[DEPRECATED] PIDI Planar Reflections 3 - Real-time reflections with LWRP+UniversalRP+Mobile support!

Community Showcases
1

**PIDI Planar Reflections 3.x is now deprecated. Please visit the thread for PIDI Planar Reflections 4.x instead, as it is the latest release and has been developed with newer Unity versions in mind : https://forum.unity.com/threads/new…e-reflections-for-urp-hdrp-legacy-rp.1157174/ **

ORIGINAL POST
Version 3.8 changelog [here]( [DEPRECATED] PIDI Planar Reflections 3 - Real-time reflections with LWRP+UniversalRP+Mobile support! page-3#post-6889871)

We are proud to introduce our latest tool, PIDI - Planar Reflections 3 :

PIDI - Planar Reflections allows you to easily add real-time planar reflections to your scenes. Planar reflections are commonly used in mirrors, water, floors and other reflective “flat” surfaces.

2048×1152 303 KB

Our unique workflow that mixes Reflection Renderers, that calculate and render the reflection of a scene with full control over most of their parameters, and Reflection Casters that project said reflection over a material on a per-instance basis allows you to create impressive scenes in no time while keeping all the resources and performance of your game under control.

1200×674 46.3 KB

PIDI Planar Reflections is more than a simple reflections tool, however. It was designed by and for game developers and because of that it is full of useful settings to control every aspect of the reflection, from its use of shadows and layer-culling to matrix projections, rendering paths and resolution downscaling.

Additional features can be unlocked thanks to the separate depth pass that the reflections system generates, and in future updates custom pass shaders can be added (in the Standard / Built-in pipeline) to create custom effects.

PIDI Planar Reflections 3 is also fully compatible with the Post Process Stack versions 2 and 3 (version 3 is available only for Universal RP) to let you reflect independent Post FX volumes and add per-reflection settings to your scene.

On top of this, the performance of PIDI Planar Reflections is the best of any reflections asset and many of the included shaders are mobile ready, including some of our ready to use water shaders.

2048×1152 369 KB

For users of Unity 2019+, additional packages that add support for Lightweight RP and Universal RP in different versions are also provided in ShaderGraph format as well as useful subgraphs that will let you create your own shaders in no time. For differences and limitations on LWRP and URP please read this

2048×1152 200 KB

The asset is fully documented, both offline (PDF) and online and comes in three different editions :

  • Lite Edition, with some limited features and a smaller shaders collection but with a very affordable price and a Per-Seat license
  • Standard Edition, with all features included and a Per-Seat license
  • Team Edition, with all the power and features of the Standard Edition but without any Per-Seat restrictions.

You can see the full list of differences between editions right here

PIDI Planar Reflections 3 is now available on the Asset Store for a 15 USD price for the Lite Edition and 35 USD for the Standard Edition.

We hope this new version will be a great help to all of your projects and can’t wait to see the amazing things you can do with it
IMPORTANT NOTICES : This asset is not compatible with any XR features (AR/ VR) nor are there plans to support them.

This initial release comes with less shaders than version 2 since many of those shaders were combined and some of them will be re-done to have better performance / features. We plan to release new shaders monthly so you can expect your collection of reflective shaders to grow considerably within the next few months :slight_smile:

Users of version 2 who bought this asset after August 1st will receive a free upgrade to version 3, Standard Edition.

All other users of version 2 will receive a ~45% discount and users of version 1 a 15% discount.

We hope this helps, and that you have a great day!

2

Fantastic news! Congrats.

I bought the version 2 asset two weeks ago - how can I go about getting the free upgrade?

3

Thanks!

Simply going to the store page for version 3 should show you the discounted price (in this case, free). I hope this helps and please let us know if you have any issues :slight_smile:

Have a great day!

4

Now that PIDI Planar Reflections 3 is released and, thanks to that, our approval time for updates is much shorter, we are preparing the first update for the asset to come out before the end of October. It will be our first Shader Pack to extend the capabilities of the tool.
Here is the (tentative, may change a bit before releasing the update) list of changes we are working on :

  • Depth Fade shaders in Metallic and Specular variants (Standard Pipeline)
  • Additional Static + Real-time reflection shaders (Standard Pipeline, currently in research for LWRP / URP)
  • Advanced Mirror shader with fogging + blur (Standard Pipeline, currently in research for LWRP / URP)
  • Improvements to the occlusion values on all PBR shaders

At the moment, the Asset Store’s uploads back end (which is used to send new updates) seems to be down again so we ask you patience in case the update is slightly delayed. The asset store has been facing some delays during the last month and a half and these are outside of our control, but we are in touch with them to try to find solutions and release all updates in time.
We hope this will be helpful for your projects and wish you all a great day :slight_smile:

5

Thanks - everything is working fine so far, except that using the PBR Metallic shader, I can’t get it to blur the reflections at all if I’m using a gloss map texture - it works ok if I change it to use a single value. Is there an easy fix for that?

6

Hi there,

We ask you to please send your support request to our support email or through a PM accompanied by your invoice number as this will allow us to follow it up more easily and give you a more complete answer to your request.

Leaving this aside, there will be some changes and improvements to the pbr shaders coming next week as we posted above (which could not be done while the asset was under review and that due to current technical issues on the asset store are being delayed) and that may help with this as well.

In any case, we invite you again to make your support request through our support channels as that will make the process easier and more efficient :slight_smile:

Thanks for commenting!

7

Hi there,

First of all, thank you for your purchase :slight_smile:

Reflection Renderers cannot be scaled in any way since they are not intended to be visible in a scene. For that purpose you must add a Reflection Caster component to any mesh, which will display the reflection that the Renderer is drawing.

The mesh with the Caster can have any scale whatsoever, regardless of the original scale of the Renderer. For more information, please read the documentation in the “Adding Reflections to a Scene” section or open the included demo scenes. In them, you can see that the object that shows the reflection in the game is the mesh with the Reflection Caster attached, while the Reflection Renderer just calculates it and stores it.

Always remember that to use PIDI Planar Reflections you always need at the very least 2 objects : the Renderer, which will be invisible in the game and cannot be scaled and the Caster, which will take the reflection produced by the renderer and assign it to any given material.

If you have further questions, please contact us through our support email with more information about the issue and your invoice number and we will be glad to provide you further assistance :slight_smile:

Have a great day!

8

Thanks! That makes more sense now!

9

Hi,

I ran into a similar issue than what I’m about to describe when implemented a simple planar reflection solution when decided to move to URP with my current project and therefore not beneficiating anymore from your great plugin feature, but I’d like to see if you have the same behavior as I do.

Basically, when using either your plugin or my implementation of planar reflection using URP (or LWRP btw), if I have any uGUI rendered in World space, I can only see the reflection happening in the Editor and only if the Scene View is actually active.
You can try by yourself: just open an URP sample, add planar reflection as you would normally do as well as a simple Text or Image UI item rendered inside a Canvas (set to World using the only supported Camera).

Now, if you either build a player and run it, or maximize the Game window, or hide the Scene View behind another Tabbed Window, or just closing the Scene View, you’ll notice that the UI doesn’t get reflected.

I believe it is related to when the UI is actually rendered (in URP implementation) but I wondered if you would see a way to override it and get the expected result?

Thanks
Best regards

10

Hi there,

Unfortunately, we cannot reproduce the issue on our end since just performing the required test (Canvas in World Space, URP in Unity 2019.3, Scene view disabled) we still see the UI elements being rendered as expected :

Scene view :

5100332--502829--upload_2019-10-23_18-35-1.jpg

Game View :

5100332--502832--upload_2019-10-23_18-35-24.jpg

Game View maximized :

5100332--502838--upload_2019-10-23_18-47-25.jpg

And a build :

5100332--502853--upload_2019-10-23_18-58-51.jpg

In short, everything seems to indicate that our reflections system in its current version works without issues with UI Canvas in World Space within URP and Unity 2019.3. We suggest you to update to the latest release as it may help you achieve the effects you want but if you have further issues please contact us directly to our support email and we will do our best to provide further assistance :slight_smile:

Thank you for your support to our products, we hope this will help you!

11

A new update is coming very soon with a couple improvements to LWRP :

  • Improved Metallic and Specular shaders for LWRP and URP
  • Improved performance in LWRP and URP
  • Fixed a bug when reflecting reflective surfaces

This update should be available within this week or (if there are any delays on the Asset store side) next Monday :slight_smile:

12

Changelog for version 3.05 (Standard Edition) :

Fixes :

  • Fixed “red foam” bug in one of the water shaders

  • Fixed the way gloss affects blur

Improvements :

  • Improved the depth pass shader

  • Exposed the depth shader slot on the UI to allow for custom pass shaders to be used

  • Improved the way occlusion is handled in PBR shaders

  • Box based projection added to the static + real-time mix shaders

New :

  • First pack of new shaders, including Depth Fade shaders and a first port of several Legacy shaders into the new version.
13

Hi there,

We had a slight delay with the new update to version 3.1 but it will be released in the next few days. It comes with the following improvements :

  • Improved Metallic and Specular shaders in LWRP / Universal RP
  • Improved performance in LWRP and URP
  • Fixed some issues when reflecting reflective surfaces in LWRP / URP

As a small peek at the roadmap for December and Q1 2020, we are working hard on the following features and improvements :

  • HDRP version of the shaders to let the asset work on HDRP workflows (~Q1 2020 )
  • Improved LWRP / URP shaders and water shaders ( December 2019 )
  • Additional Cutout shaders, Unlit shaders and additional ports of the Legacy Shaders ( December 2019 )
  • Improved workflow for blurry reflections ( Q1 2020 )

We hope this helps ! :slight_smile:

14

Any chance of getting some Amplify Shader Editor support or any ideas on how to go about doing it ourselves?

15

Version 3.08 (previously 3.1) has been released with the following change log :

Fixes :

  • Fixed a small bug which prevented the reflections from being disabled on other reflective surfaces within SRP renderers and Unity 2019.3

Improvements :

  • Improved Metallic and Specular Workflows on LWRP and Universal RP with support for Metallic / Specular maps
  • Improved support for Unity 2019.3 (BETA)
  • Re-labelled the packages for Unity 2019.3 and Universal RP as “PREVIEW” instead of “Unsupported” to avoid confusion.
  • Internal work to prepare for the December update and its new batch of shaders is ready now.
16

Hi there,

A small unitypackage containing Amplify Shader Editor samples will be released at some point next week as part of the December update (along with the second half of the “legacy” shaders) which should be a great starting point for all users working with ASE :slight_smile:

However, if you need to start already with your own shaders a good starting point is the “Create Custom Shaders” section of our documentation. In short, you should be able to add reflections to your shader by having a “_ReflectionTex” property of type sampler2D and project it over screen UVs whose x coordinate has been flipped :

screenUV.x = 1-screenUV.x;

The package to be uploaded next week will contain some Amplify specific sub-graphs and functions to help you with this as well as several easy to extend shaders that will cover the basic workflow. It will be included in all three editions of the tool : Lite, Standard and Team.

We hope this helps!

EDIT : We will not, however, release Amplify Shader Editor samples for SRP. The default shader editor for SRP will continue to be ShaderGraph

1 Like
17

The December update is coming next week with the following changes :

  • New shader pack with more legacy shaders ported to the new version of the tool (Standard Edition)
  • New pack of static reflection+real-time reflection shaders with support for box projections (Beta)
  • New sample package for Amplify Shader Editor users with several functions to make it easier to create your own shaders compatible with the system (Lite, Standard and Team, no SRP compatibility)
18

A small peek to the Amplify Shader Editor sample to be included in the December Update :

5217899--519863--upload_2019-11-26_23-31-32.jpg
5217899--519863--upload_2019-11-26_23-31-32.jpg1468×879 288 KB

With a very easy to use function node that unwraps and outputs the reflections as “ready to use” as possible, and a great starting point to implement your own custom modifications to the way the reflection is unwrapped, in case you want to copy effects such as the broken reflections included with the asset :slight_smile:

1 Like
19

Does it support orthographic camera？

20

Hi there!

Yes, it does :slight_smile:

5218316--519953--upload_2019-11-27_2-22-51.jpg