[WIP] Planar Reflections Pro - Realtime, PBR, Planar Reflections for Unity 5

Hi everyone,

we are happy to announce that we are currently working on a new asset: Planar Reflections Pro.



What is Planar Reflections Pro?

You name it: Planar Reflections Pro is exactly what you think it is. It is a totally new planar reflection system for Unity 5+.

Get realtime reflections (like mirrors) in seconds on any flat surface without fiddling around with Unity’s in-house reflection probes. With Planar Reflections Pro you can get realtime reflections with minimal impact on performance.


What differentiates Planar Reflections Pro from other planar reflection assets?

A lot to be honest. We implemented an easy-to-use (and even easier to setup) system. Once imported, you just select a object in your scene, add the Planar Reflections Pro script and hit the „Setup“ button.

The shader allows you to set multiple options to define exactly the look of the reflection you want to achieve.
Strength according to roughness, Blur according to roughness, Normal Map Distortion, Desaturation and so on...
Since we use reflection cameras, you can also use your image effects on those. So if your are not satisfied with GPU blur, you can also blur the reflection itself on the camera. Or add Bloom to reflections. Or Screen Space Ambient Occlusion. Or whatever

“Performance, performance” - Name some values, dude.

In its current state, each planar reflection requires 0.6ms to render a full scene (not the demo scene, the demo scene not even takes 0.1ms of course) at Full HD (On a late 2011 Mac). So the performance hit is quite small.




Features in a nutshell

- Realtime planar reflection with low impact on performance (0.6ms in a full scene at Full HD on late 2011 Mac)
- Blurring with smoothness and depth accounting
- Multiple reflective objects possible
- Reflection in every world direction, with rotation around the Y-Axis
- Dynamic rotation possible
- Automatic detection of relevant objects that need to be reflected (no waste of performance) based on multiple options for you to play with
- A lot of shader settings (General strength, Distortion according to normals, Smoothness accounting, Blurring, etc….)
- Easy-to-use & setup (One Click Solutions wherever it is possible)


When will Planar Reflections Pro be available?

It depends on the amount of input, suggestions & wishes we get. We want to make sure, that Planar Reflections Pro is as best as possible from the beginning.

Nevertheless, since a t.b.d. sucks: We target a release in about 2-3 weeks.


Let’s talk money. How much is it?

Well, like I said, a t.b.d. sucks. But since we are still working hard on it to deliver a finished product and not an early beta, it really is hard to say and estimate. But as always, it will be priced fair.


Thanks for your interest! As always, any suggestion, comment and feedback is highly appreciated. Please ask all your questions below and we will try our best to answer them as soon as possible!

 

Sounds fantastic. The Unity Planar reflections from the Blacksmith demo are extremely buggy.

Are you using two planar reflections in the demo scene since there are two surfaces that have reflections on different heights?

 

Basically yes, but this case is a bit different. Since the height difference is really small, the system uses 1 camera and just 2 different offsets on the objects to not waste performance.

But in general: multiple planar reflections are no problem.

 

Looks good.

 

There's something about the screenshot demo I'm NOT QUITE liking, I can't put my finger on it, perhaps the floor is too mirror like, or the reflections are not 100% consistent.

Could you try with a different scene perhaps?

 

We will do that. And yes, we took the screenshot with no blur and no normal distortion to show clear reflections But we will post some more screenshots from different examples in the upcoming days.

 

As promised at least one additional screenshot showing rougher, more distorted reflections.

 

I don't want to be a stick in the mud, but I think there is a color space conversion error in the reflections. Or maybe it's just the way the scene is lit. Have you tried comparing it to a reflection probe from the mirrored camera position?

 

Oh dang! Thanks for the input. Color correction mistake in latest beta..... Thanks a lot!

 

Yeah I don't wanna rain on your parade either, I loved your Victorian demo previously, but your screenshots aren't doing much to sell IMO, you might wanna look at that.

 

Not a problem at all That's what this thread is for: There is nothing to sell at the moment, since we are deep into the bug hunt and beta testing. Therefore: Attached a new screenshot with corrected color correction, some bugs fixed on lighting and shadows and additional options for desaturation and darkening of the reflection. Please note, that the skybox of course is reflected,too. That's where the dark blueish reflections come from




Critics & Comments apprecciated as always

 

Looks good, very good. A better showcase would be a material with variable roughness though. A metal with grease stains for instance like the one on the left:



The Unity planar reflections have issues with variable roughness, but I don't think it is a limitation of the method in general. Just with their implementation.

 

Thanks again for the feedback. Will post a screenshot of a metal with different roughnesses soon

 

Some Update on variable smoothness

 

I really hate to be that guy, especially since this is definitely an asset I'm gonna buy.

Could you remove the normal map? I want to see what sort of convolution you are approximating. Not how the normal map can change the reflection direction.

That said. Even if you aren't able to pull off a convincing variable reflection convolution, then this asset is still great. Especially for archviz.

 

Not a problem at all. Another Screenshot this time with Normal Distortion turned off.

 

Very nice. Fantastic even.

 

We are glad you (finally) like it

 

Hey. So about 10 years ago I left the video game dev business to work on a software start up. I am not up to date on all the new graphics tech and am just starting out with Unity. So yeah, I am an old man. LOL Please explain to me in simple terms the difference between this and Unity's reflection probes. And this only works on flat surfaces? Then will I still need reflection probes for curved objects?

 

In terms of strengths, the Reflections Probe is best at reflecting the inside of a hollow shoe-box shaped object. It uses box projection to handle alignment of the reflection map, and generally does a pretty good job in general. However, it breaks down when the shoe-box isn't hollow, the walls of the shoe-box aren't aligned and parallel and/or almost flat.

Planar reflections are made to reflect one flat, planar surface. For a given reflection quality, they can be faster (because they're only reflecting 1 direction, not 6) and can, because the reflection camera is 'opposite' the main camera, generally offer further quality advantages due to rendering what the player sees first and foremost. Some problems are the same however; the small gutter in the OP is generally acceptable, but rougher, more lumpy surfaces with greater height differences can cause issues. Also, for spectacularly rough, lumpy surfaces, there can be problems with what should be reflected not being picked up by the one direction the reflection camera is pointing.

PitHeimes, if I might, would I be able to snag a beta? There's some tricks and methods I'd like to test against your system. Primarily, by adding depth of field(distance blur) to the reflection.

Unless DoF can somehow be encoded along with depth from the reflection plane, I get that this will be a sort of lock for roughness, but you can kinda see in the Oct 18 cube screenshot that even with a rough surface, the contact point is a lot rougher than it should be, and the sky is reflecting through the object somehow. To be more realistic, there should be a sharper reflection there, because the reflected light doesn't have that far to disperse and blur.

 

Great, thank you for that explanation. I could not find a good one on Google. I wouldn't have even noticed the gutter if you hadn't said anything.

 

Hey there,

we are happy to share some progress with you. We have been working hard to get the mentioned "light dispersion blur" to work without impact on performace. Following screenshots will show the new feature.

Where we started

This was the latest version. As you can clearly see, the blur depends on the smoothness or roughness of the material that reflects the light. Indeed, this is a good approach, but to get more realistic visuals we had to consider another aspect of reallife: The amount of blur also depends on the distance, the light has to travel from the point of reflection to the point that is beeing reflect (so e.g.: The distance from the reflection of pixel on the wooden plane to the actual pixel on the box (in 3D space of course).


What we did

To achieve this affect we reconstructed the 3D world position of the reflection pixel on the plane and the reflected pixel on the box and calculated the distance. (Most difficult part was to get this camera position independent and therefore consistent and non-flickering when moving around). The blacker it gets, the less distance the light has to travel and therefore, has less range to disperse and hence, resulting in sharper reflections. So basically what should happen is that the edge, where the boxes and the planes meet, should reflect way more sharpen then the top edged of the boxes.

The result and the current state of Planar Reflection Pro

This is the result of the new technique. If you compare the first and the last screenshot you will clearly notice, that the text on the box, is way more sharp in the reflection because the light has to travel a lower distance. This is - like mentioned - view indepent and just depends on the distance between the plane reflection poins and the reflected points on the boxes.

We hope you like our progress and we are happy to get any feedback as always

 

An endorsement by me and our lord and saviour himself; you know you got a good product.

 

Any chance for a WebGL demo?

 

Hi - this looks really good! Did you have a realease date in the foreseeable future?
We are curently working on a project where I need planar reflections ....

 

Contact blur - good feature! Btw, in reflection on table these dark cardboard boxes appears bright for some reason.

 

Any news?

 

I need a demo containing particlesystems/

 

Things are coming together and possible release is getting closer

 

Can't wait.

 

Any chance for a WebGL demo?

 

Once we fixed some flickering issues, we are good to publish some webGL demo

 

Question: is it possible to have these planar reflections on semi-transparent surface (glass)?

 

Well, it was
Since we changed the approach with implementing contact blur, we are currently not able to achieve semi-transparent surfaces out-of-the-box. But we will definitly get back to that "issue" before release.

 

Any news?

 

Well, debugging, debugging & debugging.
But this weekend we will prepare the assetstore screenshots and so on. So hopefully not much time left.

 

Great. I assume we will be able to change the planar reflection camera settings like render layers, and maybe even cheaper render texture formats for optimisation purposes. It's ok if this can only be done via changing scripts.

 

You do not need to set any layers, because relevant objects get detected automatically and layers are switched automatically too. You can of course always include important or exclude unimportant objects as you wish. Otherwise an algorithm casts the relevant objects for you. Other Reflection Camera settings (like image effects) can also easily be adjusted per reflection. Some settings though are not recommended to change (far plane and field of view), since changes may result in disapperaing of shadows in the reflections.

Render Texture Formats and Sized can be changed as you like. This can easily be done from our Planar Reflection Editor-GUI. Or from script. Just as you wish.

 

Another shot. This time in motion to show accuracy and that it's jitter free.

 

Con you show off how emissive surfaces get blurred in the reflections in a dark environment? I'm very interested in having light specularity come completely from reflections in my project.

 

You mean like this?

 

@PitHeimes

Not quite. I'm curious how an emissive surface works as a specular light source. Could you add a small cube with a very high emission (above 1.0) with some more roughness variance on the ground?

I'm curious if you could use your reflections to add specularity to lightmapping. Unity deprecated specular lightmapping; stating that users should use the reflection system from now on, since directional specularity-mapping created some very wonky results.

EDIT: This change in lightmapping coincides nicely with the arrival of your asset.

 

@PitHeimes Sorry if this seems like a stupid question, but I have just stumbled across this and may be interested in it upon release.

Is this effect screen-space (areas outside viewport not reflected), or is it more like the effect shown in Alien Isolation when you crank Planar Reflections to max, where even areas outside the viewport are reflected(see image)?

Alien Isolation(Notice how the area at the top of the screen is just the reflection, and the caster is off-screen, shown in second image in full)

 

Hey there,

Planar Reflections Pro is NOT screenspace. So it also reflects objects outside of the viewport.

 

Does this work in forward, deferred, or both? Do you have to have a special shader on the ground plane?

 

Any news?

 

Still working on it and some "problems" with the lighting. Nothing critical though. Just polishing everything. Especially the setup-process.

 

C'mon mang already. Yeez.

 

Getting these things functional is easy - getting things plugged into Unity's lighting models (even just 'some' of them) is actually a bit more work. Lots of assets can get knocked around when they change things, like there were some bit changed in 5.3, 5.4, 5.5 etc.

 

We LOVE that you are waiting for Planar Reflections Pro. Really! Not in a sacarstic way.
But as some of you may know, we only publish stuff which is polished. We know, it is not thaaaat agile. But we care about our customer. And paying for some asset which is buggy and not ready to be used in B2C projects or in real production environments is a pain. That's why you sadly have to wait a little longer But we haven't forgot about you of course Thanks for all your patience!

In the mean time, you can enjoy our blog to get some insights into the AssetStore, our freshly founded company and an upcoming project

Monoment development blog