Sunshine! gives you AAA Quality Volumetric Light Scatter, and improved Soft Shadows in Unity. It takes the look of your game to a whole new level, and can even bring shadows to unsupported platforms like Tegra 3 (Unity, Nexus 7, etc)…
Not that there’s anything wrong with your current shadows…
No judgement!
Please ask support related questions here, and I’ll do my best to sort out any issues!
Why does it kind of seem like the images have a low contrast, like someone took a contrast slider and reduced it? It that because of the volumetric effect? Just seems like it needs a bit of a boost. Looks cool though, nice quality.
@rocki
I’m not sure if it works with iOS, but I see no reason why it wouldn’t since it can run OpenGL ES 2.0 (which is the same as the Android support targets)… I make no promises though.
If anybody winds up trying it on iOS, please let me know the results! I’d be very interested!
@Pulla
Point lights will not be supported, since this system is specifically geared for Sun/Moon/Directional lighting.
@imaginaryhuman
Thank you.
The low contrast is most likely because I exaggerated the Light Scatter in order to make the effect more obvious for people just tinkering with the demo. Also, there are no baked lightmaps/HDR or any other postprocessing in the demo, since I wanted to show Sunshine by itself.
Scatter is similar to fog, I don’t think you’ll run into any sort of contrast issues.
@Almaj
I certainly want to investigate a simple light-bounce for a later update, but I admittedly have never attempted such a thing before.
I just downloaded and installed your demo on my Amazon Kindle Fire (does not support shadows). The shadows look good, but the demo ran really slowly.
First it look about 3 min for the scene to load, then the frame rate seemed to be around 5 fps. I then installed it demo on another device and it was really slow as well. Is that the shadows causing this low fps or is it the way you set up the scene? The scene does look very simple. So I’m concerned with performance.
@Crazy Robot
I’ve only been able to test on a Tegra 3 (Ouya) and got ~30fps. I know Tegra 3 is better than a lot of chipsets out there, and fill rate can be a big issue…
Most likely you’d needs to run Hard shadows on weaker devices to improve fps. I have plans to add Trapezoidal warping for improving Hard shadows on mobile, but that’s not in 1.0.
@Crazy Robot:
I was looking at some Kindle Fire benchmarks, and it sounds relatively underpowered when compared to Tegra 3.
The Tegra 3 is probably the bare minimum chipset when it comes to Sunshine. There’s valid reasons why many Android devices don’t support the built-in Unity Pro shadows… However, some devices like Tegra 3 come very close in specs but lack an extension Unity requires, and this is where I think Sunshine can be useful.
Even if I optimize Sunshine further, it doesn’t sound like it would be practical on a Kindle Fire.
Thanks for the info, I just ran the demo on a Nook HD. and it did run smoothly, just took forever for the scene to load. I installed it on 3 devices now and each one took an incredible amount of time for the scene to load. It that due to how you created the scene or is that due to the shadow system?
@Crazy Robot
The loading time problem is interesting. The demo only uses a couple shaders, so even if they are large (due to the multi-compiling) it shouldn’t account for loading delay.
I’ll have to investigate this further, thanks for pointing it out.
Hi, this sounds too awesome to be true. ha ha So one question before I buy: Is it compatible with Unity 4.2 Free and if yes, is it still limited to hard shadows then?
The rest I’d be willing to test myself, despite the relatively high pricetag, but if you already know the answer:
Did anyone test this with the UniStorm plugin? Is it fully compatible or does something need tweaking?
And last but not least: How does the performance of that awesome lighting compare to the regular version on low-mid level Desktop PCs?
Ah I know you already wrote replacement shader for Unity Pro shadows, but you might want to make it even more clear that this doesn’t work without Pro. So the PCF shadow filtering doesn’t work either? That’s too bad, the other effects aren’t really interesting for me anyways as I am not going for the cinematic sort of experience.
I truly wish the Pro requirement wasn’t there, but there’s absolutely no avoiding it when it comes to Shadow Mapping.
Maybe one day Unity will drop the Pro requirement for RenderTextures. I personally feel it’s a bad idea to limit graphical quality on the Free versions, since graphics are the best way to show off and promote Unity itself. I think restricting functionality (Pathfinding/Occlusion Culling/Profiler/Editor Features/etc) is the way to go, but that’s just my opinion.
Are there more details on how this differs from Unity’s built in shadow system? I’m talking about potential gotchas to know about, or additional benefits you have that Unity’s doesn’t. Your demo is nice, but how about an outdoor environment, how’s distance affect the quality?
Benchmark comparisons, visual quality differences…doesn’t work with deferred rendering, etc etc. These things are handy to know in advance.
Thanks!
