As seen am I busy with a Project, and seen as with 2.6 I am running into performance limitations (Stencil shadows, alot of light sources),
I am thinking of getting a Unity 3 Pro license.
As my project contains alot of shadows and light sources, were as Unity 3 has shadowmaps and infinity light sources, I would like to find someone who is willing to test my scene within Unity 3 and compare performance between 2.6.1 and 3.0!
This is a VERY important decision for me to make, as I won’t spend 880 euro for an upgrade that isn’t really that useful afteral.
Money could be tight. Maybe it will be the only thing he needs Unity for. Maybe he wants a free engine to test it, but will go for a different engine once he is ready to publish. The list goes on, there really is not point in saying, why not buy it. Because if it does not sum up to expectations, congratulations $1500 blown.
I would just wait for Unity3 to come out, then download the trial.
That’s funny since Unity never had stencil shadows
Yes, Unity 3.0 has shadowmaps, just like Unity 2.x always had. We have optimized them in 3.0. Also 3.0 will have deferred lighting system, where (non shadowed) lights are much cheaper.
Not sure what you mean by “infinity light sources”. Infinite number of lights will take infinite amount of time to calculate, so your FPS will be quite low (i.e. exactly zero)…
Looking at your screenshot, that many lights looks like it would be a good match for deferred renderer. But if you can not use actual realtime lights, that is always going to be faster than realtime lights. Why not just bake them into lightmaps, or something?
Problem is, a fairground has lights that change colours, and shadows cast by the seats, can not be static, they move, so that will be very difficult to do with lightmaps.
Lighting is always a complex problem. One thing that many people make a mistake with is they literally put a light at each point where alight would really be in real life. This is much too much.
What you want to be doing with lighting is being as careful as possible to fake the effect.
In your scene I see basically 4 main light sources with only two of which that need to be shadow casters.
In the middle is a yellow light, multiple bulbs, but can be evaluated as if it were a single light casting a strong shadow. At the back you have a multicolored light, use a single light and a gobo on this to change it’s color as it’s case from left to right and again give it a shadow, exclude the back wall. To the left and right are some other colored lights again use a single light source and, don’t bother with shadows from these. Add SSAO and maybe some second bounce lightmapping and you should be done.
Everything about CG and game engines is about optimization, it’s about getting the effect with the minimum possible processing involved, and to do that it’s down to the user making cunning design decisions, it’s a human doing the optimization because a computer isn’t smart enough to know how. While Unity 3 is faster I don’t think it’s fast enough to resolve your problems on it’s own.
If you want i can take this project and open it with Unity 3.0 and send you back the standalone version.
Unfortunately i do not have time to test it with Unity3.0 and tweak settings. I can just import the project and send you back the result what i got on Unity3.0
