Sunshine has been released!
[Asset Store] [Official Thread]
Hey all,
I just wanted to show off a project I’ve been working on called Sunshine.
It’s a replacement for the built-in shadows that come with Pro. It supports soft PCF filtering, MSAA, should work on the Ouya (haven’t tested with one yet)… Has a pretty killer Volumetric Light Scattering effect… all around good stuff!
If there’s any interest, I could release it to the Asset Store…?
To try the demo, or learn more: UnitySunshine.com
What’s the speed like vs unity pro shadows?
As long as there isn’t a huge performance difference, I’d love to have this 
The more eye candy the better IMO!
Similar settings tend to yield similar performance (2x2 PCF with post-processing disabled, since there’s no built-in equivalent)… I’d say within a few fps.
At higher resolutions, Sunshine performs much faster than built-in! This is because Sunshine doesn’t use a full-screen shadow buffer pass, instead calculating shadows during the regular forward pass. This reduces the fill-rate/draw-calls and is actually the reason I developed Sunshine in the first place.
Having comparable-to-better performance is actually pretty awesome since Sunshine is doing a lot more than the built-in shadows (Overcast shadows, radial splits, jittered cascade divisions, PCF filtering)…
I’m actually most excited about getting this running on my Ouya (if it ever gets here) since shadows are encoded in ARGB32, they don’t need “Depth” support. 
This is looking real good. I’m not working on anything that could use this at the moment, but I’m definitely interested in seeing it progress.
I’d buy it although I have no need for something as complex as that demo.
It. Is. Amazeballs.
Interest would depend on price for nearly everyone. The lure for me is the godray’s finally leaving screenspace. That alone is worth the price of the asset because someone seriously needed to do that crap already.
There’s a lot right with this package if it is as advertised. Do you simply add new light objects in place of the default ones? Are there point/omni, directional and spot options? How is it implemented - hopefully just with new Light GameObjects you create and not some custom script or shader garbage on every object.
I’d be interested, as long as it is affordable. It’s definitely an integral asset.
I’ve always hated the Unity standard shadows, they are absolutely not on par with the rest of the system. I can’t understand why they don’t put hands on it.
This looks like something that could be the next big thing.
This said, this thing is nice, but I would only buy it if it would blend seamlessly with Unity.
A complete replacement, I mean.
And we must see the price. Keep in mind that if you set the bar high, you will sell some 10 copies.
If you lower it, you will sell much more. Hundreds, maybe thousands.
For me, I think I would buy it immediately if the price is around 50 euros. If it’s up to 100 I will wait until my game is released or nearly there.
Finally, couple of questions: works with U3.5? Works with deferred lighting?
Great that it’s already working perfectly with lightmapping, wouldn’t drop lightmapping for nothing in the world (apart real time radiosity eheh).
Price - I want to keep it as affordable as possible, and maybe even have a free/pro version? @megmaltese 50 euros or less sounds reasonable to me.
Light Types - Directional lighting only (hence the name), because the techniques are very specifically optimized around Orthographic projection.
Seamlessness - As it stands, you drop a single prefab into the scene, which automatically (or manually) picks the primary Directional Light as the Sun, and registers Camera objects with the required script to make the magic happen.
Shaders need a couple lines of code, but you can automatically change all Materials to use the Sunshine equivalent shaders(included) with a single button press.
3.5 support - I’m only using a couple small features from 4.0 to make the Inspector interface… So I’m sure 3.5 support wouldn’t be too hard to achieve if there’s a need for it.
Deferred Lighting - Currently Sunshine works with Forward rendering only. That could always change in the future though.
Realtime Radiosity - Could be fun to look into that.
Does it work with Unity free?
Unity Pro only (it requires RenderTargets)
Not radiosity, but very similar (in results): LIGHTSMARK - next generation lighting benchmark
I’d be very interested in this for deferred rendering and some basic high performance radiosity
Oh,it’s looking so impressive!
50 euros? That is a bit expensive.
this looks pretty interesting. I notice in your video that the unlit areas are extremely… bright… is this just because you’re using on top of a lightmapped scene? will you be able to control the shadow intensity to make the rest of the scene darker? I can’t tell from the video, does it work per pixel, with lit normals, or is it per vertex? Also, how do point lights react on top of this in the same scene?
I would love to see deferred rendering up and running, and of course radiosity… 
I’d say: Calculate the time it would take you to implement it yourself, multiply it with an “hour rate” and check back…
€50 is cheap considering what the system does.
If you include support for differed rendering i would most likely buy it for the current game im working on, Unitys shadowing is getting pretty outdated.
50 euro is good if this gets constant updates and features. If it’s one of those assets that gets dumped onto the asset store and forgotten about then maybe it’s a little much
A well working shadowing system can be pretty costly.
That’s why you don’t have updates in this point in Unity since a lot of time.
Just think on how much time coding it yourself (if you were able) would take. Debug, polish, integration, etc. You wouldn’t come out with less than a couple of weeks, maybe one month, of work.
50 euros is not really much but the count should be done on the number of copies he would sell.
I want to invite everybody who reads here to post if they would buy it, so that the author can have a glimpse of how much he is going to sell if he sets a budget price.