Planets 1.4.1 Meet new PBR shaders, multiple lights, environment. Amplify Shader Editor support!

The shadows on the planets look awesome.
Could you give some info about your custom shadow solution?
Could it be used as a replacement for Unity-Shadows?

Thanks!

Yeah theres no secret to it. It is using a soft sphere shadowing approach. Unfortunately this solution is limited to planets only.

You can read more on that topic here: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cg_Programming/Unity/Soft_Shadows_of_Spheres

Hi, I thought Iā€™d post a reply to your reply to my review here.

True - itā€™s not really an issue, but rather a suggestion, so I edited that in the review.

It would likely make sense to have a #define to easily opt out of the shadowing system, or a series of them to set the number of planets to be supported. I suspect that most games donā€™t need 20 planets shadowing each other at once, and this would save a significant chunk of performance for most peoples use cases.

Well, technically it helps the cache to have smaller textures. But the real issue is that it wastes memory for no reason.

I disagree strongly with this assessment. You are rendering spheres, and a ton of the information you are currently computing in the pixel shader can be easily computed in the vertex shader with no loss of quality. For instance, here are the results of my planet generation system, which runs under openGLES 2.0, and scales all the way down to low end phones:

You can see a breakdown of the basic technique used on the blog, though itā€™s been improved quite a bit since then (I actually shutter a little bit looking at that old version, and the blog was unfortunately run through a PR filter which removed a ton of details). http://www.startrek.com/article/guest-blog-in-game-preview-of-star-trek-timelines

Anyway, my point here is that I think you can make significant improvements to your assetā€™s performance without sacrificing the features you want it to have, and make the system more configurable for the range of devices Unity supports. Even if my high-end desktop can draw the planets at reasonable framerate, the system is essentially wasting a ton of cycles as itā€™s currently implemented, which can be used for everything else in the game. Iā€™m perfectly fine with the goal of not supporting mobile, if thatā€™s what you want for your asset, thatā€™s perfectly valid; my rating was based on where I thought the performance should be for the result produced, and my hope was that I could shed some light on areas which could be improved.

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Hey Jason,

I am glad that you are taking time to post an extended review. I trully appreciate your effort. The feedback you have provided will be used to help improve this asset over time.

Thank you.

The visuals are friggin awesome, but performance seems to be not there yet. Iā€™d like to pick this up since I loved your Sci Fi Effects pack. However, I tried the demo on a late 2013 rMBP @ 2560x1440 Intel Iris Pro?). The performance of the demos was a slide show. I understand itā€™s a high fidelity asset, but a lot of people these days have only integrated Intel GPUs (see Steam hardware survey). If Starcraft II can run on this rMBP, so should this asset. Sorry :frowning:

Thank you for taking your time posting your review. The proper steps will be taken in regards of the performance improvement and further optimization of the product.

I always maintain a strict quality on my assets, so itā€™s quite possible that you may be able to run this on your configuration in a matter of the next update.

I look forward to being able to serve you better in the future.

Hm, actually I donā€™t want to write more, since I donā€™t want to use up more of your time. I donā€™t want to sound too critical or harsh. Your assets friggin rock. Easily the best in their respecive category. And yes, I will write asset store reviews.

I just tried the planets demo in a browser on my work machine. No Intel integrated graphics @ 2560x1440, but a GTX 760 @ 1920x1200. More FPS of course but not quite stable. Might be a browser thing. Might be a Mac thing. Just saying.

So letā€™s just say that I would really LIKE to purchase your planets pack, but I need to know a few things:

  • My game is using a orthogonal camera. Iā€™ve seen assets that werenā€™t made for that in mind. Especially when it comes to planet penumbras or glows. Will your asset work with a ortho cam?

  • I donā€™t need the planet shadow feature. My game has a setup similar to Starcraft II or Sins of a Solar Empire where the planet is below the scene and the space ships are hovering above, with the camera looking down. So, the planetā€™s shadow is never needed. Maybe thatā€™s a source for performance improvements?

I have tested the planets example scene and what is important is to keep the orthographic camera at least 50-100 units away so the atmosphere sits in its place. I did test the scaling also, and it seems to work just fine.

The sun corona boards seems to rely on soft particle feature which gets broken when switching to the orthographic camera. The workaround for this as I see will be to align the boards with the camera and modify the Edge Mask Falloff shader value, so that eliminates the intersecting edges. There might be another workaround but it will take a while to confirm.

I will gladly provide you with the instructions on how to remove the shadow feature completely. This will definitely boost the render time and help with improving the performace.

Please also note, that in most cases you wont be using all the available planets on a screen at the same time, like you have probably seen in the web demo. What I say is that it runs much better than you might expect.

Thanks.

Awesome news about Unity 5 going free! Huge thanks to Unity Team for all the unlocked features!

How do you feel about trying Planets with this free key?
KEY REDEEMED

Awsome :slight_smile:

Looks great. Two quick questions:

Can I alter the color / size of the stars? (i.e. represent red dwarfs and blue giants?)

Can I use alternate textures and height maps (w/same dimensions as those in the package) . Iā€™m creating planetary surfaces procedurally in a custom noise library.

Thanks in advance.

Thank you!

  • Yes you can tweak the color and size of the stars. There are three color examples included with the package to get you started.

  • Yes you can use alternate textures, probably generated using some third party asset. Make sure to check how the samples work as many textures use data packed in RGBA channels.

Would be great if you could generate a normal map precedurally or you might end up using a blank one.

There are lots of customization options available such as the material values allow you to fine tune everything: colors, surface factors, clouds speed, shadows and so on.

Very helpful, thanks.

I am very tempted in the purchase of this package, but work on mobile devices?? The performance suffer?

First of all the Planets pack positioned as desktop only. Works both PC/Mac. Not suited for mobiles.

However theres a way to make it possible by using a plane with planet texture in the background. Or you might even go a step further and make an animated sprite sheet with the rotating planet. I assume this is what you looking for!

You can use an orthographic camera to take a shot of the planet without the atmosphere on the blank background and use your favorite image editor to edit the screen grab. Then you can take the shot of the atmosphere alone and put it on top.

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Hey man weā€™ve taken in full !! I need a rotating planet with the effects, though Sprite is no difference. All this is already included in the package?
Decreasing the size of the images to 512x512 or 1024x1024, the image quality loses much?

The Sprite are included in the package?

No not really. This is something you have to do on your own as the package contains assets suited for 3D only.

I cannot give you any recommendations on size as this is what you decide on your own for your targeted platform and the project in particular.

Just bought this today 5 10 2015 and no matter what I do, the planets are BLARINGLY white whenever facing any light sourceā€¦even when i remove the light sources entirely in a brand new scene.

Thoughts?

I think I have it sorted. I had to turn every single setting down and nearly every single color to almost black for most of the planets.

Is this normal for Unity 5?