UPGEN Lighting HDRP

UPGEN Lighting is an optimized for maximum performance framework around post-effect that provides a fully dynamic approximation of Global Illumination to your games (requires no precomputations). 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 (33MB)

Limitations:

• Only HDRP pipeline is supported (does not work with Built-in or URP 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 uses colliders to detect ray hits (geometry without colliders will not produce bounced lighting)
• Only light types supported with Fast GI and Ray-Tracing are Point and Spot Lights
• Does not take into consideration shadows and 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
• Stereo rendering (XR) is not supported

Compatible with Unity 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021

Forum Thread | Online Documentation

Release Notes

v2.0

• Fast Light: added Subtractive feature
• Fast Light: added Soft Culling feature
• Fast GI: added Soft Culling feature
• Ray-Traced GI: added Soft Culling feature
• Ray-Traced GI: removed support of Directional Light
• Framework: removed stereo-rendering support
• Framework: increased overall performance

v1.6

• Manager: new button to Create/Destroy set of Point Lights from internal rays
• Ray-Traced GI: Increased Maximum value of RaysMatrixSize from 15 to 25

v1.5

• Added “ClearCache” method for rays cache
• Auto selection after creation on new objects from main menu
• Bug fixes

v1.4

• Added Ray-Traced GI rays smoothing for fast moved Fast Lights

v1.3

• Added main menu commands to create Fast Light and Manager objects
• Updated script icon for Manager script

v1.2

• Ray-Traced GI: when used with Directional Light new property “Rays Matrix Scale” can adjust scale of ray-tracing matrix (how big area should be covered by rays)

v1.1

• Ray-Traced GI: new button to Create/Destroy set of Fast Lights from internal rays
• Examples: hide next/prev buttons if you have no scenes in build settings
• Manual: quality improvements + size reduced