Hx Volumetric Lighting is the easiest way to get high quality volumetric lighting in your Unity scene, adding depth and realism with rays of light and fog of variable density. It’s easy to use and runs efficiently.
IMPROTANT - Unity 5.6 currently has a bug with rendering Particle emitters in a command buffer. So Density particle support is unsupported in 5.6 till unity fixes the bug.
Features
Supports Shadow casting lights
Supports multiple lights - any number and combination of point lights, spot lights, and directional lights.
It’s dynamic - you can move lights around in real-time.
Vary the air density with your own particle emitters or 3D noise.
Easy to use. Just drop a few scripts on your camera and lights.
Requirements
Forward/deferred render Path *
Linear Color space is recommended (gamma version awaiting approval)
Directx 9/OpenGL3 and above.
Shader Model 3 and above.
Desktop and console support.(mobile is not supported)
Custom transparency shaders will need to be modified
*Is not friendly with MSAA in forward rendering mode (yet), Has the same issue as the directional light shadows because its a screen space effect. Roadmap
Downsampling depth speed improvements
Better depth downsampling
Various speed improvements
Refactoring of existing code
VR support (untested, may already work)
Faster transparency and Density support for dx11 (currently using dx9 implementation)
Known Bugs
[2017.3 beta] New version has been submitted to fix compatibly issues with the beta, should be live before the end of Nov
I’ve owned almost all volumetric/fog solutions that have been in the Asset Store over the years and I have no hesitation in saying that this is the best one
For working custom transparency shaders it adds 6.
The spot point and directional lights use 12-14. But no other shaders reference most of these keywords.
I’m cutting these numbers in half in the next build. I was using keywords for features that where turned off (for debugging purposes)
6 keywords is not terrible in the end although I do find myself avoiding using the keyword heavy assets. This looks really great and while I have something else for mobile thankfully, this looks the bees knees for desktop use
I’ve pushed an update that adds Gamma support, Automatic shader warming and cuts the shader keyword usage in half.
Just awaiting approval. Transparency only needs 3 keywords now.
I’m currently working on some web demos and some demo videos to show off the tool.
The volumetric effect doesn’t get effected MSAA, So if you have really strong volumetric rays going behind an object, the volumetric effect will have an aliased line which can give the effect of AA being turned off. I’m looking into applying the effect before the MSAA resolves.
It wont interface with SEGI bounced lights, but you could have this running along side it. The way SEGI stores its information should mean I can add support for it. I’m waiting till @sonicether adds cascade volumes before I look into support
Uber should work out of the box for any opaque shaders, The transparent ones will need a modification, There is a tutorial in the docs.
Ill answer performance below.
It only interacts with dynamic light sources right now (spot, point, direction). The baked data of enlighten isnt in a format that i can access/raymarch. I’m looking into using light probes to get some ambient light added.
see above answer
no idea.
Performance is hard to pin down. it depends on the amount of volumetric lights in your scene, how many pixels each light volume takes up, sample count and the volumetric resolution your rendering at. I’ve spent a long time working on upsampling to make quarter resolution rendering a viable option.
So far every studio that has tested out my volumetric lighting has reported better results and performance then the methods they where using before.
I’m working on a video and and some test scenes right now. Hopefully ill have them live soon.
I’m currently working on adding unity Terrain support for all the tree and grass shaders, I’ll also convert all the other transparency shaders while I’m at it.
I’m running out