UPGEN Lighting HDRP

UPGEN Lighting is an optimized for maximum performance framework that aspires to provide a fully dynamic approximation of Global Illumination to your games (requires no precomputations). Initially designed for VR games, this solution provides high execution speed, produce great visual results, and uses minimum of system resources. Emulation of indirect lighting could be made as fully automatic, in a semi-automatic way, or by manual designing light to save extra performance.

Under the hood, solution is based on the idea of making ultra-fast type of point light sources (10-20 times faster than standard ones) and using thousands of them to approximate light propagation for the scene in realtime. To achieve this we made a special kind of screen space effect, which bakes each frame hundreds of most valuable lights and applies combined lighting inside G-Buffer for current camera.

This framework provides several workflows for building lighting in your scenes. You can use such Fast Light sources to automatically transfer bounced light from standard light sources using Ray-Tracing. Or you can combine a standard type of light sources with Fast Lights to manually approximate GI in complex scenes and achieve the best performance and a beautiful visual look.

Windows Standalone Demo (22MB)

Limitations:

• Only HDRP pipeline is supported (does not work with URP or Built-in pipeline)
• In automatic mode it could be very inaccurate (to stay fast) and some manual work still required
• Lighting does not affect forward-rendered objects like transparent geometry
• Ray-Tracing use colliders to detect ray hits (geometry without colliders will not produce bounced lighting)
• Best light types to use with ray-tracing are Point and Spot Lights
• Area type of lights is not supported by realtime Ray-Tracing
• For Directional Lights a realtime Ray-Tracing works in a small area around its pivot and you suld design indirect lighting for big outdoor scenes in semi-automatic mode
• Does not take into consideration light cookies
• Ray-Tracing cache has a certain amount of inertia and will have visual delay for fast moving light sources
• Ray-Tracing will produce light leaking

Features:

• Do not need any precomputations and just works in few clicks
• Do not use any special graphics features and can work on any platform
• Full support of all VR headsets
• Fast light has special math inside so it is combination of point and ambient light types
• All framework is written in C# code and the source code is provided

• No GC allocation garbage
• Supports hot recompilation (during playing in editor)

Forum Thread | Online Documentation

Warning: Starting from Unity 2020 VR rendering is not supported