FXLab - Unity Effects (Does NOT require Unity Pro)

Hello Marrrrrrrrrrrk

Congrats to this very cool plugin. I like the effects!

But I have two questions:

1. I need more than one waterplane (island with sea and lake), but I don't figured out, how I can use two water planes. The second will be invisible.

2. If I use Depth of Field effect, the water plane will we invisible. What do I wrong?

Sorry for my bad english.

 

Thanks for the clarification; I look forward to it!

 

There is some water shader that allows me to reproduce the water effect in limbo?
I'm doing a 2d game and the distortions is heavy for my needs.

EDIT: Got it with Depht_Reflection_Refraction, but everything was very slow. what to do to improve performance?

Here is the water in limbo

 

hi marrrk where you able to upload fixed island + mountain demos?

i still see 1.1.0 on front page...

thanks in advance!

 

@vampir26:

You have several options here.
1. Add multiple FXReflectionTextures, for each plane one, add the plane defining GO to the Plane slot. This will have the biggest performance impact and I don't encourage this.
2. Just use 1 single Plane GO and reposition it (height) according to the player position (interpolate between lake and see level/height).

To why you only see one plane, I cant say much without seeing the setup. maybe you forgot to setup a layer?

The DoF effect uses the texture assigned to the DoFMaterial, if nothing is used the last generated rendertexture with the name "_FXScreenTexture" will be used. I think you only added one FXScreenBufferTexture which generates this rendertexture with this name and this FXScreenBufferTexture will NOT render TransparentFX layers by default. You can either change that (which will destroy the visible refraction of the water), or create another FXScreenBufferTexture with the allowance to render the layer your water is using.

For your bad english, I understand everything of it und ich glaube Schweizer schreiben in Hochdeutsch und Schweizerdeutsch? Ich kann mit Hochdeutsch gut leben

@Anguis:
The watershader would be a total overkill for a limbo like water, the simple "Distortion" shader should be enough and much better for the performance. If you still want to use the water shader, try a version without Depth, height and reflection. Based upon the Limbo video, its only using refraction.

For the performance: Try to keep the resolution of the rendered textures low, also keep the drawcalls low and try to use as less rendertextures as possible/try to keep the rendertextures in the same priority group.

@im: I am sorry, I still dont have an updated version of it, I will report back once its working correctly.

 

For those who want to grab the new FXLab sample scenes tonight here are both links.

Island Sample 1.1.1:
http://www.flatter.syrka.net/Unity/...e_FXLab_Karibic_IslandSample_Version1_1_1.zip

Mountain Sample 1.1.1:
http://www.flatter.syrka.net/Unity/...in/Free_FXLab_MountainSample_Version1_1_1.zip

The Main site links of the thread will be update tomorow.

Greetings

 

hi thanks

 

FXLab 1.2.0 has been accepted into the AssetStore, the payloadz version will soon be uploaded too.

Here the changelog:

- added more PP effects
- fixed shader errors when using with gles2/3 or DirectX11 devices
- added FXLab 1.0.0 as fallback option for gles2 devices who are unable to use the included shaders
- added automatically update check
- added Unity Pro support (separate option which enhances the performance when available)

 

Sounds great! Eagerly awaiting it.

 

Very Cool Asset.

I noticed that there is support for Unity Pro. How much more of an improvement to the FPS if Unity Pro is used.

 

Hi Marrrk,

The distortion effect is not working on iPhone. There's an error in Xcode

It looks like it's a problem with FXCamera and FXScreen script attached to camera object. Because if I remove the two script everything is alright except the distortion effect breaks.

 

Hi Marrrk,

I'm really loving FXlab, thank you so much for producing this!

I'm currently having problems trying to add depth of field to two cameras being rendered side by side (by setting both their viewport rectangle widths to 0.5 and offsetting the right hand camera in X by 0.5). It appears the FXscreenBufferTexture and FXDepthTexture scripts do not seem to adhere to the Unity camera's viewport settings and so render their textures at a wider field of view (equivalent to a viewport rectangle width of 1). This means the screen buffer and depth information don't map to each camera's viewport view correctly and the depth of field blur is applied to the wrong parts of the image. Do you think this something that can be worked around or would it require a fix in the two texture scripts in FXlab?

I'm very new to Unity so I apologise if I'm missing an obvious fix. FYI the reason for the two camera views is that this is a stereoscopic project for the Oculus rift currently using the free version of Unity.

Many thanks,

liitlewave

 

@ For the performance: Try to keep the resolution of the rendered textures low, also keep the drawcalls low and try to use as less rendertextures as possible/try to keep the rendertextures in the same priority group.

How do i do all those things, some simple steps would be nice?

 

EDIT: DISREGARD THIS.

The 'hidden' components were hidden and collapsed within the material header. Why Unity chose to make this is an option mystifies me.

 

Hello there, in an irony Marrrk helped me make a shader with this asset to make a proper 'solution' to getting OR working on unity free, you could use it as a basis for your own work - it works for me anyways (the stereoscopy lines up and you get a convincing converged result)

Here's a link to it http://www.pourfoi.co.uk/OculusFree/OculusFree.zip it should give you an idea of how to set up your cameras

 

Many thanks, that's actually the camera setup I've been trying to get depth of field to work with. I really appreciate the link.

The stereoscopy works perfectly, but I can't seem to get the depth of field post processing to work with the way the two camera's use the Unity "viewport rectangle" attribute to render their views to the two sides of the viewport. The screenBuffer and Depth texture scripts seem to assume each camera is rendering to the full viewport and their field of view is incorrect as a result.
I'm still looking into it using the oculusOverlay camera setup at the moment (fxLab lens distortion is too slow to use on my system) and I'll write back if I come up with a solution myself.

Thanks again.

 

Does purchasing from Payloadz enable me to get updates from the asset ?

 

Hi Marrk,
i have a little problem. Here is the problem : i have 2 cameras for a FPS, one for rendering the scene and one for rendering the weapon (i do this because the gun enter in walls if i use only one cam). But post effects only works with the cam which renders the scene and not with the weapon.
I want them to work with both cameras.

 

Heya Marrk,

Any updates on FXLab?

 

hello
i update to the last version of fxlab, and got this error

Assets/FXLab/Scripts/Textures/FXWorldNormalTexture.cs(11,32): error CS0115: `FXWorldNormalTexture.DefaultMaterialSlot' is marked as an override but no suitable property found to override

can t play any demoscene now, could you provide a fix to that? i m using the latest version of unity.

thanks

edit:nevermind you shouldn t double click on fklabscene as it seem to grab some old scene.

 

Hey Marrrk,

Shockwave BUG?

really great work, but i can't get the Shockwave to work. It works perfectly in Editor and minimized Game Window. In maximized GameWindow and Standalone Version the FXTextureAssigner doesnt assign the Texture. Sometimes it doesnt work at all, then your solution to delete the FXTextureassigner works for the Editor and minimized Game Window but for the Maximized and the Standalone the Problem still occurs. Ive tried alot but dont understand the Code to well to find a solution.

 

I've done numerous experiments and on my machine ( Intel Core i7 x980, 12GB ram, 2 x GeForce GTX580 in SLI ) I'm going from 60+ fps down to 30fps.

Even using the included example water scene I only get 37fps and when I un-tick FXCamera (script) on the main camera I get 66fps

When I build the scene and test it on my low spec machine using FRAPS I go from 60fps down to an unplayable 5fps

am I doing something wrong?

 

I have the same problem, when i play in a low screen resolution it works fine - but as i enter fullscreen mode it the framerate drops extremly much. Does everybody experience this?

 

Hi there,

I tested your assets and it was great! Totally useful for my project!
But the thing is, I want to build my project into mobile version and your shader doesn't seem to be compatible with mobile version.
I tested to build the exact same project and it's working fine on the Webplayer, but on Android build, the objects with the shader will just become a solid object like the default diffuse shader.
I would really appreciate if you can make this shader work properly on mobile.
Thank you very much! =)

 

Yeah, I discovered it crashes for iOS with the shaders I tried. I felt like I can't complain since he doesn't say it supports mobile anywhere.

Still I will join you in hoping mobile will be supported in the long run, some really nice looking effects.

 

Hello Mark,

I just upgraded to Unity Pro, I am having problem with the blackhole/distortion, after adding the FXLAB_PRO, the effect look very pixilated and some black noise.

And when I remove the FXLAB_PRO, it returns to it's intended look but I get huge performance drop, slower than when I was using Unity Indie.

Please assist,
thanks.

EDIT: Pixelize does not work with AA, not that is going to effect the outcome, but can I toggle it when I enable the effect i guess.

 

I have the same issue. Without using FXLab my project runs at 70, if I use it, it drops to 20-30 (And that's just with motion blur)

 

It's normal, FXLab's performances are based on the screen resolution.
So in full screen it will need much more than in little screen.

 

Great asset, I'm new to shaders in general and this has helped me learn tremendously.
I have a question I hope the FXLab team could answer but if anybody else has any input that'd be appreciated as well:

I've created a few new replacement shaders to use with some custom FXTextures - most everything seems to be working correctly except that I can't seem to get this one part working: I'd like to be able to write alpha values to my FXTexture, but no matter what I do they always come through as solid (1.0) - the RGB channels come through as expected, but A is always solid. Figuring this was due to the camera clear flags being set to SolidColor, I tried rendering a fullscreen quad with a shader that'd output a constant alpha of 0.0, expecting the render texture to come through clear. But no matter what I do, it always comes through solid.

So my question is: Is it a known effect of render textures (or any render targets, I guess) that the final pixel alpha channel will always be solid 1.0 or am I missing something? I can blend colors according to the alpha channel in a shader, but it always seems that the final output has to be solid despite the return type of the fragment being a float4.

Any help would be appreciated,
Thanks

 

Hi there, I am finally back in town..

@tr1stan:
This looks like an internal Unity engine assert, something which should be a class does not appear to be a class to Unity. I never encountered this problem, maybe you can reimport the package to see if this will resolve the issue.

@littlewave:
I will upload a new version the next days, this version will have the ability to handle these cases.

@Yokogeri:
You can expand the RenderTexture details on any FXTexture (FXScreenBufferTexture, eg.) component. Here you have full control about every setting. The provided documentation should handle each if not most of these settings and describes the effect of it.

@PrisonerOfLies:
Yes, Payloadz allows updates, beginning at the current released version FXLab will also notify you about new updates.

@Cyrien5100:
You can add multiple cameras to the FXTexture components, expand the Cameras properties and simply add another one, also note that the Cameras Depth settings may influence the outcome of the effects, for example: You have a MainCamera and a Weapon Camera, the MainCamera owns the FXCamera component so the stuff will be applied when the Main Camera is rendering. If now the Weapon Camera is rendering after the Main Camera the result is that the Weapon Camera will overdraw the effects.

@Kirbychwan:

Sure I added some new shaders and fixed some issues with the cameras, tried it on my Android 4.1 Archos Ti 45 mobile (well it worked so no new news about the GLES2.0 issues). On the negative side, my colleague has some private problems so the development of the thermal vision plugins is halted for now (its almost finished so I will look what can be done about this).

@flowb:
We tested it and it worked for us, did you use a previous version of FXLab and updated it? Can you try to import the latest version into a new project to check if the problem still exists? I will have a look into this.

@nomax5:
FXLab will emulate the Unity Pro RenderTextures when not in Unity Pro mode, this means that this results in a performance drop depending on the amount of used RenderTextures and the size of it. Please consult the documentation on how to save performance. FXLab uses some techniques to increase the performance but even this has some limitations.

Maybe in a later version we will be able to use more tricks to increase this, but these tricks I have in mind will only work on Windows Standalone builds.

@Arc_Blight: I am sorry for this. GLES2.0 devices have some problems with the shaders, even as these are compiled without any errors, for now I have no way to debug this issue (yet). FXLab works on mobile devices, but some shaders wont.

@Atmey: Can you give me some screenshot of this problem?

@Lucas.mv: MotionBlur uses the full screen capture, the FXCaptureScreen component is a very very slow one.

@Roland1234: FXLab does not support Alpha textures. You can try to enable them by changing the Texture formats used from RGB to a RGBA format. And you must change the FXLab.cginc file to return float4/fixed4 results when sampling the textures.

Well its possible to make use of RGBA textures but requires some changes. Alpha will also not work in the Webplayer and there might be some other restrictions. Thats the reason we removed the support for the Alpha channel.

So you can render Alpha for now, but FXLab will not use the alpha result.

If you want to change this I can provide help for that.

Greetings, Mark

 

Is there some documentation I am unaware of?

I've looked through http://www.dras.biz/FXLab/Documentation/index.html
and the PDF that came with the asset (which is the same I think) and I cant find anything on performance I've even searched for the word "performance" and not found it

Please tell me where the performance documentation is

Thanks in advance

 

Oh.. I see, I totally missed this point

Well here are some important points to increase the performance.

At the RenderTexture Settings:
- Try to keep the amount of different Priorities (Priority) at a minimum, each Priority will create a group of similar RenderTextures, multiple groups will dramatically reduce the performance.
- Set the Update Interval to something which has almost no visual impact on your rendered image (33ms is in most cases ok). All RenderTextures in the same group will use the smallest value, so you should set all RenderTextures to the same Update Interval.
- Set the SizeMode to Factor and the Size Factor to a value which does not affect your graphics to much. A lower value means the texture is smaller and the time needed to render and capture is also smaller.

The Size Factor means: How much of the size of your GameView should the RenderTexture be, which means at:
SizeFactor: 0.5
GameViewSize: 800x600
RenderTextureSize will be: 400x300

FXLab will, as said above, group RenderTexures. Grouped RenderTextures will occupy a portion of a bigger Texture, this Texture is always POT. FXLab will pack this portions so that this bigger Texture is as small as needed.

With this, we are able to render multiple textures with a minimum amount of the expensive API Calls (ReadPixels for each max GameView sized area and one Apply call).

The FXCaptureScreen component is the most expensive component in FXLab, as it does not use the described techniques above, there are still some optimizations active but these are limited.

When working with active Unity Pro settings, all these limitations are lifted as we dont need to do this to save performance.

 

FXLAB_PRO is off, everything looks fine, but horrible fps.

FXLAB_PRO is added, along with DX11: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2853559/fxlabss/fxlab03.jpg
Crystal color is missed up as well, didn't test all other scenes.

DX11 is off: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2853559/fxlabss/fxlab04.jpg still weird pixilated effects

Deferred Lighting: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2853559/fxlabss/fxlab05.jpg seems works best with pro, still not as good as non-pro effect, plus I don't want to use this method, I would lose some other effects.

 

I put the following review on the asset store, but since i am not sure if i have done something wrong, i deleted it and posted it here.


Title: Cool effects for desktop, but very slow on mobile

Nice asset with cool effects that are easy to implement into your own game.

Tried to implement "Depth of field", on MOBILE, but the prefomance droped to a few frames per second even if the rendertexture resolutions is are at 0.1 and texture update is set to 100ms.

The mobile phone is a Galaxy S3 and "Depth of Field" requires a screen texture and a depth texture, no other textures where used.

UPDATE: Maybe i am doing something wrong, because even after adding FXLAB_PRO to the Scripting Define Symbols of my trail version of unity pro, it still doesn't perform.

 

Looks pretty good! I'm impressed

I have some Questions:

1. Does the effects work when using splitscreen setups?
2. As I saw there are no Ambient Occlusion or EdgeOutline implementations, is it possible to write some myself?

 

Hello Marrrk,

Congratulations for your work on FXlab, this is realy a must have!

I have a big problem when I porting my project on android : if I add a FXlab effect, the screen turns completely pink (on Asus 7 and Sony Xperia mini). It's a shame because the game is gaining much in ambiance with this effect.

I saw in the post someone else had found the same problem, a patch was then expected. Is still expected?

Good luck and thank you for this great plug-in!

 

Hi Marrrk,

I just bought your shader package and it works great in my Unity Pro editor. I do not, however, have a pro license for Android, and when I run the shockwave shader on my Android device (Galaxy S3) it renders in the fuschia error color. I purchased this shader pack in order to avoid buying a pro license for Android and iOS because it was my understanding that all the effects would work without renderer textures at a cost to performance.

I am using:
- FXCamera (script)
- FX Screen Buffer Texture (script)
- Shockwave (script)
- FXLab/shockwave/Shockwave (shader)

- My main gameplay camera use forward rendering
- I'm building to Open GL 2.0 graphics level

Am I missing something here?

 

Hello
I bought your shader package ,really beautiful
I wanted to ask if it was possible to obtain effect "Sun Shafts" Camera Motion Blur "Glow Effect"?
Thaks

 

Hi

I would like to ask if all or some of the assets found in the demo scenes can be used for a commercial product, especially the crystals and some of the foliage. Also assets from the island and snow demos.

Is the demo scene from the webplayer available as well ?

Also i am using this in Unity free and i cant get refraction when i enable depth, am i doing something wrong ? (speaking about hte water sample scene, i enable depth in the water and the refraction seems to be gone)

Thanks

EDIT: I noticed the refraction is still there, but now depends on the angle, in some edges i dont see it like before, in others it still exists

EDIT2: Also i cant seem to be able to assign a material in the Decal shader, does it need a special kind of material ?

 

There are sun shafts in the version i got, so if you redownload will have them

Make sure you open all sample files, there is a sample in one of them

 

Apparently Marrrk has fallen off the customer service wagon...

 

Hi Mark,

I bought FXlab a weeks ago and figure out how it's working.

But i need a fisheye effect to my game (like your sniper rifle example) i can't get that camera effect. Can you help me? Sorry for my bad english.

 

Any chance of depth (buffer) masks?

 

I´m getting soem WARNINGS after updating FXLab..

How to fix this?

 

@Marrrk
Are there any news regarding bringing back the Mobil support?

 

still no answer how to fix those obsolet stuff ._.

 

What Unity version is used ? I use the latest Unity and have no errors

I do wonder though if the pack is still supported, i dont think it is sadly

 

i´m using Unity 4.3.4 - these are no errors, just warnings.. but it´s annoying to have them popup in the console on every script refresh ._.

 

I see, i get so many warnings that i have probably missed those

 

Hi, I can't find motion trail effect (v1.2.0) .
Could you include this effect sample in the package?