VolumetricLighting

Lighting effects implemented for the Adam demo: volumetric fog, area lights and tube lights

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Quick Overview

The Unity-Technologies/VolumetricLighting repository is a Unity package that provides volumetric lighting effects for Unity projects. It offers a solution for creating realistic atmospheric lighting, fog, and scattering effects in 3D environments, enhancing the visual quality of games and interactive applications.

Pros

Adds depth and atmosphere to 3D scenes with realistic volumetric lighting
Customizable settings for fine-tuning lighting effects
Optimized for performance, suitable for real-time applications
Seamless integration with Unity's rendering pipeline

Cons

May have a performance impact on lower-end hardware
Requires some understanding of lighting principles for optimal use
Limited documentation and examples available
Potential compatibility issues with certain Unity versions or custom rendering setups

Code Examples

// Adding the Volumetric Lighting component to a camera
using UnityEngine;
using UnityEngine.Rendering.VolumetricLighting;

public class VolumetricLightingSetup : MonoBehaviour
{
    void Start()
    {
        Camera.main.gameObject.AddComponent<VolumetricLighting>();
    }
}

// Adjusting Volumetric Lighting settings at runtime
using UnityEngine;
using UnityEngine.Rendering.VolumetricLighting;

public class VolumetricLightingAdjuster : MonoBehaviour
{
    public VolumetricLighting volumetricLighting;

    void Update()
    {
        volumetricLighting.scatteringCoef = Mathf.Sin(Time.time) * 0.5f + 0.5f;
        volumetricLighting.extinctionCoef = Mathf.Cos(Time.time) * 0.5f + 0.5f;
    }
}

// Creating a custom volumetric light source
using UnityEngine;
using UnityEngine.Rendering.VolumetricLighting;

public class CustomVolumetricLight : MonoBehaviour
{
    void Start()
    {
        VolumetricLightRenderer.RegisterLight(GetComponent<Light>());
    }

    void OnDestroy()
    {
        VolumetricLightRenderer.UnregisterLight(GetComponent<Light>());
    }
}

Getting Started

Install the Volumetric Lighting package from the Unity Package Manager.
Add the VolumetricLighting component to your main camera.
Adjust the Volumetric Lighting settings in the inspector to achieve the desired effect.
For custom light sources, add the VolumetricLight component to your light GameObjects.

// Basic setup in code
using UnityEngine;
using UnityEngine.Rendering.VolumetricLighting;

public class VolumetricLightingSetup : MonoBehaviour
{
    void Start()
    {
        // Add Volumetric Lighting to the main camera
        var volumetricLighting = Camera.main.gameObject.AddComponent<VolumetricLighting>();

        // Adjust settings
        volumetricLighting.scatteringCoef = 0.5f;
        volumetricLighting.extinctionCoef = 0.5f;
        volumetricLighting.skyColor = Color.blue;

        // Add Volumetric Light to a directional light
        var directionalLight = GameObject.Find("Directional Light");
        directionalLight.AddComponent<VolumetricLight>();
    }
}

Competitor Comparisons

VolumetricLights

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Volumetric Lights for Unity

Pros of VolumetricLights

More customizable and flexible for advanced users
Supports a wider range of light types and shapes
Better performance optimization for complex scenes

Cons of VolumetricLights

Steeper learning curve for beginners
Less integrated with Unity's built-in lighting system
May require more manual setup and tweaking

Code Comparison

VolumetricLighting:

public class VolumetricLight : MonoBehaviour
{
    public float intensity = 1f;
    public Color color = Color.white;
    public float range = 10f;
}

VolumetricLights:

public class VolumetricLight : MonoBehaviour
{
    public float intensity = 1f;
    public Color color = Color.white;
    public float range = 10f;
    public LightType lightType = LightType.Spot;
    public float spotAngle = 30f;
}

The code comparison shows that VolumetricLights offers more customization options, such as light type and spot angle, which are not present in the VolumetricLighting implementation. This aligns with the pro of VolumetricLights being more customizable and flexible for advanced users.

LightShafts

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A light shafts (volumetric shadows) effect for Unity.

Pros of LightShafts

Lightweight and focused specifically on light shaft rendering
Easy to integrate into existing Unity projects
Provides a simple and intuitive interface for adjusting light shaft parameters

Cons of LightShafts

Less comprehensive than VolumetricLighting, focusing only on light shafts
May require additional plugins or assets for a complete volumetric lighting solution
Limited documentation and community support compared to VolumetricLighting

Code Comparison

LightShafts:

public class LightShafts : MonoBehaviour {
    public Light sunLight;
    public float density = 1.0f;
    public float weight = 1.0f;
    public float decay = 1.0f;
    public float exposure = 1.0f;
}

VolumetricLighting:

public class VolumetricLighting : MonoBehaviour {
    public Light mainLight;
    public float scattering = 0.5f;
    public float extinction = 0.01f;
    public float anisotropy = 0.1f;
    public float maxDistance = 100f;
}

Both repositories offer solutions for enhancing lighting effects in Unity, but VolumetricLighting provides a more comprehensive approach to volumetric lighting, while LightShafts focuses specifically on creating light shaft effects. VolumetricLighting is likely to be more suitable for larger projects requiring a full volumetric lighting system, while LightShafts may be preferable for simpler implementations or projects with specific light shaft requirements.

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README

Volumetric fog, area lights and tube lights

This repository contains some of the lighting effects implemented for the Unity Adam demo: volumetric fog, area lights and tube lights.

Adam

fog in the Adam demo

Test scenes

Area light with shadows.

Two tube lights with some locally controlled fog density.

Tube light with a shadow plane and global fog noise + wind.

transparency Transparent spheres and a point light.

System requirements

Compute shaders. Tested on dx11, dx12 and osx with metal. Might work on other platforms with compute shaders too.
Tested in Unity 5.6 to Unity 2018.3.0b5. Please let me know in case of trouble in a newer version.

Usage notes

Volumetric fog

The final outcome of light scattering in the fog depends on three factors: fog density, fog anisotropy and light sources.
To affect the fog, an area light, tube light or point light needs to have the FogLight component and the scene needs an instance of LightManagerFogLights.
Global fog density controls on the VolumetricFog component allow defining constant fog density, exponential height-based and animated noise.
Density can also be controlled locally with the FogEllipsoid shapes.
Anisotropy is a global property on the VolumetricFog component. It allows the light to scatter forward more than in other directions, which is characteristic for Mie scattering occuring with larger particles like water droplets of fog.

Area lights

Area lights give great direct light results, but their shadows and scattering in the fog are very rough approximations in this project.
Direct light soft shadows are implemented using PCSS - the technique was good enough for our specific cameras, but in general isn't great and the settings are difficult to tweak. Real time shadows from area lights is still an open research topic.
Regular area light should contribute to the scene in its entire front hemisphere. This is difficult to handle for a shadowmap (paraboloidal projection and multiple shadowmaps are not very practical), so with shadows enabled, area light's influence gets limited to a frustum with a controllable angle.
The scattering contribution in the fog is limited to the same frustum and not physically correct either.
Volumetric shadows in the fog use Variance Shadow Maps. VSM allows for pre-blurring the shadowmap for very soft shadows with wide penumbra for the cost of just one shadow sample at the stage of injecting the light into the froxel volume.
Softness of the volumetric shadows, apart from looking more natural, has an important role: it avoids aliasing by changing sharp shadow edges into smoother gradients, this way pushing the gradient above the Nyquist freqency of the froxel resolution. In other words: if shadows are aliasing, try blurring them more in the FogLight settings.
The original paper uses Exponential Shadow Maps. ESMs cause light leaking right behind the shadow caster; on top of that, their penumbra is very wide right behind the shadow caster, but gets narrow further away. Those two properties made them very hard to tweak for our shots not to be washed out, avoid aliasing, etc. VSMs don't leak light this way and have a more constant penumbra, so were a better fit for us. (VSMs experience a different kind of light leaking in a specific configuration of shadow casters and receivers, but we didn't have that problem in our scene).

Tube lights

Tube lights use a very cheap and practical solution to approximate area lights, but the resulting quality is much lower.
Still a very useful fill light, source of extra specular highlights or simply when there's a need for an elongated, omnidirectional light.
Tube lights don't have proper shadows, but each one can have two ShadowPlanes. Shadow planes cut off the light's influence and have a controllable feather.

Known issues and missing functionality

Directional light support disabled for now, but should be added soon.
The froxel resolution is currently hardcoded and larger view distances will cause undersampling issues along the view axis. Should be fixed soon. In the meantime use the Far Clip Max setting to limit how far the volumetrics are calculated.
The lights only work in deferred rendering and won't affect any objects rendered in forward.
No scaling via the transform component - currently the size and shape of the lights can only be changed via the properties of the light component. Changing the scale in the transform component doesn't work.
Currently the lights always render as back faces of the proxy mesh, without using the stencil buffer. A proper deferred light needs to be rendered as front faces, back faces or a quad (depending on the intersections with the near and far plane) and cull pixels using stencil. Not implemented for Adam, since wouldn't have changed anything with our specific cameras and light setup, but necessary for the lights to be universal.
The material emission of the light source mesh (the quad and the capsule) is only a rough approximation - needs to be calculated properly.
Banding - there's quite a bit of banding, particularly visible in those dark scenes above; needs to be solved somehow. Note that banding isn't the same as aliasing. The latter creates differently looking bands and happens due to the froxel resolution being too low (below the Nyquist frequency) for the sharpness of features in the fog (shadow edges, quick changing gradients). To fix aliasing, increase froxel resolution (controls coming, or decrease Far Clip Max), or make the features in the fog smoother (e.g. by blurring the shadows more).
Area light's have Unity's standard shader BRDF baked into its lookup tables. To make them work with a different shader, its BRDF would have to baked into new lookup tables. There's currently no tool to do that, but we should make one. In the meantime take a look at the original paper in the references.