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Unity Realtime Reflections and GI and realism Exploration

Discussion in 'Made With Unity' started by HeliosDoubleSix, Sep 2, 2014.

  1. Zomby138

    Zomby138

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    That looks really good!

    What's the interaction with normal maps like?
     
  2. HeliosDoubleSix

    HeliosDoubleSix

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    Thanks, FYI:
    "they have ways of dealing with this, and with realtime reflections so a dynamic object moving around your scene will pick up lighting and reflections from your realtime GI or from your baked GI. Right now some of this isn't working but will be by release time. It will store the direction the light was travelling from in the lightmap so you can get lighting and specular from normal maps and such too."

    As soon as they add it I'll try it out
     
  3. shkar-noori

    shkar-noori

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    what beta version are you using?
     
  4. FuzzyQuills

    FuzzyQuills

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    Looking pretty good!

    @HeliosDoubleSix:The screen you offere 1 million points for... ;)
    Believe it or not, I was guessing Quake too (geddit?! :D) and that's because I saw someone else playing Quake once.

    There are also way too many Quake refs on the internet to even forget about it. so no Quake n00bs allowed! :D
     
  5. kurylo3d

    kurylo3d

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    Anyone else miss the original team fortress for quake 1? Or weapons factory for quake 2? lol
     
  6. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    It's Q3DM7. Any diehard grunt would know this.

    Nice work so far on the scenes... but still not quite there in terms of quality. What are you finding are the weak points of enlighten so far?
     
    Last edited: Sep 12, 2014
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  7. Hikiko66

    Hikiko66

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    Yeah, Quake multiplayer mods were probably the most fun I've had gaming, especially Quake1.
    TF, Painkeep, ThreewaveCTF, Airquake and CCTF are some of the mods I played the most.
    They inspired me so much I was designing mods on pieces of paper when I didn't know how to code =/
     
    Last edited: Sep 12, 2014
  8. kurylo3d

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    Quake2 and halflife were my favorite... quake 2 ctf, quake 2 weapons factory, action quake 2, gloom for quake 2.... and then action halflife was just epic. not to mention all the other mods for it.. hell i made mods for half life.
     
  9. HeliosDoubleSix

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    Beta 3 when you asked, now beta 4,
    This scene was just thrown together :)

    Weak points as it stands are you cannot get soft area shadows without using Area lights which currently are not supported in realtime, which means for those you need to bake, and to get high quality baked GI you need really really high realtime GI settings, which I'm sure can't be very efficient and takes forever to process. Though I think they are separating the quality settings for realtime and GI soon. And even when it is set really high you are inherently limited by the lightmap max size of 4096x which sounds like a lot but if your object has a huge surface area you may well hit this sooner than you think, then your only option is to start breaking your model up into smaller pieces.

    And it has lots of stupid hard limits like quality cannot go above 'x' and cluster size cannot go below 0.1 and lights cannot go brighter than 8 and other such nonsense.

    But more than all of that, I am quite tired of staring at my computer baking all day long :-D
     
    Last edited: Sep 12, 2014
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  10. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    Good, this is feedback they need.
     
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  11. HeliosDoubleSix

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    My 70 page email has been sent to Unity phew...

    In the meantime more 'Can you tell what game this is'
    Precompute res of only 2 so not super high res or anything, just some fun ( and realtime not baked ) and to see how it handles large areas :
    Screen Shot 2014-09-15 at 03.36.41 pm.png

    Screen Shot 2014-09-15 at 03.46.29 pm.png
    Screen Shot 2014-09-15 at 03.36.25 pm.png Screen Shot 2014-09-15 at 04.11.50 pm.png
     
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  12. Baldinoboy

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    Wow man. Do not know the game but that is beautiful.
     
  13. janpec

    janpec

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    Haha that made me laugh, i was also thinking Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament .

    Helios nice work. That second last picture under bridge has very realistic lighting. Have no idea about game though.

    Are you perhaps maybe interesting posting some nature scenes with GI, for example tree dense areas, maybe especially being bellow dense tree crowns, i wonder how nicely lighting bounces and if it does work with alpha textures yet.
     
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  14. shkar-noori

    shkar-noori

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    Please keep those screenshots coming, and everytime you post a screenshot please tell us the version of the beta if you can, I really can't believe how amazing those are :D
     
  15. FuzzyQuills

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    For some reason, I recognize that game, but can't think of the damn name! :D
     
  16. Luckymouse

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    Hi HeliosDoubleSix, some of your image said "Lit purely from the Sky, no lights at all", are you using the built-in unity 5 Skybox Procedural shader to light your scene, or using HDR image as skybox?
     
  17. HeliosDoubleSix

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    I did try SpeedTree which is part of Unity 5, but it was playing up with the GI when I last tried due to how it uv maps, I'll have another look.

    The Game btw was GTA San Andreas

    I have been lazy so far and used the procedural sky ( which isn't even properly HDR ), uSky looks interesting though I shall have to try I was thinking I wish the Unity sky has colour transition and atmospheric scattering, silly me for not checking the asset store :)

    And one more as it finished re-lighting at a higher res now, playing with making the windows into lights:
    Screen Shot 2014-09-16 at 02.07.48 am.png
     
    Last edited: Sep 16, 2014
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  18. Luckymouse

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    The procedural sky is what i thought too. Your GI image looks awesome.

    By the way uSky is still under developing at the moment, but you are welcome to download our tryout project at my post here. I appreciate for any advice.
     
    Last edited: Sep 16, 2014
  19. FuzzyQuills

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    @HeliosDoubleSix: Heh... those images you're posting made one of my friends drool... :D
     
  20. 8Infinite8

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    Really fantastic work. Your blog post was very inspirational. Thank you. I really hope Unity fix their shadows. A 3rd quality option as you say would be most appreciated, including penumbra shadows.

    Would love to see a video in motion of these most recent shots. They look stunning.
     
    Last edited: Sep 18, 2014
  21. PhobicGunner

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    I just want Unity to throw in PCF filtering. It's not that hard, and it instantly looks 100x better.
     
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  22. FuzzyQuills

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    @PhobicGunner: technically they did, but it's only 4 samples... o_O
    And plus, they should get into VSM or Poisson disk filter, that would look better too! :)
     
  23. PhobicGunner

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    Nah, that's not PCF. That's just plain old linear filtering. What they NEED is a 3x3 tap PCF filter on top of the existing linear filtering - 9 samples total, combined with linear filtering it looks amazingly better than what we have now.
     
  24. FuzzyQuills

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    @PhobicGunner: Huh, not surprising! :D
    As far as I know, Shadow Softener accomplishes such filtering.
     
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  25. PhobicGunner

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    Yep, that's basically what it does. I've also written both linear and PCF filtering for a custom deferred renderer, so I know the differences between them and I also know just how good they can look when combined.
     
  26. FuzzyQuills

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    @PhobicGunner: huh! Well then, happen to have a thread for this "deferred renderer?" Me curious! :)
     
  27. FuzzyQuills

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    [Double post deleted. WHOOPS!]
     
    Last edited: Mar 13, 2015
  28. 8Infinite8

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    "As far as I know, Shadow Softener accomplishes such filtering."

    @FuzzyQuills - It "accomplishes" but solves nothing, it falls short. We have a constant battle with shadow distance and surface acne from self shadows. Nasty clipping. Fighting with bias and distance to get the right look. You win one and loose the other. Even with shadow softener we get terrible results.

    Example: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/shadow-softener-official-thread.200024/page-6#post-1775851

    Soft shadows would be OK if we could blur the shadow noise somehow but even then we lack the realism of penumbra.

    @HeliosDoubleSix Looking forward to seeing more :)
     
    Last edited: Sep 18, 2014
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  29. Zomby138

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    I find myself checking this thread several times a day to see if there are any new images posted >_<
     
  30. KEngelstoft

    KEngelstoft

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    @Zomby138 you can use 'Watch Thread' in the top of the page.
     
  31. QuantumTheory

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    @HeliosDoubleSix Is this lighting workflow the same one outlined in your gigantic, mega blog post? Do you prefer adaptive or non-adaptive tonemapping? I've access to the beta and noticed some artifacts on a simple bake on an object with normal maps. This was in Beta 1 so perhaps they fixed it after I reported it. *shrug*

    I've a big scene that's 80% finished that I'd like to light and add to this thread if you don't mind sharing tips. Thanks!
     
  32. HeliosDoubleSix

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    Sure, you should probably start your own thread and link to it though, I don't care personally, but for other reasons that is a good way to go, I hijack other peoples threads all the time though ;-P

    Thread junkie you :)
     
  33. HeliosDoubleSix

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    Forgot to say , yes the mega huge super silly long blog post is all the same stuff. Adaptive tone mapping is only available with Reinhard currently which is an abomination and no one should ever use it. I am currently contemplating adding auto exposure myself, the guy at Unity I am speaking with wants to add it but he is mega busy with Enligthen so I might do it, and if I don't, he might ;-D

    This is mega important for when you go from outdoors to indoors which can vary in brightness by 10,000x

    And is actually a real PIA to achieve in a graceful way, for instance taking into account a burning zombie running towards you... seriously
     
  34. QuantumTheory

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    Agreed. I fooled around with OptimizedHeijDawson given your blog post and I do like the results, but I miss eye adaptation. Thanks for the exhaustive analysis!
     
  35. Zomby138

    Zomby138

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    I have a question about the "Box Projection / Parallax Correct Cubemap". Does the cube have to be aligned with the cardinal coordinate axes, or can you rotate it?
     
  36. HeliosDoubleSix

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    It is pretty limited, think in terms of if you have a room this will help reflect all 4 walls and ceiling wonderfully, if there is anything in the middle of the room, it breaks, if it is not a rectangle it breaks ( not sure if the yard adding other shapes )

    But when that fails the theory is you can blend it with other reflection method where needed, such as SSR for things currently in the screen to reflect ( either Candela or Unity is writing custom SSR for one day in the future ) or the Enligthen system can actually be used to render reflections as it stores various data from the lighting process, this is a form of dark magic I cannot understand, and it is not in the beta yet, but will be added soon. I suspect it is limited in resolution but can reflect things behind you nicely.
     
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  37. Jingle-Fett

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    Dammit I can't wait to get my hands on Unity 5 :D I've got a lot of good 3d assets I want to try out. Impressive work by the way!
     
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  38. FuzzyQuills

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    @8Infinite8: Well, There is one way of removing bad shadow attenuation, and that is fiddling around with the way it samples it during the lighting pass. this is made even easier if using a lookup texture for lighting! :)

    And at least we have soft shadows, right? RIGHT? *runs to Unreal Guru to ask for advice* Ok, I'm good! :D
     
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  39. Almakos

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    Hey HeliosDoubleSix,
    I've read your blog post which is super long but interesting.
    However I am not sure I understand correctly what is the best way of using enlighten so far. As I understood "baking" feature is not exactly ready if to compare to beast in Unity 4.x. Is that so?

    Also I am super curious about enlighten performance and visual quality on mobile, do you have any suggestion about what approach to take...
    Should it be Dynamic GI or Static GI + Realtime...?
    I am genuinely confused about all the options

    I understand that you should be super busy, but would be very useful if you could post couple screenshots with your most loved settings so far.

    Thank you for your time and please keep up your research. It is very useful at these super early stages when almost no-one knows how to use this thing.

    Cheers!
     
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  40. Joachim_Ante

    Joachim_Ante

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    Generally you use "DynamicGI" for realtime lights with realtimeGI.
    and "Static GI" for completely baked lights.

    The other two settings, are not very useful and will be removed in future builds.
     
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  41. HeliosDoubleSix

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    Well there's no point just yet as they are still making changes to the system

    But before Unity 5's release I will have a sane article on the process

    Also Unity are working on the realtime Shadow system, what the end goal and timeframe with that is I'm not sure, but it will get better
     
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  42. FuzzyQuills

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    In actual fact, when's 4.6 coming out? o_O
     
  43. Baldinoboy

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    I am wondering the same thing. Do not want to waste my download allowance on the beta so waiting for the actual thing. Never worked with UI so actually looking forward to trying it out. 4.6 is probably going to be the last major update in the 4.x cycle right?
     
  44. NexGen

    NexGen

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    Awesome pics and info!! I'm so looking forward to have my Unity 5 Pro license :p
     
  45. Pulov

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    Whoah. The last urban shot is breathtaking. Please share an exe or make a vid because I need to see this in movement
     
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  46. Piers909

    Piers909

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    Its pretty amazing that the quality of the model is not nearly as important as the lighting when it comes to making something look photoreal. The fact that this is real time makes me really excited for U5.
     
  47. shkar-noori

    shkar-noori

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    Unity 5.0b5 is out, share some screenshots and thoughts with us on the new version
     
  48. HeliosDoubleSix

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    You don't need to tell me Shkarface, I'm already all over that :p, Still having huge crashing problems though so my patience is getting quite thin.

    Truly, the amount of leverage good lighting gives you, I have been waiting for a good GI solution for a long long time for this reason. You can make even a pile of white boxes look good with simple bounced lighting and good tone mapping.
     
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  49. shkar-noori

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    I'm really excited about these screenshots and I can't wait anymore :D, btw U5 never crashed on my pc.
     
  50. FuzzyQuills

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    @Shkarface Noori: Well, if Helios uses Windows 8... :D I heard on some Win8 machines, 4.x is unstable unless you use --force-d3d11. Also, betas are prone to crashes, you are just a lucky guy who doesn't get 'em! ;)