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Jove 2.0: DX11 Rendering System (Alpha Release)

Discussion in 'Assets and Asset Store' started by Aieth, Aug 17, 2014.

  1. Aieth

    Aieth

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    This post is a little bare at the moment. A lot of the information that was here has become outdated. I'm going to be posting new information soon

    SSR_OnAndOff.png



    DoubleCamera.png


    LitShadowcasting.png


    Developer diaries

    FAQ
    • Does this require DX11?
    Yes.
    • Will you raise the price?
    Yes. Every major update will see a small increase in price.

    Demo

    New standalone demo - Requires DX11
    https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/233290703/JoveStandalone.rar

    (move with WASD, hold right click to rotate)

    Old webplayer demo - Requires DX11

    https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/233290703/Alpha02Demo.html

    (move with WASD, hold right click to rotate)

    Thanks for reading!
     
    Last edited: Mar 31, 2015
  2. bac9-flcl

    bac9-flcl

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    This looks very promising. I was always wary of using third-party rendering-related assets with Unity as vast majority of them usually tackled some isolated effect (only cubemaps, or only IBL, or only fog, or only shadows), which promised a world of pain, hugely complicated workflows and problems with performance whenever you would try to merge those solutions into one project.

    This is the first product in the field that looks like an all-encompassing solution that covers a lot of use cases and gives you impressive performance. Everyone should check this out, I don't think there is anything comparable on the asset store at the moment.
     
    Last edited: Aug 18, 2014
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  3. hopeful

    hopeful

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    This was brought up before, but the answer was not clear to me. Does Jove 2.0 work with substances?
     
  4. bac9-flcl

    bac9-flcl

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    Trying it out now, everything works well so far. I can't even pick what to give a highlight, practically everything from very nice translucency to thoughtfully layered ambient occlusion (you have no idea how much I wanted separate high-frequency and low frequency ambient occlusion all this time, never being able to translate that effect from concept art) is impressive. It's obviously still in alpha, so don't expect it to cover every single use case (for starters, there is no support for shadows from point lights yet), but overall what I see is very pleasing.

    One thing I'd recommend to point out in the quick start guide is that you need to have forward rendering enabled in the project settings, not deferred rendering. I know that Jove adds it's own pipeline, but for some people it would be pretty intuitive to set that setting to deferred as they install an asset that gives them better deferred rendering. Had a few frustrating minutes guessing why wouldn't things render like they supposed to :)
     
  5. lazygunn

    lazygunn

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    I've had a play with the alpha, its extremely impressive, its odd in fact how 'bland' it makes Unity 4's rendering seem, my computer's GPU fan humming at quite a volume increase given, great stuff, time to see if I can get something more than cubes and spheres looking pretty in it

    Referring back to the WIP thread, I purchased truesky while it was grand value for money so I'm going to try implementing that with the directions given, and whine if it doesn't pan out aha

    It's extremely enthusing to finally have something in Unity at a core level showing the importance of Compute. Hopefully this can get a bit more people on the compute train

    Speculation: There are several shader solutions that I would be extremely pleased to see this getting along well with that arent under the basic PBS umbrella. I'm fully aware it's not your job to chase around after shader writers to provide support but I do hope to see some robust management (whoever ends up doing it) for terrain solutions like RTP (Although with DX11, tessellation prob makes more sense than POM, at least as an option) and Shaderforge (This could possibly involve quite a lot of wrangling but it would create a real mesh with what i feel will be a ubiquitous Unity 5 workflow tool)

    Secondly, and here's the joy of being contrary - I wouldn't speak too soon about mobile's inability to run this, i've already tried a few great PBS shading solutions on my HTC One in their full fat, not even mobile optimised flavours and theyve run without a hitch, directx 11? Speculation time. http://www.anandtech.com/show/7784/...-64bit-warpath-with-48core-cortex-a53-designs

    Thats the GPU that the autumn release of the Samsung S5 Prime is purposed to ship with, phones last year were already ferociously fast, my HTC really does pound a lot of straight up desktop systems ive used in equivalent tasks, usually relating to Unity use, although yes, massaging is required, and im evangelistic of the technical and social consequences of widespread VR adoption. Oculus consumer version is some way off but the inevitable home of the technology is going to be mobile, Google made a charming nod to this with Cardboard, the SDK of which i'm currently moving to Unity for multi-phone OS compatibility (I'll make it available, i can't vouch for its quality though im no great coder) meaning an open solution for mobile vr, and Samsung developing a VR enclosure for their phones no doubt with the prime in mind, i might well be having a go at getting this working with something mobile. While DirectCompute might not be on the cards for Android, what's the news of OpenCL flavours of the Compute shaders? (A starting implementation of Unity OpenCL is here http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/opencl_unity.242520/ and i'm hoping UT take it on in Unity 5 as a matter of course)

    Great start, and looking forwards to the future
     
  6. Play_Edu

    Play_Edu

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    great job guys.
    Would be the great if you add glassy type property like reflection or refraction.
     
  7. Prodigga

    Prodigga

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    This looks excellent. I'll be watching this closely.
     
  8. Aieth

    Aieth

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    While you can obviously use textures from anywhere, there is no special support for any runtime modifications or anything like that at this time.
    Thanks for pointing that out, I'll include it in the next version :) There are more features relating to ambient light coming later on, but I am glad you are happy with what is already there.

    I am open for integrating Jove with other products which would compliment it. That said, it is not I am going to actively pursue at the moment, it is also probably going to be hard to maintain since Jove is bound to change a lot since it is only an alpha version. But if any asset developer is reading this and want to know what it takes for their asset to work in Jove, PM me and we can talk about it. Jove does support forward rendered objects so depending on the lighting requirements it could be easy to integrate.
    As for mobile phones... Well, we'll see :p I do not have high hopes for that in the next five years. Even if some prototype hardware runs it, nobody is going to make a game that eliminates 99% of the market. I mean, people are wary against abandoning DX9, and thats only ~20% of the market.

    There is actually a refractive glass shader already. This image is slightly outdated, I made a slight oversight in this version and the glass looks a little more plastic than it is supposed to but the main idea is the same http://forum.unity3d.com/attachments/joveglass-png.107416/
    The glass shader supports both reflective and refractive light, from cubemaps/ambient light and analytical light sources (point, spot and directional).

    Thank you, I am glad you like it :)
     
  9. Licarell

    Licarell

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    I too purchased truesky in the hopes that it would work... although I'm currently up to my eyeballs in another project that must meet a friday deadline... lazygunn if you have a chance to give it a test run I'm literally all ears to find out how it went.
     
  10. Aieth

    Aieth

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    Does truesky only deal with the sky or atmospheric scattering as well? Is it rendered as a mesh, or how does it work? If it is just the sky, it should be possible to slap it in a forward layer and it should just work. But I guess you are gonna have to edit some code if you want it to control JoveLights instead of Unitys lights.
     
  11. lazygunn

    lazygunn

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    Ah well it seems to be a-la nuaj, volumetrics with raymarching, the atmospheric scattering is integral to the cloud implementation as in these situations they're intrinsically linked (likewise a realistic ocean renderer a la proland). The truesky alpha is in formative stages truthfully, its quite stripped down, switching layers didn't help and the code is in a dll but as the code for nuaj was made available it might be possible to figure out how it integrates, or i should look harder at truesky and might be being ignorant. I imagine it's not entirely straightforward though given implementing volumetrics in a rasterised renderer is not 'natural' to the renderer. I'll have a look now though and get back, maybe direct communication with them would be more edifying, ive had a fair bit of time with nuaj so im aware cloud rendering is not a trivial task and truesky might be a good maintained answer for clouds when having Jove implement its own could be enormously time consuming
     
  12. Licarell

    Licarell

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    This is my thought as well, it's a timeless cliche but, why reinvent the wheel... all in all both JOVE and TrueSky could benefit greatly working seamlessly together, I asked the creators of TrueSky in their forum tread and they felt confident that TrueSky would work fine in JOVE... what I'm not sure about though is if he understood what JOVE 2 was all about...
     
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  13. lazygunn

    lazygunn

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    A quick go with setting things up seems to show that it probably needs a bit more informed application than i'm able to provide, truesky in its current form is quite particular and i guess as an alpha this is to be expected. Generally not working however, truesky seems to rely much on a particular shader for writing to depth which is used by truesky to control the camera view, maybe a multi-camera setup might work? But even if so there'd probably be no interaction between Jove and truesky. I don't doubt they could work together though, in fact a maintainable editing could be quite straightforward, but its def beyond my remit currently
     
  14. Aieth

    Aieth

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    I sent out an update to all those who have previously contacted me with their in-voice. If you own Jove and want access to Jove 2.0 before it is approved by the asset store, PM your in-voice!
     
  15. Aieth

    Aieth

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    Here's an updated look at Joves glass shaders with 5 different settings. The yellow glass sphere has a point light behind. I'd love to see what someone with actual artistical talent can make :p

    5Spheres.png
     
  16. bac9-flcl

    bac9-flcl

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    Stock Unity:



    Jove:



    It's not the prettiest model, it has no highpoly source for baked normals and the PBR maps I just made for it are very sloppy, but still, I think it looks neat. I should definitely spend more time on higher quality AO and roughness map though, the lighting can look quite a lot better with a higher quality asset.

     
    Last edited: Aug 19, 2014
  17. braaad

    braaad

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    Regarding TrueSky, I spent some time this morning trying to integrate it. I hooked it into Jove's rendering and I can output the diagnostics to screen but I am having issues getting the depth to TrueSky. I originally started by passing the native pointer of render target 0 which has the depth buffer... no depth info in diagnostics.

    Then I thought that maybe since temporary render textures were being used and the native plugin callback gets called on the rendering thread that they were being reset before TrueSky got to use them. I tried a few other things with no luck. Basically I just need Jove's depth so I can get the native pointer and send to TrueSky. I didn't have much time to check it out so I probably just overlooked something.

    @Aieth do you have any ideas on how to share the depth with the native plugin? Maybe creating a seperate persistent RT with depth is the only option since you are using temp buffers? I will eventually figure it out but just making sure I'm not missing something obvious.

    I will spend some more time on it tomorrow.
     
  18. Play_Edu

    Play_Edu

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    thanks for ans . It's in my wish list.
     
  19. Meltdown

    Meltdown

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    Does it work on Windows Store Apps and WP8?
     
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  20. bac9-flcl

    bac9-flcl

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    Not sure about the former, but no, it will not work on Windows Phone as it is DX11 asset and as performance requirements are not a match for the phone hardware.
     
  21. blueivy

    blueivy

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    The difference is unbelivable. It's like it transformed into next gen when rendered with Jove :p
     
  22. Aieth

    Aieth

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    I don't think that should cause any issues. A temporary rendertexture is still a regular rendertexture as far as DirectX is concerned, it is just a Unity wrapper to help manage instances. How is the depth texture passed to TrueSky? The GetNativePTR function Unity has? Also, are you sure it uses the hardware depth buffer and not Unitys depth shader replacement texture?
    Jove is gonna run on anything that supports DX11. I am not sure what the target market is for windows store apps, I assume it is mainly tablets? If they run Windows and have a DX11 capable graphics card, then yeah it is going to work. As for phones, I do not think there are any phones which, even if they run Windows, support DX11.


    @bac9-flcl
    Looking great, be sure to post an update when you rework the texture maps :)
     
  23. braaad

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    Haha, thanks. I knew I was missing something. I will have to get onto them about that tomorrow, I'm sure it's an easy fix on their side to provide the option.
     
  24. Aieth

    Aieth

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    [QUshould braaad, post: 1740114, member: 137636"]Haha, thanks. I knew I was missing something. I will have to get onto them about that tomorrow, I'm sure it's an easy fix on their side to provide the option.[/QUOTE]
    It should be, Jove uses a linear 32 bit floating point buffer, so no fancy decoding needed :)
     
  25. Licarell

    Licarell

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    Braaad, please let us know what you find out and if you where able to get thinks talking... I hope you don't mind I've been posting quotes from you over on the TrueSky thread.
     
  26. FogGobbler

    FogGobbler

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    Thanks August for the "secret" :) . I can´t get it to work though, becuase of these errors:

    Assets/Jove/Demo/Editor/Image Effects/AntialiasingAsPostEffectEditor.js(43,41): BCE0004: Ambiguous reference 'AntialiasingAsPostEffect': AntialiasingAsPostEffect, AntialiasingAsPostEffect.

    Assets/Jove/Demo/Editor/Image Effects/AntialiasingAsPostEffectEditor.js(44,38): BCE0004: Ambiguous reference 'AntialiasingAsPostEffect': AntialiasingAsPostEffect, AntialiasingAsPostEffect.

    Do I have to have Jove 1 installed?

    EDIT: Never mind. I started a new project and now everything seems fine :) .
     
    Last edited: Aug 19, 2014
  27. Aieth

    Aieth

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    The Jove demo scene uses the default anti-aliasing and vignetting image effects from Unitys Standard Assets. Those errors are basically saying you have two copies of those in your scene.
    Under Jove/Demo/ delete the Standard Assets folder and the errors should go away :)
     
  28. lazygunn

    lazygunn

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    Love the jove train makeover! Already from messing with the alpha ive noticed how straightforward using Jove makes using PBS shaders, the current implementation is compact, has features as standard that are well integrated and mean maximum beauty at minimum hassle (the 4 channel texture covering most the main maps, colour alpha controlling the smoothness quickly and translucency as standard is quite great and seems to get many possible materials covered on an elegant and small area of inspector), having everything so in harmony is great, a far cry from the hassle of using shaders/assets whatever that seem at odds with their basic environment and each other
     
  29. Aieth

    Aieth

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    Thank you :) Jove 2.0 was developed in cooperation with a games company and an independent indie game group. We spent quite a while on making sure it was usable and was easy to work with. Projects like this tend to suffer due to lack of artist input, so that has been super valuable.

    Looking forward to seeing what you create!
     
    Last edited: Aug 19, 2014
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  30. braaad

    braaad

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    @Licarell I posted this in the other thread, but just letting you know I have emailed him and I'll post once I have a solution.
     
  31. Meltdown

    Meltdown

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    The target market for Windows Store Apps is any PC that runs Windows 8, and then the tablets. They all run DX11.
    The reason I ask is that currently anti-aliasing doesn't work with Unity on Windows Store Apps you can’t do AA on the backbuffer, the only way to do it is the staging render texture. So I'm wondering if Jove works around this and supports AA?

    Could you do a Windows Store Apps build using Jove and let me know the result?
     
  32. bac9-flcl

    bac9-flcl

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    Jove has no support for MSAA if you're asking about that particular antialiasing approach. Only post process AA works at the moment.
     
  33. Aieth

    Aieth

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    You are correct. Deferred shading has a number of benefits over forward shading, msaa is not one of them. Currently the only AA availablr is Unitys standard assets post process AA. I am going to write my own temporal AA soon enough, but msaa is unfortunately never going to work, since the technique prohibits it.
     
  34. Olafson

    Olafson

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    This looks great! Can't wait for it. Some proper AA would be a huuuuuuuuge benefit for this asset. Unity lacks any good AA solution.
     
  35. Aieth

    Aieth

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    I will not be able to access my computer today, but I can test a build tomorrow. If you want me to run a build I can do that, but unfortunately MSAA is out of the picture for deferred shading.


    I guess I am the only one who always kind of liked the look of FXAA ;) It does not really solve aliasing from movement though, but it does make pretty still images.
     
  36. bac9-flcl

    bac9-flcl

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    I think the best possible solution would be SMAA support, especially since there already are open-source implementations of it for Unity. Unfortunately they never worked for me, only outputting black screen, but they seemed to work for other people. SMAA is quite more advanced than FXAA and would give less blur, but it's still a post processing effect that should be fully compatible with your renderer. Not sure if any modifications are even required to get it to work, to be honest - but as I've said, I can't check it myself as it doesn't work for me even in stock Unity.

    I think this is the repo with the last version: https://github.com/Chman/uSMAA
     
  37. lazygunn

    lazygunn

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    I rather like FXAA too, so you're alright there

    When will you be doing the roll call for most wished for features? Hah i guess thats a bit much now, but do you have a list of must-implement features before the give and take? Id be interested in the near-future roadmap

    From my fooling around i've deduced that more shadow casters would be very much appreciated and i suppose the anticipated SSR implementation, with those two I can most definitely start some pretty things in motion - Although i've spent the morning preparing a model (Or a scene containing quite a few models) for some heavy lifting, could be what the doctor ordered for getting implemented features a voice by including them in the scene as they appear, really quite interested in what can be done with trickery, brain power, and having sudden enormous liberties in ways that i'd never before thought how to use.. i dont even know how to compose a scene where the number of lights is of absolutely no concern

    I guess with things rolling the only the thoughts are shader authoring, this kind of thing really could be given an enormous bump by Shaderforge (i imagine a wait until after Unite for the author to tackle systems like Jove, and ive no idea how quickly Jove will progress), the idea of this playing nice with Allegorithmics software is a great one! Particularly as Substance Painter is the only real software that I think is already solid, not bug-impaired and catering fully to PBS development, and not a gabillion pounds to buy, and tied naturally with substance designer, which is a great piece of software

    Just want some ways to recreate a kind of subtle layered vray shader to get the most realistic or flexible results from a surface, thats not saying a wish to emulate vray that would be absurd, more wanting things like complex fresnel or view angle based blending, multilayered translucent materials, even easy as pie but very impressive ocean shaders and so on) and hand coding that kind of open flexibilty for shaders (and hence really letting this kind of system show its potential) sounds a challenge atm, it's really not a problem and cant be realistically expected for a while. Just want this thing to do really well, well enough, in fact, that I can use it as my main PC workhorse knowing it'll support the stuff i know i'm going to want to use, UT will have to pull quite a coup to have U5 look as good and enjoy the cohesion of a dedicated high end renderer as part of the core package. This thing can make Unity have a path towards U4 competition in the graphics oomph department so long as the tools for the content are there
     
  38. Aieth

    Aieth

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    @lazygunn

    I updated the road map in the main post with a little more information :) As for layered stuff, I have things planned but I cannot speak of it at the moment, it is too experimental.

    I am probably going to look into cooperation with other assets more when I reach beta stage. Reaching beta means I really need to be sure of and lock down most parts of Jove, and there are a few things which are still possibly going to be rewritten.
     
  39. JecoGames

    JecoGames

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    It says on your road map that you plan to support water shading,but woudnt a glass shader with the correct index of refraction suffice?
     
  40. Licarell

    Licarell

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  41. bac9-flcl

    bac9-flcl

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    For thin water layers perhaps, but I guess there is stuff like caustics and depth-dependent fog that's not usually present in transparent shaders. Although I can't say water shading support is the most desirable feature from that roadmap. :)
     
  42. Aieth

    Aieth

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    Yeah you could use the glass shader for it I suppose. I suppose I should be more precise and say ocean shader and flow map support :) Caustics, water fog, waves etc. I also have to fit terrain in somewhere in that roadmap... still not sure which way to go though. We will have to see.
     
  43. Licarell

    Licarell

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    I agree, the skin shader would be a more desirable addition I would think since characters are usually the focus of most games...
     
  44. bac9-flcl

    bac9-flcl

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    In regards to terrain I would say you absolutely can't go wrong by choosing to support Relief Terrain Pack compatibility. It's hands down the best offering in the field, and it has great PBR support that, guess what, requires custom deferred like Jove 2.0 or Lux to work. Perfect match.

    Writing entire terrain shading solution on your own is a gargantuan task that can probably take more than a year on it's own (judging from RTP development) and it makes little sense to start from scratch in that field when another asset covering that already exists.
     
    Last edited: Aug 20, 2014
  45. Licarell

    Licarell

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    AMEN bac9-flcl...

    Aieth I get the fact that you want Jove to be a all in all but early adoption to these other plugins like RTP and TrueSky could help speed up early adoption to the Jove train and would be a good stop-gap while you develop more towards your own solution.

    All I'm saying is if you would please just consider this...

    I don't want your sales to suffer because of missing vital features, I want you to make a TON of money on this so you have the support you need to add/refine features which helps us.
     
    Last edited: Aug 20, 2014
  46. Aieth

    Aieth

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    Unfortunately it is not that simple :) When talking about custom deferred, this usually means overriding Unitys light calculation shader. Jove does not do this, Jove does not use anything from Unitys deferred pipeline at all. So I am afraid integrating Jove and RTP is a really complicated task.

    I am not yet sure on what I will do, but I am leaning towards scrapping everything and starting from scratch. Getting Jove to work with RTP is going to be just as much work as porting RTP to Unreal Engine 4, and doing such a major integration places severe limits on development, as every change has to function with everthing in RTP.
     
  47. bac9-flcl

    bac9-flcl

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    Ah, alright, I probably misunderstood the following explanation about RTP PBR and misunderstood what Lux is doing with Unity deferred rendering then.

     
  48. lazygunn

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    I'm absolutely convinced of water's relevance overall, it's not much like glass at all, certainly the use cases are way different, a physically based large body of water has a bunch of specific properties that should be recognised, the extinction of light wavelengths, alterable by the turbidity of the water, back lighting and translucency, generally a whole bunch of SSS taking into account factors like foam, an accurate BRDF for light interaction from the atmosphere, and then the whole gameplay aspect of it, being able to reliably get heights for any part of a wave, wave generation, artistic control throughout the authoring, yeah, water's quite important I think, the principles in ocean rendering can be translated to rivers, lakes, even down to shallow water that can segue nicely into water bodies. How to author the surface or volume meshes of the body say, in the case of rivers, is quite a thing, and how to model interactions with the water like ripples, it's quite a good aplication of a bunch of cool technology, and it finds parallels in skin and i think skin has had a more thorough treatment, and there are more practical implementations of skin shading available, and implementation that isn't quite as much of a challenge as water bodies at all, imo.

    In addition, i think something like skin, as it has several well known approaches, can be nailed down and be more a responsibility of art and design rather than the tech, when ocean is quite the opposite, a nice implementation should really offer some broad artistic options but the principles are all deep in the land of technology and science

    I'm equally keen on water rendering and skin rendering being tackled, i see them both as having doubtless significance in games, i just don't think water rendering should be sniffed at, it's likely to be useful at hand wether you have skin in your game or not, but your assets for your characters are most deeply rooted in your art guys, there's no replacement for quality art in skin, no matter how cutting edge your technology, but a lot of the work on water is beyond the remit of the regular artist, at least if they want to get the rest of their job done.

    To put it shortly, there would be more time wasted on water when it came to implementing it yourself as a Jove user currently unfamiliar with it(and then i assume also when skin and water even come round really) than there would be on skin, and that time would be taking a big chunk out of whoever's working on its ability to do anything else, when skin's reliance on strong art is doubly the natural expectation on your artists. Additionally the water implementation has an intrinsic link with the atmosphere in a fully integrated simulation and is part of the core foundation of simulated environmental physics. The water implementation could have a much more significant effect on the appearance of your game as a core feature than your skin

    I'll get off my soapbox haha, i've just spent big bunches of this year looking at and figuring out 'water stuff' and to do it well as a feature to be used by many is a feat that i'd love to see done properly
     
    John-G likes this.
  49. Licarell

    Licarell

    Joined:
    Sep 5, 2012
    Posts:
    434
    @lazygunn - agreed

    @Aieth - Please explain what you mean by scrapping everything and starting from scratch...
     
  50. lazygunn

    lazygunn

    Joined:
    Jul 24, 2011
    Posts:
    2,749
    Ahh yes, no, RTP would not play with Jove straightforwardly at all in its current state, Tom's already overcoming a host of Unity rendering bugs making it work on most things which is part of the beauty of it but shows how tied into Unitys existing pipeline it is. What's more is using large features of directx11 would make it fundamentally tied to Jove if it was pursued, which apparently is just a pain in the arse with Unity's current terrain (Indeed scrapping and from scratch would probably be the best move ultimately)

    And its PBR, involving Lux etc, while i love and intend to keep using them, the fact they use a similar science for the shading, its nothing like a one to one relationship and is really quite self defeating to make work with each other in their current states, and whats more that wouldnt really be down to Aieth, i cant see it being their call?