I was so curious about how Sonic Ether’s bloom looked compared to Paroxe’s ultimate bloom which I already had so I bought it to compare. This is perhaps not that interesting now that “everyone” has moved on to use the new hip and cool all-in-one effects, but I was curious and perhaps someone else wants to know as well.
The difference between these two assets is immediately evident in that Sonic Ether’s version only has 2 settings while Paroxe’s version has more settings than Unity itself.
Here’s how Sonic Ether’s bloom looks out of the box in the included example scene:
They look very similar if you ask me. The biggest difference between the look of the two, that I can see, is that Ultimate bloom can’t produce a bloom that is as tight as Sonic Ether’s. No matter how I tweaked the settings I couldn’t replicate this. You can quite easily see the difference on the small blue dots.
Also worth noting is that it took me about 30 minutes to setup Ultimate bloom so it looked like this. They look quite different out of the box, but I guess that’s where all the flexibility of Ultimate bloom comes in handy, if you want it, that is. You can create the exact bloom you want.
As for performance I’m not really qualified to say anything about that, but I’m getting around 500fps with both effects and they both take about 0.25-0.30ms to render according to the profiler. So I would say they are pretty much exactly the same in terms of performance, although you can reduce the quality of Ultimate bloom a ton compared to the settings I have it at here.
The flexibility of Ultimate bloom allows you to create a range of different looks, like this neat J.J. Abrams looking effect:
In the end I think I’ll end up using them both. Sonic Ether’s bloom looks really nice out of the box and the fact that it’s completely plug & play is really nice. On the other hand the extreme flexibility of Ultimate bloom sure is fun to play with when you have the time and you’re after a specific look.
It really depends on how much control you want over the effect. Sonic Ether’s effect (like you pointed out in your post) has pretty much just those two options to change overall bloom and the lens dirt effect. I think I remember him saying something to the effect of “It’s too easy for users to screw it up.” which is perfectly reasonable. The efficiency is also quite nice with SE’s systems. He’s actually created a couple of image effects that are pretty awesome. The main one I like is the SSAO, if not just for the fact that it can add and calculate color bleeding to give a faux-GI color bounce effect.
You would be fine using both, though the latter bloom would be much more customization for any given situation, which is kind of important if you’re looking to add a specific type of style to your game.
What do you mean? It’s the standard “I’m better than you” editor skin, i.e. the dark pro only skin.
Edit: Ahh, nvm. You mean that it’s blue? It’s because I’ve set it to be tinted blue when I’m play mode so I know I’m in play mode. It’s a setting under “Preferences” => “Colors” called “Playmode tint”
I have Sonic Ether’s bloom. What I love about it is that it doesn’t suffer from the massive suck that is Unity’s built in bloom. That is to say that if I have a metallic surface, I don’t have fireflies popping up all over the place as my character walks through the scene. Does Pardoxe match that? Eventually for my release, I’ll likely combine the image effects that duplicate functionality. Of course, not everyone will. Not everyone will even care if image effects looks horrible. Look at any review of Digital Homicide’s (under a false name) Devil’s Share and see when the reviewer goes into the shop. Fireflies everywhere. It looks horrible. At the very least, put the Unity bloom under the tone mapping. Not as intense or accurate, but at least it doesn’t look horrible.
In my quick test I didn’t see any bloom spots or flickering that appeared in one asset that didn’t also appear in the other. I also did a quick test in an actual project I’m working on and they look the same in terms of flickering. However, I need to have the “Temporal stability filter” setting turned on in Ultimate bloom to get the same results as Sonic Ether so I’m guessing he implements something similar to that.
None of the assets are flicker free by any means. I’m guessing you need some sort of temporal antialiasing either before or after the bloom in the image effect chain to fix that.
Thanks for this comparison. I wouldn’t have known there was a bloom asset available with such tweaks if you didn’t pointed it out If you have lots of assets, you can do some other comparisons, it can be useful for everybody
If you have lots of assets, you can do some other comparisons, it can be useful for everybody 