Unity Realtime Reflections and GI and realism Exploration

[HeliosDoubleSix]

Hi, I was recently inspired by Koola creating stunning arch vis in UE4, so I thought I’d have a stab at it in Unity ( Unity 5 early beta, to use the new Enlighten powered GI, Reflections are possible in Unity 4 with Candela )

Loads of work in progress, details on post effects and methods here:
http://www.shadowood.uk/Store/?u=2014-09-02

Edit, I am talking with the guys at Unity about some of the issues I have had, some of the issue were me being stupid, some of the issues are being fixed. So remember a lot of what I was doing was in the very first beta of Unity 5, I will update the article in time with what I have been learning and posting progress and tips here.

Hopefully this will inspire some more people in turn! I welcome criticism and especially any advice or tips with this stuff. And likewise if you need help ask away and I’ll do my best to pretend I know everything, thanks

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EDIT, just ( Sept 2015 ) finished new demo for Unity, video here:

Unity 5 Lighting Demo: The Courtyard

EDIT, Source for the above project and playable EXE with blog post here: Unity Blog

Images here:
https://www.artstation.com/artist/heliosdoublesix

Playable EXE was at Unite Boston, so that will be released publicly along with source project for free

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EDIT, work for Arch Virtual
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/unity-5-realtime-medical-environment-for-virtual-reality

Virtual Realism with Unity 5 | Arch Virtual VR Training and Simulation for...

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EDIT, now working for Unity on an animation, here is what has been keeping me busy, more here: Shadowood - Divine Unity Shrine

Ok that’s hall security sorted out, realtime GI, reflections using Box Projection ( scene and robot all mine )

Youtube below, try to ignore how rudimentary the animation is and how blurry youtube made it >_<

Unity 5 Shiny Realtime GI

Huge super res capture of a realtime GI scene ( 3840x2160 ):

Ramblings, Research and Unity 3D Experiments: www.shadowood.uk
Follow my nonsensical explorations: Twitter – YouTube – RSS – Tumblr

Model lifted from GTA San Andreas a 10 year old game ( shadowing issues on the columns go away at higher resolutions this is at the lowest quality! and all realtime so sun can move ) Sadly no piling into innocent pedestrians is included.

[PhobicGunner]

Holy shit! This screen shot in particular:

Looks pre-rendered in Mental Ray or something. Just… wow!
Unity 5 is going to be a force to be reckoned with in the game industry, no doubt about it.

[PhobicGunner]

Huh… I was going through the thread you had.

Were those issues present with Generate Lightmap UVs enabled for your meshes? I didn’t see you mention that option, so I wondered.

[Frenetic_Pony]

Certainly made that screenspace reflection stuff look good, usually it looks like junk when you start moving around! That being said, it just looks like SSR instead of the more accurate screenspace cone tracing alike UE4 uses, and without the temporal supersampling or normal map AA, yay lack of filtering!

Ohwell, having a solution for Unity is better than having none so… cool.

[Pulov]

Looks very interesting

[HeliosDoubleSix]

@PhobicGunner

Were those issues present with Generate Lightmap UVs enabled for your meshes? I didn’t see you mention that option, so I wondered.

With my more complex scene that just crashed. When it was working, it was hit and miss, difference being with no way to fiddle with it if it did screw up. This would be more useful if you could set import options per sub object in a huge file, not just for the whole file. I did’nt feel like splitting my scene up into a million FBX files naturally

[Zomby138]

Wow! This looks spectacular. Is this running in Unity 4, or do you have the 5 beta?

[kenshin1]

Thank’s for sharing, very interesting article!!!

[imaginaryhuman_1]

Very nice.

[SteveB]

Wow…realtime…wow

[0tacun]

Thank you for your insightful blog post.

[kurylo3d]

very helpful.

[FuzzyQuills]

This is incredible! I might also ask: how did you manage to get the shadows that awesome?

Either way, lookin’ forward to Unity 5 full, especially after seeing this!

[HeliosDoubleSix]

Talking with the guys at Unity about it… I just figured out how to get the lighting quality dialled up to 11, can’t wait to show it off At first it seems disastrously bad and blurry, till you know what the settings all mean then it is amazingly wonderful ( when it doesn’t glitch and leak light and uv unwrap like a crazy insane person anyway ) When I have it all figured out with solid renders to show, I will post a coherent explanation

[FuzzyQuills]

@HeliosDoubleSix : Perhaps you can show us this weird uv glitch? I see none!

[HeliosDoubleSix]

@FuzzyQuills

@HeliosDoubleSix : Perhaps you can show us this weird uv glitch? I see none!

Well the above shots in this post are hand picked, but on the blog post I show all the nasty stuff that went wrong at one point or another. They are still working on it though and I am reporting issues that are possibly Unity’s fault or user error ( it happens sometimes… often )

[FuzzyQuills]

Yes, King of all messups would have to be UV mapping. I know from all the times I had a texture tiling completely wrong in blender, or a weird seam, or… enough on that!

Anyway, a beta will definitely have bugs, and uer error or not, it will mature. if anything though, the quailty of the final release, the way it’s going, could end up… mind-blowing!

EDIT: OOPS! typed ‘mid-blowing’ instead!

[HeliosDoubleSix]

I am finally getting spectacular results from Enlighten, below all realtime ( after lengthy lengthy precompute ) and by realtime I mean you can move the sun light, change the sky, change materials, make parts of your model emit light, and by Unity 5 release you will be able to move point lights, spotlights and I think area lights too while in realtime, along with knocking down walls and having the light update and such. And by realtime I mean at that kind of res it takes a couple of seconds for changes in the light to propagate on a high end desktop.

And if you bake the Sun light too ( then you cannot move it any more ) you will get better shadows with penumbra-ness ( shadows will be sharper closer to the object that cast them, blurrier further away ), normal realtime direct light on the right, baked area light as the sun on the left ( ignore the bounced light in this as it is turned off )

Area shadow baked versus Direct Light Realtime ( the glowing pink in the one images is a bug I think ):

[Baldinoboy]

That is so awesome. I want to try real-time gi in my scenes so bad.

[Zomby138]

Glad to see you’re getting improvements!

When you have the “sun” light baked, do you get any specularity?