5.4 beta 15 forward linear rendering. Single pass stereo rendering is disabled.
the material of those glass is standard(specular) shader set to transparent mode,
it renders reflection from a baked reflection probe.
I’ve got a similar issue, that is likely caused by the same underlying problem. After upgrading from 5.3.4 to 5.4b15 yesterday, I noticed that the planar mirrors in our VR game (based on the code found here) are terribly broken. The mirror code assumes that it can simply place a camera behind the mirror, render the scene into a texture as it would be seen from that perspective, and then sample the resulting texture in a shader applied to the surface of the mirror. In 5.3.4 this worked because each eye was effectively its own camera, and thus had its own reflection camera. Now in 5.4, the two eyes are handled by a single camera, which means there’s a single reflection camera rendering to a single texture that’s then used by both the left and right eye. This clearly produces the wrong effect.
What I believe I need is:
- A way to obtain the local position/rotation of each eye relative to the camera object so that I can setup two cameras and produce two reflection textures.
- A way in my pixel shader to identify which eye is being drawn and choose the correct texture.
Can someone confirm that my understanding of the problem and solution is accurate? And assuming I’m on the right path, is there a way to do this with the APIs currently available?
betalulu: thanks for reporting this - it has been raised with the team.
dan.kryomann: looking to get someone from the VR team to advise.
betalulu: actually can you raise a bug yourself and post the number here so that we can follow up internally? The team is aware of the issue as mentioned above, but it’s better if you raise the bug so that you are kept in the loop via the bug ticket.
Bug reporting recommendations: Unity QA: Building quality with passion
Yeah I’ve already reported a bug for this issue, the issue id of this bug is:
790752
Great, many thanks.
Hi Dan-
I have been able to get MirrorReflection to work by doing the following:
- Create 1 main camera for normal rendering of everything but Water (the layer you put the mirror on). Set this camera to “Both Eyes” and Layer 0. That way your main rendering gets all the advantages both eyes being rendered at same time.
- Create 2 additional cameras. These will be the reflection cameras. Set them to only render “Water”. Set 1 to Left and the other to Right. Important part: Set near clipping on both of these reflections cameras really low, to 0.01 or lower or you will have objects near the mirror from layer 0 camera that will seem to be behind mirror.
- Don’t use “Single-pass stereo rendering”. It doesn’t agree with this layered camera arrangement.
You could also just go with 2 total cameras, 1 for left and 1 for right, but you will lose some of the performance advantage of the both eye camera for the bulk of your scene rendering.
ccs
Thanks for the reply ccs. I should have replied to this thread a while ago with an update on how I’ve resolved the issue. Your solution sounds reasonable enough, but it does require modifying the main camera / render passes which isn’t ideal. My solution modifies the MirrorReflection code and enables it to work without requiring any changes to the main camera (ie: a single main camera rendering all layers to both eyes). It also has the added benefit that it works just fine for single-pass stereo rendering. If we could get support for creating our own stereo cameras that render to split textures, then this could be improved even further.
Basically, I modified the MirrorReflection.shader so that it has two reflection textures, one for each eye, and it samples the appropriate texture based on which eye is being rendered (you can determine this by examining unity_StereoEyeIndex when using single pass stereo rendering, or by checking the sign of unity_CameraProjection[0][2] when using traditional multi-pass stereo rendering).
The MirrorReflection.cs is then responsible for generating the appropriate texture(s) for the camera that is being mirrored. Normal monocular cameras only require a single reflection render pass. Stereo cameras require two reflection render passes (this is where having engine support for creating our own stereo cameras that render to a single side-by-side split render texture would be super useful). Unfortunately, Unity does not currently expose the per-eye details that we need from a stereo camera (ie: position/rotation of each individual eye and the projection matrix used by each eye). I had to rely on some SteamVR APIs to access this information, and haven’t yet looked into how (or if) one could do this for other VR platforms.
I’ve attached our modified MirrorReflection scripts in case anyone is interested.
2623563–184287–MirrorReflection.shader (2.31 KB)
2623563–184288–MirrorReflection.cs (15.8 KB)
2 Likes
Cool solution Dan. Thanks for sharing it. That should improve performance of this a bit for me as it only requires a single camera setup. I also like the reduced complexity. I was also having trouble with image effects that use depth textures with the layered approach (1 both + 2 left/right), so this might solve that as well.
Hi Dan- You solution works great, but I found a bug that causes odd clipping in the mirror depending on how the mirror is placed. I suggest this fix:
Yours:
Vector3 normal = -transform.up;
Fixed:
Vector3 normal = transform.up;
1 Like
Hi,
I’m using the AdvancedMirrorReflection shader/script from the asset store and also have this problem - unfortunately the author appears to have dissapeared. I’m keen to retain the functionality of the shader (rather than use just the base shader as fixed by Dan) but don’t know how to fix the lack of stereo in reflections (I cannot script sadly). Would anyone be willing/able to show me? The shader and script is attached. Many thanks in advance.
Felix
2634879–185293–MirrorReflection.cs (9.99 KB)
2634879–185294–AdvancedMirrorReflection.shader (3.88 KB)
I am having problems with this on all the water prefabs. Is this just a generic reflection problem? I downloaded what dan kroyman’s scripts, but couldn’t figure out how to get them to work (i’m a shader newb). I attempted to do what ccsanders did, but also couldn’t follow exactly how to do that. I’m totally stuck, since I need water working for the Vive.
I went to the unity3d debug area, the main one referenced is closed duplicate, which didn’t make any sense to me after I read the referenced debug that it was suppose to be closed to. I’d hate to bug someone, but is there a prefab that actually works with reflections and vive, that way I can figure out the exact steps on how to do it?
1 Like
If you have clipping problems, try removing these two lines.
Vector4 cameraSpaceClipPlane = CameraSpacePlane(reflectionCamera, pos + offset, normal);
reflectionCamera.projectionMatrix = reflectionCamera.CalculateObliqueMatrix(cameraSpaceClipPlane);
First, thank you for posting this!
Second, this worked GREAT for me in the 5.4b11, but now Oculus fails to run through Open VR, and it looks like the Steam VR camera fails to work with the Oculus VR SDK.
Anyone have any idea on achieving the same results in a VR agnostic fashion? (ie offsetting the two views for two renders in the reflection code without depending on the Steam VR camera, and then differentiating the eyes in shader in a way that works on the Oculus SDK?).
Thanks!
The VRpanorama asset that runs in batch, does it correctly outside the whole “vr” process. This is for it’s 360 stereoscopic mode. They kind of explain how they are doing it in their support thread : [RELEASED] VR Panorama - render 360 stereo videos - Community Showcases - Unity Discussions
This general bug drives me crazy btw, there was a library change in b24 that I hope people will start using so this won’t be a complex problem. I also btw dislike not having the parallax support in the standard shaders, so throwing away anything with a bump/normal map drives me crazy as I port things to vr.
Alright - turns out that if you have a SteamVR_Camera as a child of another SteamVR_Camera (which worked great before for basic camera layering), SteamVR stack overflows and locks up Unity. This issue removed, from what I can SteamVR / OpenVR handles support for the Oculus, and I can at least run my game.
Three problems remained since the upgrade to 5.4.0f1:
a) I’m using a derivative of the water reflection above - it worked GREAT before on 5.4.b11… but now the reflections are offset and warped. I can confirm that two are still being generated, and that the eye differentiation in the shader is functioning correctly. I’m not sure what changed. Has anyone been able to make anything like this Mirror Reflection work in Unity 5.4.0f1?
b) My camera was not recentering / was floating awkwardly in the air. Turns out Open VR does not properly respect InputTracking.Recenter();
What does work though:
Valve.VR.OpenVR.System.ResetSeatedZeroPose();
Valve.VR.OpenVR.Compositor.SetTrackingSpace(Valve.VR.ETrackingUniverseOrigin.TrackingUniverseSeated);
c) My layered camera doesn’t work at all any more. It used to work fine (seperate stereo camera, child of the head, let me render my other layers ontop in exactly they way I want). Now if I have the SteamVR_Camera component, we crash. If I remove the component, its view is horribly warped and offset. Has anyone had any success layering two cameras in SteamVR?
Yes. The mirror solution that I provided earlier in this thread is still working great for us as of 5.4.0f2 (NOTE: I haven’t tried this on an Oculus in quite a while so there’s a possibility that it doesn’t work anymore). I’ve updated it a bit to keep pace with improvements Unity has implemented in their shader libraries, but none of those changes were necessary. Here’s a simple unitypackage containing a stripped down version of our latest mirror script+shader (I had to remove a bunch of dependencies on other features of our game). This should be usable as a simple starting point for anyone that wants to create their own custom mirror functionality.
2726226–193726–Mirror.unitypackage (10.8 KB)
6 Likes
There seems to still be issues with VR water reflection in 5.5. (Open bug report about it here.)
I tried the Mirror unitypackage above and the reflection do work correct for me, except that occlusion culling is not working correctly. So in the reflections, objects flicker in and out of existence if occlusion culling is enabled.
Did anyone ever manage to fix up the water assets from Standard Assets (Water script / FXWaterPro shader) to work with single pass VR rendering? And with occlusion culling support too?
(I’ve asked about this internally in Unity too, but there’s no resources for this right now, so I wanted to hear if anyone from the community have managed to fix this. I’ve searched around a lot and it’s hard to get clarity on this issue…)
Mike Tucker says here he was able to fix it 
UPDATE:
I spoke with Mike and he said he was able to fix the reflections, but never got to the refractions bit. It’s been broken for quite awhile… surely someone at Unity can tackle this, surely?
dan-kroymann’s solution was working great (thanks!), but the reflections are now very incorrect for me on 5.6.1f1 (was fine on 5.6.0f3). Anyone else seeing that? Possibly a 5.6.1f1 bug?