Compilation of all my unity graphic demos. You can push Unity pretty far.
-Dual Paraboloid Reflections
-Instant Radiosity realtime GI. This uses a custom deferred render built inside of Unity.
-Realtime viscous liquid
-3D Space Nebula
-Volumetric Lights
-Volumetric Fog
-3D Gaseous Clouds
-Realtime Ray Marching
-Order Independent Transparency]
Hey Brianasu,
I’m curious about your marching cubes video/implementation. Is this done on the GPU or CPU? Also, how big of a resolution and how many metaballs do you have in your isosurface?
It’s done on cpu. It’s the marching cubeswith some optimisations I used here.
http://www.alphanew.net/index.php?section=articles&site=marchoptim〈=eng
The metaballs are generated via the unity particles system so it varies. The res is around 30x30x30. Probably nothing as complex as your systems.
To be honest, when i look at your demos, i don’t see anything advanced…
Maybe look at this one more time ?
Maybe when I get a budget of millions of dollars I can afford art like that:)
Yes you are correct that those two videos are both visually stunning.
But I think its a combination of AAA art. I’m not a modeler so I can’t setup awesome scenes like that yet.
I think most of that unreal stuff you can do in Unity. The majority of those are post effects done in screen space. SSAO, sunshafts bloom even the “volumetric spot lights” aren’t real, those are done in post same as which Unity does. Lot’s of bump specular + post + color grading. No realtime GI and other recent effects.
The best thing about CryEngine 3 is that it has advanced Light Propogation Volume lighting aka realtime GI. But it’s kinda unfair throwing CryEngine 3 at Unity especially considering it’s a multi million dollar engine.
The effects I posted are each one specific effect. Maybe I should have titled the forum that Unity 3D has a very flexible graphics engine.
Hi brianasu.
I am interested in your realtime GI implementation.
Can you give a little more info how it is done? What is the cost in terms of performance?
And do you plan to make a commercial release?
Thank you.
Nice work brianasu,
couldn’t agree more on your assessment of unity. Especially now that image effects can be done before the transparent parts of the render queue with Max and Min blend modes.
nice GI implementation to.
Thanks for the comments. The realtime GI is based on Instant Radiosity and Splatting Indirect Illumination and Reflective Shadow Maps. You basically render the scene from the lights point of view getting depth and color. Then use the color to create virtual point lights VPL to do one bounce Radiosity and use the depth buffer to place the lights.
A few problems you run into is light flickering because the density of the VPLs are not high enough. Splatting indirect illumination kinda solves this by making the placement of the VPLs more smart. There are other algorithms like clumping together similar lights.
Large outdoor scenes are not practical but indoor scenes are. I wrote my own custom deferred renderer for this so I can render 1000 point lights pretty fast. But it all depends on your cards fill-rate. Deferred lights are just basically transparent spheres getting rendered to the screen. If you have 1000 transparent spheres overlapping each other you’ll get slow down.
I’d like to keep working on this more but I’m more interested in implementing Crysis 2 light propogation method which is a much better implementation. Just need to ge my head around all the maths:)
A while ago one guy implemented something called Imperfect Shadow Maps in Unity3D. It’s a similar algorithm but it takes into account occlusion in the rendering equation. You basically render the entire scene as a dense point cloud. Then render low res dual paraboloid shadowmaps that give you a good approximation of a soft shadow map. It’s like rendering shadow maps without actually needing to render the geometry.
Great work. You have done some wonders. I am not even experienced enough in graphic stuff to comment properly 
wow, pretty cool. How do the gaseous clouds work. Is it a kind of metaball implementation?
greets
You could post a request for artists. If you plan on selling these in the asset store, you could give them a percentage.
You clearly missed the point here. This post is not about his artistic skills but rather what he was able to do with “code” and his skill set. It usually takes more than just one guy to create cool and awesome looking “tech demos”.
@Brianasu - I love the looks of your “Instant Radiosity”. What’s the performance impact like?
I would love to know how the clouds are done too.
Well, just read again the title of the post then.
No offense but we all know that Unity’s graphics are not its strongest point, so someone have to explain to me why someone want to emphasis this point ?
I think cry engine is definitly out of reach and my post was not really fair with this one. I agree.
But as far as i know UDK is completely free unless you sell more that some amount of money.
I agree.
Yes ! Because i have to say that the title confuse me.
I also know that Unity have awesome strong points.
My apologies to not recognize the research work you’ve done.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/graphics-vs.-aesthetics
Listen up.
What he showed here was exactly what he advertised: advanced graphic capability.
Don’t try to teach me anything, i am not your student.
Please don’t start these complete useless arguments. Secondly, telling Xalener that you’re not his student was very unnecessary. Please be more thoughtful of your actions and comments in this thread.
What I want to know is not what unity can do, but how fast it can do it in a production environment.
Dude, it’s free knowledge. Some charge over a dozen grand for gold like that. Why pass up a chance like that?
Anyway, these demos are amazing. Especially the gaseous clouds. Is there any chance these would be released for developers? I’m particularly interested in the global illumination, as I haven’t seen many implementations of it that didn’t have some major drawbacks or clashed with other features.
any plan to put all this in assetstore?