Emissive Materials (Question)

    Hi to everyone. I'm just curious - how the emissive materials will work when they will be fully implemented? Will they have glow or they will just have a constant color? Will they produce actual light or they will be decorative only? And if they will - this light will be with Unity lights or with some kind of GI? Thanks for your answers :)

    These materials will just have a glow - but they won't emit actual light unfortunately. Working with actual lights would probably be too expensive (especially if people decide to place many construction elements with emissive materials), and there is unfortunately no GI in the new version yet. Since Unity doesn't provide a proper realtime GI solution for their SRPs yet, GI will probably only be supported via Raytracing in the near future (which is on our todo list, but it has a low priority atm) ^^

    red51, hi again, can I suggest one interesting thing that I found?


    There is a thing called SEGI, a realtime GI from Sonic Ether, developer of SEUS (Minecraft shaders), this GI technique he used in his shaders and published as a package for Unity. It allows create realtime GI with scene voxelisation, and this GI works fine with emissive materials, procedural geometry and moving objects. It is also highly configurable, which means that it can be used on all PC levels (from disabled at all to ultra settings). And it also don't need any GPU raytracing, you can use it on regular videocards.


    I tested this myself in Unity 2020.3.18, and looks like it is working fine, after some tweaks I get really great results


    SEGI is under MIT license, so it is possible to use it in Rising World, I guess, it is also an open-source project.


    SEGI GitHub (with releases, I tested version from it)

    SEGI on Unity forums


    It was on unity store some years ago, but looks like it is now completely open source. Asset package contains good manual how to configure it.


    This technology can bring almost infinity light sources (voxelisation is not bounded by amount of light), and this thing can be used with many different things - from soft-light sources to emissive textures. I think this can bring rendering to a really new level ;)


    There is also another benefit - realistic light in scene, as this can also simulate light reflections from materials (as GI was originally created for this), this can make realistic forest light or really good atmosphere in player buildings with windows (as there will be more soft daylight)

    Thanks for bringing this to our attention, this looks very impressive! 8):thumbup:


    However, unfortunately this doesn't seem to be compatible with Unitys scriptable render pipelines, more specifically with the HDRP. Shaders work different there, and most parts of the old Unity Graphics API (which are used by SEGI) are no longer compatible with HDRP - so there would be quite some work involved to port this to HDRP...


    It's a bit disappointing that Unity does not offer a proper realtime GI solution. More than 2 years ago they deprecated "Enlighten GI" (which is useless for a procedural world anyway, because it requires baking of all light data) for HDRP and said they're working on an in-house realtime GI solution. But a few months ago they suddenly re-enabled Enlighten (with extended support until 2027), and didn't provide any further information about their in-house realtime GI solution... it's a pity, considering that Unreal's "Lumen" looks very promising.

    Quote from red51

    However, unfortunately this doesn't seem to be compatible with Unitys scriptable render pipelines, more specifically with the HDRP. Shaders work different there, and most parts of the old Unity Graphics API (which are used by SEGI) are no longer compatible with HDRP - so there would be quite some work involved to port this to HDRP...

    Yes, original SEGI is not compatible with scriptable render, but there is a project with same approach that is compatible - VXGI (GitHub), it was designed to be compatible with scriptable render pipelines, was inspired by SEGI and have same license (MIT)

    Quote from paulevs

    Yes, original SEGI is not compatible with scriptable render, but there is a project with same approach that is compatible - VXGI (GitHub), it was designed to be compatible with scriptable render pipelines, was inspired by SEGI and have same license (MIT)

    Yes, but even that one isn't compatible with newer HDRP versions anymore - it only supports Unity 2019.4 (HDRP 7), but in HDRP 10 (Unity 2020.2+), Unity moved to a new internal constant buffer API, which makes it no longer possible to pass global variables to command buffers (which is happening in VXGI). There is no public replacement API available unfortunately, so "fixing" this requires changes to the HDRP itself ||

    But even if it was compatible, it uses geometry shaders, which aren't supported by Metal, which would mean this feature wouldn't work on Mac... :/

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