Hello everyone,
I’ve been reading all the posts about the beta version of Unity 3 and so far seems that is a great product.
But I’m still curious about some specific points of this new engine…I already sent an email to the Unity support asking specific questions, but I would like to see what are your toughts about this new engine, especially about the rendering performance.
What I would like to know ( and this is the question, so please be very clear about what is very good ans what is not ) is how good is the improvement of the rendering quality, seems I read lots of posts about the great quality of Beast, but some posts were very critique about the shadows, that seems are still the same as in the 2.6 version…
Since my main purpose with Unity will be to use for 85% of the scene lightmaps and to have just some realtime shadows ( trees, main character ), and since in the features video with the soldier walking the shadwos were really good, I would like to know what is your opinion about that.
Native shadow map comparison/filtering on capable GPUs (less VRAM usage, less bandwidth usage, double rendering speed, faster shadows, some “softness” in shadows for free). GPU shadow filtering does not work on OS X because of some Apple driver bugs though.
Improved shadow bias - much reduced false self-shadowing artifacts.
Improved soft shadows for directional lights (coming in beta4). Mostly reducing wrong shadow halos/ghosts around objects in some scene setups.
Soft shadows for point lights (coming in beta4). Not very soft, but softer than in 2.6.
I’m glad to hear you guys are working on this still. I am using the beta for pro and just beast light mapped my scene which looks so wonderful! But… The real time shadows are horrible no matter how much I tweak the directional light settings. Since the beast light mapped looks so good now the difference with the real time shadows is even more obvious than before which is unfortunate. I wish there was a way to increase the antialias or blur on the edge of the real time shadows… At least more than the quality settings… This way they’d blend better and possibly the jiggle effect might tone down quite a bit. Either that or adjust the movement sensitivity… i.e. how often they are updated… By slowing down their update cycles that also may help with the jiggling. Just some ideas and feedback. Look forward to seeing the beta4 =)
For the original poster… I’d say that with the beast light mapping you’ve pretty much got a winner from the start. I think it’s totally worth the investment already. However, the real time shadows are still being worked on so it’s a little early to build an opinion about them. They are usable if you make them high quality, make sure the bias is set best as possible and don’t make them too dark. It also seems to make a big difference what is casting the shadow… i.e my characters don’t need anything spectacular and they look pretty good. Small object also look pretty good. More complex building type objects seem to make the jiggle effect way more obvious but then beast light mapping them might be the way to go anyways unless you setting up some kind of scripted day / night cycle. Though I’d like to see if there is a way to real time blend the light mapped shaders via a script yet i.e. blending beast light mapped morning, noon and evening shaders over a set period of time but I don’t know if it’s possible yet or not.
a) The interface looks more pro now, integrated publishing options but without the webplayer, nicer colour scheme and arrangements but there were several glitches, numeric value scrolling behaviour isn’t implemented consequent and perfectly, can’t save colour schemes by names, still can’t minimize the app on OSX, …
b) I was curious about the new post processing shaders but sadly quite some did not work or at least as expected (DoF, …) and others could not provide the quality i was hoping for (edge detection for beeing a reasonable edges renderer without hickups and with some AA).
c) Switching AA works like a charm but the shadows are still way too lowres. I don’t get why we can’t have more highres textures here if you for instance just need one object to look right and it must be non static.
You’re right it now works here as well, i tried it for several times.
I’m pretty sure it did not work the last time i payed attention to it and i placed the beta3 and v2 icons at different positions in advance in order for not mixing things up. This is strange or maybe i am …
These are some good additions. I’m glad you’re paying real-time shadows some attention Aras! Any chance of providing one higher level of resolution? That could solve a lot of problems in certain scenes.
There are numerous posts with a lot of info on the beta around the forums and Unity blogs, and though I’ve been following them religiously I understand it would be hard to sift through all of it now if you hadn’t been following all along. There are some user videos on YouTube and Vimeo of Beast and other new features that have me pretty excited!
The biggest addition is the ability to actually test sound in the editor without having to compile the game. This makes using 3d sound alot more reasonable.
The example that torrando twins gave was fairly good, imagine you were standing outside of a club, all you can hear is the bass (and maybe a bit more). Now you can apply a low-pass filter and it will seem like you are outside of it. Simply remove the filter and it will sound normal, so you are now inside it.
I found a bug where if the sound is 2d. You apply a low pass filter and than try to tweak its values in the editor, it will crash the editor.
I’ve realized that if I use the first person controller, as I move towards a sound source, it tends to distort. Any reason why it does this? Or is this just a bug in the beta? Other than that, Unity 3 is incredible
Have the normal map shaders been improved in Unity 3?. I find the current shaders a little ugly - banding issues etc…
Seems the Unity guys think that normal maps are just for bumpy walls and nobody will notice any degradation. Then again… considering how few complaints I see about the normal maps in Unity I suspect they may be right
What banding issues? Are you using DXT-compressed normal maps by chance?
If so, then yes, we’ve greatly improved ability to use compressed normal maps in Unity 3.0. We use so called “DXT5nm” compression (one channel in G, another in A, 3rd computed in the shader). So now you actually can use DXT compression on normal maps without bad block compression artifacts.
you will receive a mail from the sales team or with b4 from preorders with the data on where to download it once your beta access has been processed this / next week. Thats at least where I get my mails from
Well, it might not be now, but it was. If people chose not to receive newsletters from us this included the pre-order release “newsletter”… it was a stupid mistake on our part which has been fixed.
Anyway, you should receive the email in a day or two.
