I was really unhappy with the quality and performance of Unity’s shadows. I tried a few ways to speed it up but they all relied on unity’s lighting in the back end.
So I’ve completely replaced Unity’s dynamic lighting.
Way less light bleeding, shadow acne, peter panning
Smooth Shadow distance fall off (No more pop in shadows)
Coloured Light cookies
Multi Camera friendly(reuses shadow maps from other cameras)
Can handle Higher res shadow maps (not recommended for most GPU’s).
Shadow quality can be changed at run time with out needing to change settings profile (Why unity)
Currently supports point, spot lights and Directional light
shadow caster exclusion list (great for torches)
To do
Area lights
Soft shadow on directional light.
Cascade Directional light.
LOD friendly
Downsides
Doesn’t support transparency (supports alpha cut out and alpha overlay though)
Only supports Standard shader family
Doesn’t interface with light probs or enlighten
Edit: Currently Only works in deferred shading path.
Edit: Uses VRAM to increase performance (size set by user) Still out performs unity if buffer size is 0
Some of these downside could be fixed but I’d need Unity source or their Render API improved.
The game I’m working on doesn’t need transparency and is procedurally generated, So most of these downside don’t apply to me.
Going to finish up directional lighting this week and hopefully have a build ready for testing soon.
If anyone has any feature requests, I’d love to hear it!
This looks awesome. I’d like to see a demo with much stronger volumetric effects - to see how far it can be pushed. I’d also like to see how it interacts with enlighten, and how it looks when two different colored light volumetrics interact/intersect. I’m really stoked about this, as I’m having endless shadow gap issues. You also mention that directional and area lights are to do - does that mean that this only works with point and spot? Or only point?
Thanks in advance!
Fixing shadow acne looks amazing. We’ve had a lot of trouble with that in our procedural game.
The limitations do seem a little hard (only working with standard shaders and no transparency). Depending on price it’s definitely something I’d be tempted to look into and research with to see if it fits our game.
Right now it works with spot and point lights. I should have directional done by the end of the week. Area lights will probably be the last thing I add. Unfortunately my lights don’t interact with enlighten, I’d need unity’s source to get that working. you might be able to fake it by having a unity light in the same place during the baking process, but I haven’t tested it.
Here’s a picture of stronger scattering and colour mixing, Ill add more scatter functions soon, right now it scatters in all directions with the same strength
If i sell it, probably around 50-60, but ill have to do some more research first.
Ill include a few scenes in the demo, its hard to show off this effect with video and screen shots. If anyone has any recommendation on scenes, id love to hear it.
Nearly got cascade shadow maps generating today. Couldn’t find a way to limit the render area in a command buffer so i had to make a custom blit shader to copy 4 textures into one.
@Jesper-Mortensen or @KEngelstoft have some idea of how to render lighting to enlighten without unity lights or tip for integrating other lighting systems such as this one?
Good one. I have lots of issues with shadow acne, a.k.a banding in my game, also (to less degree) peter panning. Too bad you can’t make this work with legacy diffuse shader (which is what I’m using for my game to get oldschool flatshaded look), otherwise it’d be an instant buy from me (don’t care about transparency either or interfacing with probes).
So if I understand correctly, in essence it’s similar to my own implementation of lights:
Sounds like an increase in shadowmap precision, probably R16->R32, doubling memory use. Atleast, for point lights as those don’t support dedicated depth formats.
So you have a unique shadowmap for each light? Your memory requirements would then scale with the number of lights, while Unity lights have a constant requirement.
I may be wrong here, but this is due to keeping shadows over multiple frames? As that’s the only way I’ve found to increase the performance of unity lights significantly, and the only other way I found was clipping pixels covered if they’re not in range of the light. You’ve also disabled to ‘wiggling’ of torches in the viking village demo, further increasing the chances of this being correct.
Internally Unity only has 1 shadowmap of each required quality, and draws over the content just before it renders the light onto the screen. This is why there isn’t a update-per-script option like on reflection probes, there is no per-light buffer you can keep.
It would be nice if you can include the downsides of these things in the OP:
Your lights use a lot more memory than Unity’s, especially if you have more of them
Your lights only outperform Unity’s if the shadow casters don’t move and you therefore don’t update the shadowmap
This only works in deferred.
A related problem to 2); As the code is slower but runs less, if something happens that has to update multiple lights you’ll get a frame spike that may be higher than what you’d get every frame with builtin lights.
My suggestions:
LOD support. it improved performance for me a LOT; from ~70% of builtin ms to ~20% or so iirc.
I don’t know how you’re rendering into your shadowmap that makes this standard shader only but you could use Camera.RenderToCubemap with a replacement shader to generate the shadowmap, removing the standard shader requirement.
I’d love to be proven wrong, and that this isn’t what I described above as that’d mean there are lots of further improvements to be made on top of a good base.
Great job at the volumetric lighting though, looks awesome! Next step is voxelizing the world in range of the point light and conetrace some GI through it
I’ve been following your progress on Hitbox Team - this is looking really promising. Definitely interested ! Especially the volumetrics. Though I would need it to play along with light probes and Enlighten.
So far, I’ve managed to create a sort of fake lit-fog with particles which look OK at far distances:
I haven’t done any research into making it work with enlighten yet. My game is procedurally generated so figuring out if i can get it working with light probes and enlighten is at the end of my list. My guess is I’ll need some enlighten API opened up.
! Especially the volumetrics. Though I would need it to play along with light probes and Enlighten.