Jove 2.0: DX11 Rendering System (Alpha Release)

Community Showcases
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Asset store link

This post is a little bare at the moment. A lot of the information that was here has become outdated. I’m going to be posting new information soon

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Developer diaries

FAQ

  • Does this require DX11?

Yes.

  • Will you raise the price?

Yes. Every major update will see a small increase in price.

Demo

New standalone demo - Requires DX11
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/233290703/JoveStandalone.rar
(move with WASD, hold right click to rotate)

Old webplayer demo - Requires DX11
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/233290703/Alpha02Demo.html
(move with WASD, hold right click to rotate)

Thanks for reading!

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This looks very promising. I was always wary of using third-party rendering-related assets with Unity as vast majority of them usually tackled some isolated effect (only cubemaps, or only IBL, or only fog, or only shadows), which promised a world of pain, hugely complicated workflows and problems with performance whenever you would try to merge those solutions into one project.

This is the first product in the field that looks like an all-encompassing solution that covers a lot of use cases and gives you impressive performance. Everyone should check this out, I don’t think there is anything comparable on the asset store at the moment.

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This was brought up before, but the answer was not clear to me. Does Jove 2.0 work with substances?

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Trying it out now, everything works well so far. I can’t even pick what to give a highlight, practically everything from very nice translucency to thoughtfully layered ambient occlusion (you have no idea how much I wanted separate high-frequency and low frequency ambient occlusion all this time, never being able to translate that effect from concept art) is impressive. It’s obviously still in alpha, so don’t expect it to cover every single use case (for starters, there is no support for shadows from point lights yet), but overall what I see is very pleasing.

One thing I’d recommend to point out in the quick start guide is that you need to have forward rendering enabled in the project settings, not deferred rendering. I know that Jove adds it’s own pipeline, but for some people it would be pretty intuitive to set that setting to deferred as they install an asset that gives them better deferred rendering. Had a few frustrating minutes guessing why wouldn’t things render like they supposed to :slight_smile:

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I’ve had a play with the alpha, its extremely impressive, its odd in fact how ‘bland’ it makes Unity 4’s rendering seem, my computer’s GPU fan humming at quite a volume increase given, great stuff, time to see if I can get something more than cubes and spheres looking pretty in it

Referring back to the WIP thread, I purchased truesky while it was grand value for money so I’m going to try implementing that with the directions given, and whine if it doesn’t pan out aha

It’s extremely enthusing to finally have something in Unity at a core level showing the importance of Compute. Hopefully this can get a bit more people on the compute train

Speculation: There are several shader solutions that I would be extremely pleased to see this getting along well with that arent under the basic PBS umbrella. I’m fully aware it’s not your job to chase around after shader writers to provide support but I do hope to see some robust management (whoever ends up doing it) for terrain solutions like RTP (Although with DX11, tessellation prob makes more sense than POM, at least as an option) and Shaderforge (This could possibly involve quite a lot of wrangling but it would create a real mesh with what i feel will be a ubiquitous Unity 5 workflow tool)

Secondly, and here’s the joy of being contrary - I wouldn’t speak too soon about mobile’s inability to run this, i’ve already tried a few great PBS shading solutions on my HTC One in their full fat, not even mobile optimised flavours and theyve run without a hitch, directx 11? Speculation time. Snapdragon 610 & 615: Qualcomm Continues Down its 64-bit Warpath with 4/8-core Cortex A53 Designs

Thats the GPU that the autumn release of the Samsung S5 Prime is purposed to ship with, phones last year were already ferociously fast, my HTC really does pound a lot of straight up desktop systems ive used in equivalent tasks, usually relating to Unity use, although yes, massaging is required, and im evangelistic of the technical and social consequences of widespread VR adoption. Oculus consumer version is some way off but the inevitable home of the technology is going to be mobile, Google made a charming nod to this with Cardboard, the SDK of which i’m currently moving to Unity for multi-phone OS compatibility (I’ll make it available, i can’t vouch for its quality though im no great coder) meaning an open solution for mobile vr, and Samsung developing a VR enclosure for their phones no doubt with the prime in mind, i might well be having a go at getting this working with something mobile. While DirectCompute might not be on the cards for Android, what’s the news of OpenCL flavours of the Compute shaders? (A starting implementation of Unity OpenCL is here OpenCL_Unity - Community Showcases - Unity Discussions and i’m hoping UT take it on in Unity 5 as a matter of course)

Great start, and looking forwards to the future

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great job guys.
Would be the great if you add glassy type property like reflection or refraction.

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This looks excellent. I’ll be watching this closely.

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While you can obviously use textures from anywhere, there is no special support for any runtime modifications or anything like that at this time.

Thanks for pointing that out, I’ll include it in the next version :slight_smile: There are more features relating to ambient light coming later on, but I am glad you are happy with what is already there.

I am open for integrating Jove with other products which would compliment it. That said, it is not I am going to actively pursue at the moment, it is also probably going to be hard to maintain since Jove is bound to change a lot since it is only an alpha version. But if any asset developer is reading this and want to know what it takes for their asset to work in Jove, PM me and we can talk about it. Jove does support forward rendered objects so depending on the lighting requirements it could be easy to integrate.
As for mobile phones… Well, we’ll see :stuck_out_tongue: I do not have high hopes for that in the next five years. Even if some prototype hardware runs it, nobody is going to make a game that eliminates 99% of the market. I mean, people are wary against abandoning DX9, and thats only ~20% of the market.

There is actually a refractive glass shader already. This image is slightly outdated, I made a slight oversight in this version and the glass looks a little more plastic than it is supposed to but the main idea is the same http://forum.unity3d.com/attachments/joveglass-png.107416/
The glass shader supports both reflective and refractive light, from cubemaps/ambient light and analytical light sources (point, spot and directional).

Thank you, I am glad you like it :slight_smile:

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I too purchased truesky in the hopes that it would work… although I’m currently up to my eyeballs in another project that must meet a friday deadline… lazygunn if you have a chance to give it a test run I’m literally all ears to find out how it went.

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Does truesky only deal with the sky or atmospheric scattering as well? Is it rendered as a mesh, or how does it work? If it is just the sky, it should be possible to slap it in a forward layer and it should just work. But I guess you are gonna have to edit some code if you want it to control JoveLights instead of Unitys lights.

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Ah well it seems to be a-la nuaj, volumetrics with raymarching, the atmospheric scattering is integral to the cloud implementation as in these situations they’re intrinsically linked (likewise a realistic ocean renderer a la proland). The truesky alpha is in formative stages truthfully, its quite stripped down, switching layers didn’t help and the code is in a dll but as the code for nuaj was made available it might be possible to figure out how it integrates, or i should look harder at truesky and might be being ignorant. I imagine it’s not entirely straightforward though given implementing volumetrics in a rasterised renderer is not ‘natural’ to the renderer. I’ll have a look now though and get back, maybe direct communication with them would be more edifying, ive had a fair bit of time with nuaj so im aware cloud rendering is not a trivial task and truesky might be a good maintained answer for clouds when having Jove implement its own could be enormously time consuming

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This is my thought as well, it’s a timeless cliche but, why reinvent the wheel… all in all both JOVE and TrueSky could benefit greatly working seamlessly together, I asked the creators of TrueSky in their forum tread and they felt confident that TrueSky would work fine in JOVE… what I’m not sure about though is if he understood what JOVE 2 was all about…

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A quick go with setting things up seems to show that it probably needs a bit more informed application than i’m able to provide, truesky in its current form is quite particular and i guess as an alpha this is to be expected. Generally not working however, truesky seems to rely much on a particular shader for writing to depth which is used by truesky to control the camera view, maybe a multi-camera setup might work? But even if so there’d probably be no interaction between Jove and truesky. I don’t doubt they could work together though, in fact a maintainable editing could be quite straightforward, but its def beyond my remit currently

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I sent out an update to all those who have previously contacted me with their in-voice. If you own Jove and want access to Jove 2.0 before it is approved by the asset store, PM your in-voice!

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Here’s an updated look at Joves glass shaders with 5 different settings. The yellow glass sphere has a point light behind. I’d love to see what someone with actual artistical talent can make :stuck_out_tongue:

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Stock Unity:

Jove:

It’s not the prettiest model, it has no highpoly source for baked normals and the PBR maps I just made for it are very sloppy, but still, I think it looks neat. I should definitely spend more time on higher quality AO and roughness map though, the lighting can look quite a lot better with a higher quality asset.

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Regarding TrueSky, I spent some time this morning trying to integrate it. I hooked it into Jove’s rendering and I can output the diagnostics to screen but I am having issues getting the depth to TrueSky. I originally started by passing the native pointer of render target 0 which has the depth buffer… no depth info in diagnostics.

Then I thought that maybe since temporary render textures were being used and the native plugin callback gets called on the rendering thread that they were being reset before TrueSky got to use them. I tried a few other things with no luck. Basically I just need Jove’s depth so I can get the native pointer and send to TrueSky. I didn’t have much time to check it out so I probably just overlooked something.

@Aieth do you have any ideas on how to share the depth with the native plugin? Maybe creating a seperate persistent RT with depth is the only option since you are using temp buffers? I will eventually figure it out but just making sure I’m not missing something obvious.

I will spend some more time on it tomorrow.

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thanks for ans . It’s in my wish list.

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Does it work on Windows Store Apps and WP8?

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Not sure about the former, but no, it will not work on Windows Phone as it is DX11 asset and as performance requirements are not a match for the phone hardware.