Oh my, that’s true! 
I am currently using it in my cultural heritage-related app - hopefully it’s just temporary (maybe a major update?), the asset is great and is exceptionally fast
Why has been deprecated?
Hi everyone!
As you have already noticed, I have decided to deprecate the package.
I understand that I have totally blown any faith in myself as a publisher (each of my assets have been deprecated in the end), so I will refrain from making and publishing any Assetstore packages from now on.
Existing Sleek Render customers can receive any needed support through my email - support@nadezhdin.org
Below is a detailed post-mortem on this situation.
Exactly two years ago I have left my day job (as a Unity game developer) and focused on ways of getting some passive income. As I have published Assetstore packages previously, I know that it’s a thing, and it’s generally easier than making, marketing and publishing games (sorry fellow game developers). I started looking at different options and ideas of the new package.
I have noticed a total lack of truly mobile friendly post processing. And I knew for sure that it’s doable because I have seen a talk by a graphics programming prodigy (with whom I have talked later) and their team managed to achieve top-notch graphics quality with very little overhead (and it was all done in Unity). I was inspired both from the idea that there’s a completely empty niche on the assetstore and that it’s totally doable.
As Unity is primarily a mobile engine, especially for 3D games, it looked like this package would totally blow the market. And it was my first mistake - I have bet too much on this thing being super successful.
I have left my day job in July, and the first release of Sleek Render was in November. That’s 4 months on savings for a family of two (and I’ve had my firstborn delivered in October, so technically there were a family of three by the time Sleek Render was released). I was working fulltime on Sleek Render and was sure that it will at least provide the cost of living for us.
The release was interesting, but it was not a blast I eagerly expected. I wanted it to go more viral from the start (again, I was expecting too much from this package).
It got me $59 in first month (it was selling for 10 days at a lowest price)
I was working full time on it for the next months, and got $300 and $308 for the December and January (not quite much, but it was at least partially covering our expences). It sold for whooping (compared to the first months of release) $714 in February, and it was partially because of the slightly raised price for it (at that time it was $17 already). I was expecting it to grow in the following months, but it was quite consistently selling for $450-$550 a month (sometimes dropping below $400).
It was clear for me that this package just won’t work as a main source of income and I have started doing some “freelancy” work on the side, still managing to spend most of my time on Sleek Render.
By the March 2018 it was already 10 months on savings, and receiving $500 a months didn’t really cover all of the living expenses (it was partially covered, but savings were slowly depleting).
This was the time I have stopped working on Sleek Render full time and started looking for a day job.
I got one and it was paying enough to even start making some savings again. But in return, Sleek Render didn’t get as much attention as it was getting before.
At some point the work was so intense and time consuming that I spent the whole month not even opening a Sleek Render project because I was physically unable to do so. I was really hoping that this “crunch” time would pass and I will be able to return to Sleek Render to make promised additions, but it never happened.
But really, this is not the main reason I have decided to deprecate the package. Even if it’s not updated, it still can be sold, right? Some people may still use its features as it’s pretty stable. This is the good thing about passive income - it just keeps “ticking” even if you’re doing something else (in my case - working on a day job).
But keeping it alive on the store has one drawback - customer support. I’ve done a great deal of customer support in the past and I truly believe that the package is at least somewhat intuitive to use without looking at the manual. It’s not perfect, but it’s quite usable. But usability is not what the customer support was usually about with Sleek Render. It was about performance.
To understand this problem further, you need to understand the average Assetstore user (90% of users who have dropped me an email). And it’s the same as the main Unity’s target audience - non-professionals that want to develop games. Non-professionals can’t really tell tech things apart - which one would be good and fast, which one would be bad and slow. And this is where the main problems come from.
What an average user would do with the Sleek Render package:
- Make a scene with standard PBR materials, even if it’s just one solid color (especially when exporting from Blender - you see a different mesh and a different material for each separate color of the object. One simple objects explodes into hundreds of meshes and materials). Maybe put some third-party good looking water with realtime reflections.
- Add Sleek Render to the scene
- Add some other post effect package on top of Sleek Render because the latter doesn’t have some functionality
- See that performance is not good
- Write to support
This is an exaggerated scenario, but even using PBR materials with 3D scenes on mobile (the ones that are there by default) can already bring performance down to a frame budget edge (it can be just a bit less than 16.6 ms so it looks like it’s running steady at 60 fps). I have written on this problem [earlier.]( Sleek Render - Lightning Fast Mobile Post Processing Effects page-5#post-4353145)
And this process doesn’t even end on “an average user”. I’ve seen absolutely amazing, professionally looking projects suffering from this problem.
This is where Unity falls short - it has sub-optimal defaults, that are easy to use (and also to develop and support - it’s easier to have one generic uber-shader that runs on mobile, on desktop, on consoles than having specific shaders for each platform even if it makes total sense from the performance point of view).
Unity has pretty optimized mobile shaders, which are included by default, but it takes time and experience to get to them. This is not what an average user does.
The audience of “average users”, that are most numerous on the assetstore, that generate the most revenue, don’t really need Sleek Render - it just doesn’t make a difference - the game would be slow on mobile anyway. And professional devs with a separate graphics rendering department can make these things themselves (I’ve seen a few cases where Sleek Render was heavily modified and sometimes completely customized and rewritten).
As this customer support pressure not really getting lower (with the same exact questions all the time) while sales are going down (mostly because I haven’t updated the package in a while), I have decided to deprecate the package to reduce my customer support fatigue.
In general - I have understood that people need more education in this field. This is really the only way to make a difference in the industry.
For those wondering where to get Sleek Render:
- If you’ve bought it - you can always download the latest version from the AssetStore menu in Unity. It’s the default functionality - you will always have access to all of the downloaded packages even if they were deprecated.
- I’m considering putting it on Github under MIT license to help a few interested graphics programmers. It won’t happen until January 2020 though as it will undermine the monetary effort of people who have bought it recently.
In general, it was nice experience. I’m terribly sorry if anyone was relying on some of the functionality that was planned for future updates. Again, I’m still available by that support e-mail if anyone has any questions regarding this situation.
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Thank you the the openness and best of luck with your family.
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Thanks for making the asset! As someone who bought it recently, I wouldn’t be miffed if it appeared on GitHub today. The longer it’s on there, the higher the chance that someone else forks it and adds something interesting!
I wonder if maybe you could reduce the support burden by raising the price (literally, double it to $40)? You might sell to fewer customers but keep the total income the same. You could also consider selling the support at a freelance rate instead of giving it for free with the asset purchase. I’d gladly pay to have a graphics pro look over my shoddy shader work and point out the performance bottlenecks, but I might be in the minority.
Best of luck with your future projects!
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Very bad news
Крепись
Oh man!! I had it on favourites and was about to buy it and then I noticed it wasn’t there anymore.
I wish you all the good luck!
Fair play dude, totally understood. Have fun with the little one!
As someone who beta tested this asset (and had purchased some of your other assets) I’m sad to see this one go, but you have to do what’s best for you. Hopefully you can get out of the crunchy period and get to work on some fun things again.
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As promised, here’s the latest Sleek Render version for the reference (for everyone willing to use it as a starting point for custom post processing).
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I googled it up today. I must say, the bloom FPS cost of 1 is outstanding. For comparison, unity post processing stack bloom costed me 30 FPS in same scene. While the quality is surely lower, it works really fast. It’s great!
I’m still mourning Sleek Render. 
It still pops in my mind whenever I need some good postprocessing for mobile.
Especially now that an equivalent asset is needed to work in URP
There is one already man. but is not Sleek, look for this https://assetstore.unity.com/publishers/39057
Is this still an active project?
No its now open source
Does anyone knows if it works for VR ?
If not, does anyone know a VR fast bloom effect ?
It does not work for VR out of the box. However, I have seen some people on Reddit using it to add it to their VR games after some tweaks.
Also, depending on your target VR platform (desktop vs standalone headsets like Oculus Quest), it’s generally not advised to use any form of full-screen post processing. Bloom can be effectively authored at a different level - by using hand-made art consisting of semi-transparent meshes and additive/blend materials.
This is especially true for Bloom, which requires active downsampling of your rendered scene, which makes bloom prone to flickering, and in case of VR it will have different flickering for different eyes.
I suggest you watch this talk about porting apps to mobile VR, it has a lot of good insights, not just for Oculus Quest 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvMQUz0g_Tk
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Hello, I’m encountering a bug (? I’m on unity 2022.3.27f1 in BiRP.
When launched to mobile, the camera is flipped from horizontal to vertical. However doesnt happened on the editor
I also going to make the package upm compatbile, thus developers can import them easily. That is if the package is useable
EDIT: Nvm it,the bug is gone
For anyone in the future who still looks using Sleek Render
Check this out: