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

I'm still interested to know more about the general work flow.

Will we need to use a special shader? Would we be able to make our own custom shaders that can use the effect? Will it work in both forward and deferred rendering? Any information about these sorts of things would be great.

 

so when this reflects "more" than screen space reflections
does it fully replace other ssr-solutions?

would of course be nice if it is compatible to vtp

 

This looks great, I really need this NOW!

Is the shader behavior similar to the Unity standard shader (work with realtime GI / baked lightmap, sky reflection)? Will it work in combination with SSR and ReflectionProbes?

 

Hey there,

after out major Update for Vertex Tools Pro is finally out in the wild, work continues on PRP

A "special" shader, with all Standard Shader functionality will be needed. Nonetheless we try to make the process of integrating the effect into your own custom shaders as easy as possible. Sadly we currently only target deferred rendering path. But we will try and see to get it running in forward too.

Yout have to differentiate. Yes, it will reflect everything you want to be reflected. It is not limited on screenspace. On the other hand it will only work on flat surfaces. That's why this technique is called Planar Reflections.

Yes the other behaviour is excactly like the Standard Shader ones. And it will work in combination, but you have to be carefull if you use SSR or Reflection Probes on the same object you use PRP on, it will may come to strange blending between reflections.

 

It looks just like what you can get on Some Other Engine 4.

Can't wait for this to be released. Reflections are too difficult to make in Unity for now.

 

1+ for glass support.

 

Wow this looks great, exactly what we need.
Will it work in both forward as deferred

 

@PitHeimes

Could you just release the product in its current state as a beta version or something? I would pay full price. Hell, I’d pay twice.

 

yeah some early access would be nice

 

How's progress going on this?

 

I want to pay for this... would pay for beta access!

 

+1

 

+1

 

@PitHeimes

So how about it? Release a beta?

 

@PitHeimes
Any news?

 

Hey everyone,

while working on our main project we had to realize that it still is a long way to polish PRP to a point where we would charge money for it. The usability is not as we wished currently and there are some bugs in certain situation. In short: It does not meet our own quality standards for the asset store.

Therefore we decided to release PRP on github soon. I will update this thread once it is published.

 

Any news? I really would like to use some good looking planar reflections

 

Even getting it to a state where it's ready to put on github so that people can actually use it takes some more time and effort and time is unfortunately fairly limited at the moment. But we haven't given up on this.

 

I just discovered this long gestating project while looking for a solution to a problem I'm having with water reflections. In the real world, water doesn't reflect sunlight when something blocks it, but most Unity water assets do. In the picture below for instance, there shouldn't be a specular highlight on the water in the shadow of the island.



Would it be possible to disable the built in sun highlight and planar reflections on water assets and replace them with PRP (assuming the water asset provides a way to turn them off)? If so, would it solve this, or does PRP suffer from the same limitation? Also, will PRP work with projected grids, and pick up the original displacement based highlights, or would it need to be placed on a static planar mesh?

I've seen this issue with Water4, Aquas, and Ceto so far, and I'm sure other water assets do the same thing, so it should be fairly simple to test if you're not sure. If PRP can solve this, it would open up its potential market considerably.

 

It's unlikely to be something that can be plugged into other solutions like ceto, etc. Though in theory it could be possible, it's not something you'd hold your breath for.

The issue is the way the sin light is being applied.

In ceto, the sun exists as a vector, color and intensity, but no shadowmap. This is faster and allows for better subsurface scattering to be handled with that extra speed, but does have the problem you're seeing.

In normal materials, the sun exists as the vector, color, intensity and a shadow mask, which adds a texture look to every step, so not everything is viable at those same speeds. This would solve your problem, but it would be slower unless you simplified some lighting functions drastically.

I'm going the whole hog and using image based lighting for the ocean in my projects - so for the whole environment it has a vector, color, intensity and 'mask' for each pixel. That way I can get the clouds blocking the sun and behaving nicely, but in terms of speed I'm not even in the same order of magnitude as the simpler approaches.

 

Too bad. After looking at it again, the sun highlight doesn't use the same mechanism as the planar reflections. If only the sun used the same mask as the rest of the reflections, or you could apply an external image mask, the way you do to create shoreline foam for instance, the problem could be easily solved. It looks like I can turn it off completely by setting the specular intensity to 0, though, so I'm still curious how PRP handles the situation, and whether it or some other 3rd party product can give a "proper" reflection, including a masked sun highlight.

 

Hello,
Sorry to dig this out but I am really interested by your work.
Any news on this ? I will be glad to be a beta tester.

 

@PitHeimes Any news on an experimental GitHub or other distribution so we can have a little play around?

Love to see this in action on my machine

 

Any chance to get my hands on it? Maybe releasing it with a "not ready for production and might never be ready, purchase at your own risk. Loading this asset in your project might turn all of your MP3 into Justin bieber songs"

For real though, there is no need to release it for free. How. Many "please "you think is required for the asset to be realsed?