Or go to my other forum post with a lot more work-in-progress images and video’s: Go to thread!
MF SSGI will soon be released on the Asset Store and is ideal for dynamic games like: City-builders, games with level-chunks, customizable interiors, etc. Since it runs on DirectX 11 and OpenGL, I will also port it to the Built-in render pipeline once everything is ready!
What are we looking at?
Highly optimized handwritten shaders
ZERO bake times, nothing is static, no Unity GI
DirectX 11 and OpenGL support!
Runs on WebGL and (modern) mobile phones
No RTX/DXR Raytracing required, works any GPU that supports Shader model 3.0
Raymarched shadows from/to each pixel on the screen! Most other SSGI solutions need lightsources to be assigned. Not this one, each pixel is considered a lightsource, each with their own shadow trace. This creates super natural and smooth occlusion.
Realtime Thickness map: Most SSGI solutions just have a default 2.5D object “thickness”. As the depth-buffer is just flat, a thickness is needed to predict if light can move ‘behind’ an foreground object. Other solutions have a fixed value or mask for this, making 2 different props the same thickness. MF SSGI outputs a realtime thickness-map so that shadows are natural and accurate.
Very exciting. How well suited do you think it is to large outdoor scenes? I saw that you’re testing with the Viking village sample, so hopefully large spaces are well handled.
We have environments that are 64 square kilometers. Since you are working in screen space, does that mean this should be ok?
What are the important environmental constraints on your solution?
Keep up the great work. I look forward to purchasing it.
I think there aren’t any constraints in that regard. A lot of GI tools use voxels etc, this is all screenspace. I did test it at Viking Village and everything worked without any noticable artifacts. I did notice that even the mountains in the background were lit, that would be a bit overkill I think, so I will add a max-distance feature to it.
In that case, I’m ready to give it a try. Be sure to charge enough to make it worth your time to properly support it and continue to improve it in the future.
Yeah I’m still wondering what this asset should cost. What would you consider a fair price for such a tool?
I do agree with your advice; I’ve launched 2 assets (multi threading and debugger) way back nearly 8 years ago and supported it for over 3 years before I deprecated it due to new Jobs-system and piracy.
I hope times have changed a bit, so I want this tool to be a success for many years as URP is not going anywhere and will be the default once built-in is deprecated.
Please let me know what would be a fair price, I could use some input here.
to $200 is crazy, there’s already SSGI for URP, fairly new and from known asset store members.
They sell it for $49.
I’ll say it mostly depends on the quality. How does it compare to other SSGI assets for URP?
something in the range of $30 to $90 is reasonable, depending on quality & stability.
Can we get a built demo? Ideally with two scenes, interiors & exteriors (open world/vegetation/terrain). Or even better one that mixes the two, so you can see how interiors look when there’s skybox lighting and exteriors without any baked lighting.
Note: If performance is poor and you are running on a laptop, please make sure your webbrowser runs on your NVidia/AMD GPU, and not the Intel integrated graphics!
I tried the demo, the effect of the light passing through the curtain and creating light on the floor was supurb!
One thing i’ve been curious about is if solutions like this can also work as SSAO solutions. I saw this in Ghost Wire Tokyo where there was an SSGI and and SSAO option and the SSGI did both which complemented the rendering very well.
It kind of seems like such a thing would work well here…
$200 or even higher would be just fine if the solution is robust, well documented, and supported for the long run. We use Jason Booth’s Microsplat extensively for those reasons. He has built himself a model where every major new version of URP causes a new $20 charge (or something in that neighborhood), so he can continue to support it over time with ongoing revenue. Seems fair to me.
Yeah that’s fair game; if an asset is pirated or doesn’t sell enough units its obvious devs stop developing it. I hope it sells well when I release, lots of work still ahead.
Perhaps I will start low, a friendly early-access version. Once all bugs are ironed out and people are happy I can up the price over time.
Thanks for the kind words!!
SSAO would indeed be possible as all the required math/tech is already build. I could use the raymarching to do some very fancy AO indeed, I could add it as an option for sure! Thanks for that great idea!
Yeah I know there are a few SSGI assets out there, but most require either some sort of baking, or are DX12 only due to raytracing. I did find a URP SSGI/colorbleed asset but it only supports Deferred.
My closest competition is Upgen and it is different in many ways. Its not SSGI, it even requires colliders for surfaces to produce bounce lights. Lights require additional components, etc. It also requires manual setups per scene, where fast lights and other components need to be setup. Raytraced shadows only come from Unity-lights, not other emissive surfaces like my raymarched shadows do. Also I think for the HQ raytraced results lights should even be static/not moving it appears, but I could be wrong about that.
In general my asset is meant to be hands-off: just add the renderfeature, tweak some artistic and quality settings, and done. It doesn’t matter if you use dynamic lights that move, emissive objects that change constantly, all of it is contributing to the final result, each pixel is a lightsource and has super fast raymarched shadows.
The WebGL demo I put online is just one single Renderfeature, no scene tweaks or additional setup/baking/components/workarounds. All lights and props are dynamic and can move around freely with zero baking/setup.
link gives 403 error, no permission to access
A desktop demo would be ideal, something like the viking demo with SSGI toggle.
Ideally no changes to skybox lighting or anything, just SSGI on/off
