ar.