Screen Space Multiple Scattering

I'm getting this error "SSMS-master/SSMSGlobalFog.cs(109,29): error CS1061: Type `UnityEngine.Camera' does not contain a definition for `CalculateFrustumCorners' and no extension method `CalculateFrustumCorners' of type `UnityEngine.Camera' could be found"
What am I missing?

And by the way this looks great!

 

Update to 5.5 or newer.
I had that at first too when I first tried to run it on Unity 5.4. CalculateFrustumCorners function was added in 5.5 if I'm not mistaken.

 

This looks amazing. Cant wait to try it out with some Gaia / Gena scenes

 

Ok... this is just stunning! Unfortunately screen shots didn't work. Tomorrow I will play more with this and hopefully sort out the screen shot issue

 

I'm confused. If this is basically a DOF effect then what makes it different than just using a DOF effect? Also, what Unity version is required to use this?

 

What I meant by that is that the technique used to emulate the effect (light scattering through fog, perceptually appearing blurry) works very much like DOF except that it uses fog to determine what areas of the screen should be blurry and by what amount instead of depth.

5.5.

 

Ok - so some images i am happy with

Environment created with Gaia and Gena, and lit with SimulSky (way overkill as I essentially obliterated it), and playing with this amazing asset.

Just love it, and would be happily to purchase it to fund more development from the author!

 

And the video

 

Hello,

First of all, amazing work! Seriously the best fog asset I've seen so far - thanks so much for sharing.

I do however have an issue - your fog seems to flip my game upside-down. This is actually a well-documented issue for global-fog in VR projects that was supposed to have been fixed in 5.6. However, after upgrading from 5.5 to 5.6, the issue persists.

I'm using the altered Forward rendering version (with the commented lines changed.)

Have you, or has anyone else, experienced this issue?

Thanks.

 

Can't wait to try this myself, looks really nice. Good fog can do a lot to cover up a lot of other issues with LOD switches and such. Very nice approach, and like @AdamGoodrich I'd be willing to pay a nominal fee to see active development on this continue, and possibly expand into some other areas.
Perhaps a little blurring on the results of particle effects like waterspray on bigger waterfalls? more dynamic behaviour of fog over and near water in general (it behaves a bit differently)? volumetric behaviours to simulate being inside of clouds at the top of a mountain? Animation of some perlin noise within the fog? Parallax behaviour of distant fog vs closer fog if animated?

Just a few ideas to play with.

 

If you use the regular deferred version, does it flip when you're in play mode?

I certainly plan to develop it further. Noise is probably the next thing I'll add. However, for really advance stuff and if you don't mind paying, this seems to be a pretty good option:

https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/fog-volume.225513/

Regarding transparencies, I see no viable option to make them work short of blurring them on a case by case basis which would get expensive really fast. I think I'll make a branch that works like in the new Zelda: lower the bloom threshold and slightly lerp between the sharp source RT and the blurry one:



Nowhere near as good but better than nothing.

 

Hello..

My camera is flipped when i used ssms and ssms global fog into my camera in runtime mode.When i unchecked smss global fog it looks not flipped,well..

How can i handle this?

Thank you.

 

If you're using Forward rendering take a look a this post:
https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/screen-space-multiple-scattering.446647/#post-2937865

 

Hi, new Unity user here. Your fog looks awesome, and I want to use it in my project, but I can't figure out how to swap the global fog for your fog, and haven't found any explicit instructions. Could someone kindly give a brief walkthrough (or a link)?

 

Just add the package to your project and then take a look at the included example scene.

 

Thanks for your quick response. I followed the example scene (exponential for global fog mode) and got something that starts to look like the screenshots in Viking Village, but I now have a couple of new problems:
1. Height fog has no effect, whether I toggle it on or off
2. I can see the fog at very close distances in the game view, but once I jump into play, there is no fog for objects close to me. Is this because the main camera isn't the same as the game camera, and I only added SSMS to the main camera?

 

Can you post a screenshot of your camera settings? Would be easier to diagnose the problem that way.

 

Screenshots of camera and game/play view:

 

Oh I see, it seems that when you enter Play mode the "CameraLoop_HighQuality" camera is turned off. Either disable the other cameras and re-enable that one OR add the fog effect to all the cameras.

 

Oh ok yeah I see it now after activating that camera in play mode. The height fog works fine too - I just needed to increase the height. But the "CameraLoop_HighQuality" camera is an auto-looping camera - how do I find out which camera it is using in Play mode?

 

Well the simplest method would be to enter play mode and then check in the hierarchy/inspector which camera is activated.

EDIT Scratch that, just enter play mode, go back to the scene mode and look for the camera icon.

 

just downloaded SSMS from Github and going to play with it! does it also work with SM3.0 mobile devices?

 

I haven't tested it on mobile but I don't see why it wouldn't work.

 

I'm getting some good results, even in my test scenes.

 

Hey. Great stuff. I have tried to use it. Hovewer when I mix it with Temporal Antyaliasing I got flickering. Is there a way to fix it?

 

What kind of flickering? Also, what's the order of your camera's image effects stack.

 

Man... you're beast. LOVING Effect prints. i'll test now!

 

Can you please make a tutorial explain how to use this project settings ?

 

Anyone in particular you're having trouble with?

 

Sorry it took me so long to respond - I eventually returned to this, and I'm experiencing the same behavior:

Works fine in deferred, with standard deferred shader,
Flips scene and game camera in forward with the forward lines uncommented and deferred commented out - even without MSAA on, which I've seen cause this with fog shaders in the past.

I'm confused that this is still happening and nobody else has mentioned it... are you all using a different version of Unity? I believe I tested this on a 5.5 build originally, and today I've confirmed the behavior is the same on 5.6.0f3.

Any ideas?
Thanks

 

Maybe another shader in your camera stack is conflicting with SSMS?

 

There are no shaders on the camera stack other than those default in the example scene.

So, I made a fresh project and only imported your asset. Next I replicated my main project's settings, notably: Vulkan graphics API, VR support enabled, forward rendering.

Strangely without changing (de/commenting) any code to make it work in forward rendering mode, I saw no issues or artifacts (although I haven't tested it in VR yet.)

Then, when I switched the commented lines to the forward version, even in this fresh project, the view is flipped in scene and in playmode.

Worth noting: I also of course tested everything before changing project settings (other than forward) and the behavior was identical.


Does this make any sense to you?

Also, I'm testing it with the deferred commenting in forward in VR right now, i'll let you know how that works.

 

Firstly, I'd like to note that I do understand this is a free asset, and I by no means expect any support to accommodate for the niche VR development scene.

Nonetheless, here are my findings:

I can confirm that the deferred commented version (default) works in my main project (in forward mode.)

I think this may have to do with 5.6 fixing the flipping, and thus rendering your forward mode unnecessary? Just a thought.

I found that it works (and looks fantastic) in VR only in multi-pass mode, not single-pass, which means it's largely useless for most projects (as the performance loss going to multi-pass is generally enormous). Here it is in single-pass VR - note however this is only one eye and thus doesn't show the main problem.:



It may be difficult to see but this is the effect seen in single-pass VR: In the left eye, the fog is either higher or lower, depending on head rotation, than the right eye. When you tilt your head slightly left, you see 2 fog lines (really two Height Fog effects) - one in each eye, each at a different vertical position.

You may also note the very large aliasing artifacts on the edge of objects. These are present with or without MSAA, and in multi and single-pass. They are caused by the SMSS script. Turning the Scattering Intensity to nothing does fix this aliasing issue, but also disables the SMSS, of course.

Finally, and least importantly, there are minor artifacts on the edges, shown here: http://image.prntscr.com/image/5d61a31da2c146fcafc5ede477b3e269.png

These aren't very noticeable unless the fog Start Distance is set far away.

I'll keep researching to see if I can fig the fog shader single-pass issue, since I think all fog is messed up in single-pass.

Thanks for any ideas,
Matt

 

It's good to know that commenting the lines is no longer required for forward rendering. As for the VR issues, if the fog on its own also has artifacts maybe it's necessary to update it to be based on 5.6's global fog from the standard assets although if that's not somewhere on Github or Bitbucket already I couldn't include it in the repository anymore.

Reading Unity's documentation on single-pass mode it seems that the shader would require some modifications to work properly. Would you like to take a shot at it?

 

Do you have any ideas for what you will do next ? what is your plan to improve this ?
Just wondering

 

I've never really worked on shaders, but I'll take a crack at it. I'll let you know how if I can get things working.

 

TBH, this was intended purely as a proof of concept. I had been thinking: "how come nobody is doing it? Doesn't seem so hard". Turns out it's easy when all you have to do is modify somebody else's open source code lol.

As for the future, not much to say really. Since transparencies don't play nice with it (and fixing that would require radically changing how they're rendered) making a new simpler effect would probably be a good solution. I had already started working on it but my PC unexpectedly died and it's going to be out of comission for a while. That one is easy since all it requires is a lerp as far as I can tell.

 

Truly amazing asset! Thanks a lot for sharing!

Regarding transparency: did you already try applying your fx after rendering the transparent pass? Basically bluring the color info of the particles together with the opaque pixel beneath it? Ofc it is not correct, but maybe it would not look too bad... what do you think?

 

Applying it after transparencies is how ot was done at first actually. The problem there is that transparencies would be blurry regardless of how close or far to the camera they are. AFAIK, this problem affects all DOF effects on deferred renderers. Even UE4 has this problem.

Having said that, if that's not a problem for your scenes then you can enable this behavior by commenting out the tag [ImageEffectOpaque] in the SSMS.cs script.

 

What would I have to do to mod the global fog shader to flip the height fog effect upside down and above the camera at an offset?

 

I'll be honest: I have no idea.

 

this is awesome but the scattering deos not work for me. what does it color correction whise? it darkens my image massive

 

Are you using linear space?

 

OCASM very beautiful fog, and I start to use it, but when i switch on, and work in the scene view(I see fog there), unity start eat memory, and eat it all 16 gb. I have another effects of course, and it's heavy too, but only with fog everything start dying. Why is that? What should i do?

 

+1 here, seems a memory leak ...

P.S. Also, found Unity 5.6.1f1 leak (not related to SSMS) - put anything in Search (filter) field in Hierarchy window and Unity will start eating RAM with 1-3 GB/sec - on empty, freshly created project without anything changed... bugreport is sent, hope they will fix that.

 

Seems like the render targets aren't being cleaned up. Maybe the API changed in the latest version?

 

So, Out of curiosity, if I wanted to invert the height fog, say if I was making an underwater scene... what'd be the best way of doing that - preferably if I could set some sort of surface offset, so my gameplay can still take place on Y = 0? I fiddled with some of the math, but I couldn't seem to jigger it around to do what I wanted. Thanks!

 

Looks beautiful. Good job.

 

I don't know but you could ask Keijiro Takahashi on Twitter. Unlike me he's a competent graphics programmer and he's dabled with this height fog implementation before.

 

Looks amazing! thanks for sharing.