SE Natural Bloom Dirty Lens

Claims that SE Bloom isn't working might be overstated. I'm sure there are some cases where it is not working properly, but Unity has been changing a lot of things in the last year, and they've introduced a few bugs on their end. Two of the bugs related to SE Bloom in posts above are actually Unity bugs that ought to affect all bloom plugins.

Another update to Unity is due in about a week (5.4). Possibly some of the Unity bugs that affect SE Bloom (and other bloom plugins) will be fixed.

As noted above, in relation to a performance bug in a recent Unity version on OSX:

And as noted in comment #340, there are Unity lightmap errors that can show up with any bloom effect, and you can fix them by adjusting the SE shader (as shown above).

 

You can see on his profile that sonicether has been posting on a different thread recently:

http://forum.unity3d.com/search/4651801/

So... there's that. It's a bit strange that he wouldn't pop into this thread seeing how SE Bloom has been a Staff Pick and is today's 24 Hour Sale, especially since people have some doubts as to whether it's still being supported. He hasn't completely disappeared and seems to be working on a new project. Make of that what you will.

 

@Hitch42 - I don't know if things have changed, but in the past devs often said they had no idea their asset was going to be featured in the 24-hour sale.

IIRC, @sonicether has had this plugin on 24-hour sale before and has not appeared in the thread till days later.

 

Can confirm! I had no notice when OMT was on 24hr sale.

 

Hi guys.

Let me first apologize for not checking in and letting everyone know what's been going on. As others have stated, I am devoting most of my time to developing my real-time global illumination solution. I have worked on SENBDL here and there, and experimented with new features, but haven't had the time to polish up an official update. I am in the final stages of preparing my GI asset for its first release, and once that's done I'll be able to spread myself out a little more so that I can keep supporting my other assets. Updating SENBDL is next on my list of things to do.

As far as whether this asset still works with the latest version of Unity, I can say that I've been using this asset for my personal projects since its release and I haven't encountered any problems with it--that's not including Unity bugs that become more visible with the addition of a physically-based bloom effect, and those have been very rare for me personally. I keep up-to-date with Unity and am pretty much always using SENBDL in every one of my scenes, and if I had noticed that it stopped functioning after a certain Unity update, I would have put aside what I was working on to fix that immediately.

About my website, I admit, I must prioritize getting it up and running more than I have been. Being only one man, I've had to make choices on how to spend my working time, and up to this point I've seen it as more beneficial for me to actually work on my graphics projects than work on my website. I had assumed that having an Asset Store page and a dedicated thread would suffice, but I've realized that was a mistake. Having an up and running website is important, but it's going to be absolutely critical when the GI asset has been released, considering the complexity of the asset and of the project as a whole.

I wish I could clone myself and work on all of these things at once, but I have to make choices on which to work on, and I have to stick with that choice long enough to generate enough momentum to make worthwhile progress.

Anyway, that's what's up. I'll cross my fingers that preparations for the new asset go smoothly so that I can work on updating this one soon.

 

Hey I like your asset, very impressive. Unfortunately I can't use it in my formally projects for a long time, because they're mobile games. Gamma is really like IE6 somewhat.
The performance issue is another problem. I optimized my current game to made more room for SENBDL despite of the color space issue, but it still doubled its setpass calls and dropped the fps heavily.
I hope your new asset will come with out-of-box workaround for mobiles

 

Hello!

I was just wondering if you need Unity 5 pro to use this asset? On the page it says Unity 4 pro is needed but not 5. I have read all the pages on this thread but havent found anyone mentioning it. I really want to play around with this awesome asset but dont have pro. Thanks!

 

In past years, Unity realized limiting the power of the engine lead to nothing but lose-lose. So they freed a bunch of functions and focus on service now. That means you can use those Unity4 Pro techs in Unity5 w/o a Pro license. Details at Line 1, Engine with all features.

 

Awesome, thanks!

 

Thanks a lot Brechtos! Sorry for taking so long to check your answer We're implementing your fix right now!

We also found this bug (flashes) happening in our customizations by using SENB alongside Shaderforge's Fresnel node (for rimlight), we were fixing this by adding a CLAMP node in our shader manually. I hope this also solves the customization flashes.

 

Hi SonicEther,

Just wanted to report a strange happening. Recently upgraded to Unity 5.4 (beta), and when using your SE Natural Bloom Dirty Lens on the OVRCamera Rig, it sometimes swaps the image upside down (very disconcerting in VR); particularly when viewing certain particle effects.

Anyway, lots of moving parts there, but hopefully you know what might be causing this and can fix for your next release.

 

Does this work for WebGL builds?

I was using Ultimate Bloom until I realized it won't build for WebGL.

 

Gentle reminder to all regarding the "light pop" artefacts, "makeshiftwings" solved it, should take away most of your headaches/ doubts about this impressive asset: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/bloom-pop-under-hdr.281656/#post-1956674

 

Thanks for the heads up on a fix.

 

I did a quick test, it appears to ~not~ work on WebGL in Firefox. But best to check with the developer directly.

 

Not working in Unity5.4 b25, can you give it a try?

 

Working for me in 5.4f1.

 

gonna try that, looks like a unity side of problem

 

Has anyone managed to get this working in VR? (Or found an alternative that works well in VR and can give similarly good 'glowy' bloom?) - I gave it a quick try and it didn't work (screenshot attached).

But there's a recent review saying 'I use it with SteamVR'... so is it a Unity version issue, or maybe they've fixed things up themselves for VR?

(edit - typical... immediately after posting this I find the solution... it's not compatible with the new 'single pass stereo rendering' option, but if you turn that off, then it works)

 

Hi all

Ive encountered a bit of an issue with using SE Natural Bloom that im hoping is a bug and can get resolved. (otherwise im just trying to use it a way it wont work)

Everything works great when i apply the effect to a camera that has a skybox or color background

Unfortunately for my game i have 3 cameras all layered on top of one another.
Stage camera - static effects and 3d background items
Game camera - this is where the fun happens
Cockpit camera - internal the ship the player is playing with its own lighting.

So the gun fire i would like to apply bloom to is the middle camera. It nomally has its clear flags set to depth only. With this setting SENBLOOM does not seem to work.

suggestions / help is welcome

 

Yes I have the same problem. Working in deferred and linear. I use the near cam to exclude lights and other stuff inside of a vehicle or building environment, but want to have some special image effects on the far camera eg atmospheric scattering, fog. A solution is to use Forward on the Near cam, but that break a lot of deferred stuff and HDR.

Perhaps is solvable with a script. Get the FarCam target RT_Far and add the image effect by the script, and combine the RT_Far with the final screen. It's a vague solution only.

 

Hi,

a couple people mentioned performance problems when using this in Unity 5.3. Is that a confirmed issue?
Is this project still being maintained?

I am confused as to the performance of this package as well. The description states "The rendering cost is less than the cost of 2 default Unity bloom effects.", yet a couple other projects have listed performance comparisons (https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/22217, https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/22189), and have SE Natural Bloom coming out worse than the default Unity Bloom... was the SE statement above referring to the legacy Unity Bloom?

I tried Amplify Bloom's trial in my project, and was seeing my batches doubled. Is that comparable to what I can expect from SE Natural Bloom?

Thanks for the info.

 

It worked great for me in 5.3 and is still working great in 5.4. I haven't experienced any extreme performance degradations due to this.

 

Hi, everyone. It's been way too long since I've posted here and I apologize for that.

I said that I would update this asset once things settled down a little bit with my other asset SEGI, and I want you guys to know that I've been working on this. I've been working on efficient and customizable diffraction spikes and a new distance/fog blending mode.

So, just some details about this new blending mode, In my own experimental/personal projects, I've been able to use the blur textures generated with a bloom effect like SENBDL to simulate the way that fog can blur/scatter light. Here are a few inspiration/reference images.





There are a few reasons why fog can appear this way, but I've found that this effect can be quite well achieved in screen-space by using SENBDL's blur buffers and an exponential fog function. Here's a demonstration of how the effect looks so far.




Here, I'm just using Unity's built-in fog. This new feature will be such that you can use whatever fog solution you'd like, and then SENBDL can add this blurring/diffusion effect on top of the fog solution that you choose. It may seem a little strange to bundle a fog effect in with SENBDL, but it makes sense to reuse the data that SENBDL already generates to achieve this effect. For this reason, if you're already using SENBDL, this effect is essentially free.

As of now, this approach can suffer from issues if there are very bright objects in the foreground, but I'm experimenting with ways to diminish this.

Anyway, I just wanted to fill you guys in on what's going on. You can expect to hear a lot more from me regarding this new update.

Also, if you have any suggestions for new features you'd like to see, let me know!

 

Just figured I'd also let you know that I've been working on a really simple side project asset that should be done within the next few days. Here's the thread for it if you'd like to check it out https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/wip-se-screen-space-shadows.441909/



I'm also going to fix whatever outstanding errors there are with my SSAO asset and make it free. At this point, with so many options for SSAO solutions on the Asset Store, I think it's best if it's simply made free.

I just wanted to keep you guys informed on what's going on.

 

Looking forward to that fog effect, its exactly what I've been looking for.

 

Dat fog... woah...

--IronDuke

 

Looking nice!

 

What would your estimate of the SENBDL update being live on the asset store be? 1 week? 1 month? 3 months?

I understand that this can be hard question to answer, but i just can't wait to try out those new features! I'm currently working on a few portfolio pieces in Unity, where i am using SENBDL. I'm currently trying to evaluate if i should wait to release my work just to make sure to have the newest update of SENBDL.

 

Yeah, it is difficult to say. Though, if I made my best guess, I'd say the update with the fog feature would come first, in a few weeks. Then diffraction spikes would perhaps take another few.

 

Do SENBDL shaders support the newer GPU instancing? or will that support come in the next update?

 

What's the benifit of GPU instancing for a postprocess shader?

 

Hi

For what date approximately do you expect to update with this feature that you mentioned in the post?

It looks awesome ...

regards

 

I think I missed the fog blur announcement, it looks gorgeous!

Can't wait to use it in my still to be released game if the eta doesn't slip too much in the future

 

I'd like to get it done in about a week, but it's difficult to say for certain.

 

Thanks for the reply. With this new feature of "fog", to call it somehow, will it continue to have the same performance that had its asset before or will it consume enough more resources?

And another thing. In the next update when you include this feature, will it be fully implemented or will there still be features to include to show the best visual result?

 

Fog looks really good!
For me it looks more like smoke than fog because of the opaque smoke particles, but anyway great.

 

SE Natural Bloom & Dirty Lens is 25% off for the wishlist sale!

 

Hey CODY. Any idea when the fog will be included? Thanks

 

Can anyone help me figure out what the problem is here? I am using Unity 5.4.2f2 (64-bit) See the attached image. My camera is using HDR, I am in forward rendering, linear color space, but it still the effect script has this message in the inspector and the game have not bloom whatsoever.

Regards,
Carlos

 

Make sure that you don't have Anti-Aliasing enabled in your Quality Settings.

 

Thank you Stormy102 for your reply. I have not anti-aliasing in my project. I have the exact recommended settings that appears in the help document of this asset. My project is for Xbox One by the way, in case that this is an important info.

Regards,
Carlos

 

I just saw this asset on the store and it looks amazing! the quality and softness to the glow is really good
I was just wondering, since I'm making a 2D game (therefore orthographic, forward rendering and AFAIK no HDR) would i be able to use this asset in anyway or not? Id understand If i cant since this uses HDR, but would be nice to know

(game is in my signature in case my description wasnt sufficient enough)

 

An updates on this?

 

I think someone earlier in this thread said that it works with both ortho and perspective.

 

Is there a way to use a distortion effect shader while using SENB? For some reason it doesn't seem to work...

 

Make sure it goes after the SENBDL effect - https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/image-effect-order.345389/#post-2237010 make sure your image effects are in this order for maximum effect and authenticity.

 

The effect doesn't show up in editor view anymore in 5.6. Any idea how to get that back ? =)
It's quite crucial for setting up my all illuminations properly.

 

Add the [ImageEffectAllowedInSceneView] attribute to the script and it should work. https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/ImageEffectAllowedInSceneView.html

 

Already tried.
I also created a new clean project to make sure it was not a conflict of different post-processing effects, but no it doesn't work for some reason.