Good question

Cause if it's to show off unity, making a game that any number of other options could serve perfectly well might not be the best thang

It's all a bit vague. We're having an internal 'developer conference' - and have been asked to come up with things we can present on. Generally anything coder-y and interesting. Not a game co so I'm thinking I'd just explain the game loop and what that means in terms of tracking state, with a very noddy example. I don't want it to be too Unity-centric... Breakout might work, will need to see if an hour is plausible!!

It'd have to be without, standard physics engines tend to screw up doing breakout.

Haven't been in here for a while.  If anyone is interested, Call Connect is sitting on about 111,000 downloads. It's been free for quite a while now so we don't see a dime, but still encouraging.  It's been cruising along at around 15-30 downloads a day, then for some reason last week it shot up to over 500 downloads in 2 days.  I honestly have no idea why and I may never figure this thing out.  Anyhoo...

Yer we knew of that one, caused a generous spike at the time. Dunno about congrats, just an update being we're part of the fraternity, kinda.  Not a very active part mind you, but we'll be back.

Very nice!

@Gunn - ooh that's lovely! Nice lighting

Cheers for the compliments guys! I'll post an update after todays work, assuming i made decent progress.. which i do hope i will, naturally - just fell upon a veritable bounty of shading lighting models programmed for Unity so prettiness is coming!

For anyone who knows, was that particular metal effect in halo 4 (and reach i think) the result of a cook torrance lighting model? (Im talking about that very particular kind of shading and specular highlight on painted metal surfaces) I hope so,cause i found one, its jolly exciting. And a ward shader!

It does when he used the nice shader.

Sadly (for us) all but 800 or so are freebies.  Freeloaders!  Still, I think the average downloads per app is around 25,000 so wahey. Obviously the figures are a bit fuzzy given that some apps are acquired millions of times and some barely get the one, but it still looks nice.

LazyGunn wrote:

... For anyone who knows, was that particular metal effect in halo 4 (and reach i think) the result of a cook torrance lighting model? (Im talking about that very particular kind of shading and specular highlight on painted metal surfaces) I hope so,cause i found one, its jolly exciting. And a ward shader!

Chen's doc on Halo3 materials has info - may not be the same as the system in 4 and Reach, but presume it's ballpark:
http://www.bungie.net/Inside/publications.aspx
http://www.bungie.net/images/Inside/publications/presentations/lighting_material.zip

Not sure which specific metal effect you're after - MC's armour hero effect will be overkill for props and no idea how easy it is to add SH irradiance/GI support to Unity or whichever engine you're using, cos IIRC this was tied into Bungie lightmap baking server farm.
They way they broke it down into low, mid and high-freq lighting is very nice (but high-cost, so hero effect only).
You'll want some form of directional reflection in there for shininess (e.g. blended full cubemap, as screenspace normal spherical envmap doesn't really cut it for flat planes or reflections that change as you move around a static object, but can be good enough for IBL on particles or low-detail props, especially animated things that are constantly moving and only need a cheap hint of reflectivity, rather than full, correct reflections and the cost of a cubemap texread).

For high-freq specular, Cook-Torrance (Torrance-Sparrow) used in Far Cry 3, CodBlops etc. - more expensive that Blinn-Phong (which itself is nicer than naive phong). 
NB - Blinn-Phong can give decent results if normalised:  
http://renderwonk.com/publications/s2010-shading-course/hoffman/s2010_physically_based_shading_hoffman_b.pdf
http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/j.kautz/GameCourse/04_PointLights.pdf
AFAIK, normalising BP makes it energy-preserving so the specular highlight break up less at distance and glancing angles, which (with decent mips for normal maps) helps reduce aliasing and "light speckle" on normal mapped surfaces as they get further away.

djchump wrote:

LazyGunn wrote:

... For anyone who knows, was that particular metal effect in halo 4 (and reach i think) the result of a cook torrance lighting model? (Im talking about that very particular kind of shading and specular highlight on painted metal surfaces) I hope so,cause i found one, its jolly exciting. And a ward shader!

Chen's doc on Halo3 materials has info - may not be the same as the system in 4 and Reach, but presume it's ballpark: http://www.bungie.net/Inside/publications.aspx http://www.bungie.net/images/Inside/publications/presentations/lighting_material.zip Not sure which specific metal effect you're after - MC's armour hero effect will be overkill for props and no idea how easy it is to add SH irradiance/GI support to Unity or whichever engine you're using, cos IIRC this was tied into Bungie lightmap baking server farm. They way they broke it down into low, mid and high-freq lighting is very nice (but high-cost, so hero effect only). You'll want some form of directional reflection in there for shininess (e.g. blended full cubemap, as screenspace normal spherical envmap doesn't really cut it for flat planes or reflections that change as you move around a static object, but can be good enough for IBL on particles or low-detail props, especially animated things that are constantly moving and only need a cheap hint of reflectivity, rather than full, correct reflections and the cost of a cubemap texread). For high-freq specular, Cook-Torrance (Torrance-Sparrow) used in Far Cry 3, CodBlops etc. - more expensive that Blinn-Phong (which itself is nicer than naive phong).  NB - Blinn-Phong can give decent results if normalised:   http://renderwonk.com/publications/s2010-shading-course/hoffman/s2010_physically_based_shading_hoffman_b.pdf http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/j.kautz/GameCourse/04_PointLights.pdf AFAIK, normalising BP makes it energy-preserving so the specular highlight break up less at distance and glancing angles, which (with decent mips for normal maps) helps reduce aliasing and "light speckle" on normal mapped surfaces as they get further away.

Excellent, cheers for that! I'm just getting my feet wet really but definitely reading a lot about IBL and physical lighting, i found a 'cheap' oren nayar which enthused me greatly, so, its all about digging and learning. Unity's engine is unity, hah, if you have the pro version its pretty extensible, if you dont.. well, i dont so i make do, but these lighting models are available as you can write vertex/fragment shaders as normal, sans a bit of syntax here and there. Unity has light probes, that work with it's Beast lightmapper to create ambient light volumes, not exactly proper GI but its nice, not sure how well it can contribute to other aspects of lighting. Writing cubemaps can be automated in the pro version, so.. yeah need pro again, dont know any way to blur or blend them in-shader anyways, but i'd certainly like to know how (I've tried changing the mipmap level for my static cubemaps and it kind of works for a certain degree then its seams e'erwhere). Finally, i'm vaguely tempted to sink a year into making U4's gi solution work for unity (sparse octree voxels?), im reading a pile of papers on it. It looks straightforward enough from the papers and pics, to conceptualise, but how do i program that!

You're a good ways ahead of me on this stuff Chump, even if i wasnt covering a bajillion bases i have noone to tell me any fecking thing, assuming i could understand it at all in the first place, but i mostly understood that post and it was hugely appreciated so cheers!

Moar pics soon as i've finished blocking in the critical level detail

blocking, is donneee, now for all the cool lil details, lbp style

LazyGunn wrote:

Excellent, cheers for that! I'm just getting my feet wet really but definitely reading a lot about IBL and physical lighting, i found a 'cheap' oren nayar which enthused me greatly, so, its all about digging and learning.

Cool! Oren Nayar and Minneart are nice ways to get anisotropy into the BRDF - especially as there's a bunch of places you can dig up coefficients to easily switch up from velvet to steel or other surface effects. Costly though, depending how many coefficients you want to use

More artist-friendly though are spherical env maps for anything that always faces the camera or where realism of reflection is not critical - cos you can literally paint in blurred reflections, specular highlights etc.  Our VFX artists swear by em. It's what Sculptris uses to make it really fast and easy to change out the preview material by simply swapping in a different SEM texture.

FWIW - this book sits on a few of the rendering guys' desks at work (including mine ) and is a good read, but the website also has tonnes of useful links: 
http://www.realtimerendering.com/index.html
http://www.realtimerendering.com/portal.html

For any academic/conference papers Ke-sen Huang's page is a goldmine:
http://kesen.realtimerendering.com/
More game-specific at GDC vault but lots hidden behind a paywall
http://www.gdcvault.com/free

Course, if you really want to drool you can see what the offline rendering guys get to play with:
http://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/publications
http://graphics.pixar.com/library/

What was fun though was hearing about Quilez' work on Brave!
http://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW/2012/Volume-35-Issue-4-June-July-2012/The-Royal-Treatment.aspx
http://www.iquilezles.org/
I'd been following his demoscene and fractal stuff for years, so it was really cool to hear that he got to use that pixelwizardry for Pizar

Unity's engine is unity, hah, if you have the pro version its pretty extensible, if you dont.. well, i dont so i make do, but these lighting models are available as you can write vertex/fragment shaders as normal, sans a bit of syntax here and there.

Cool - majority of the lighting comes down to the pixel shader and what different textures are used on the meshes (e.g. spec, gloss and how those maps are used in the calcs). Even the more complex systems like deferred lighting, fully deferred rendering, light index deferred etc., the light pass or g-buffers are still rendered to with shaders at the end of the day.

Unity has light probes, that work with it's Beast lightmapper to create ambient light volumes, not exactly proper GI but its nice, not sure how well it can contribute to other aspects of lighting. Writing cubemaps can be automated in the pro version, so.. yeah need pro again, dont know any way to blur or blend them in-shader anyways, but i'd certainly like to know how (I've tried changing the mipmap level for my static cubemaps and it kind of works for a certain degree then its seams e'erwhere).

Yeah, to blur a cubemap you'd want to do it offline either at bake or post process in some art package. You could do it dynamically in -shader at the cost of multiple tex reads and an average or gauss blur, but that'd be expensive and only viable if it absolutely *had* to rapidly respond and change according to game actions - otherwise the runtime could CPU blend cubemap textures and upload to shader each frame.

Postprocess blur tends to always be gaussian as it's seperable so can be split to vertical and horizontal passes for cheapness. (can also run each pass twice at double-space for a much wider blur without having to up the number of tex reads and caning the tex cache)

blending is easy:
- if blending in a specific amount (e.g. 40%) of specular or env map or whatever, just mul by 0.4 before adding to the light calc, or lerp by 0.4 or whatever.
- if SEM / cubemap per area/room, upload the 2 textures, read em both and lerp between them in-shader according to some shader constant value (e.g. as the character mvoes from one room to the other).

Finally, i'm vaguely tempted to sink a year into making U4's gi solution work for unity (sparse octree voxels?), im reading a pile of papers on it. It looks straightforward enough from the papers and pics, to conceptualise, but how do i program that!

I dunno man - I'm not a tools guy so I leave the offline bake to our editor, I'd leave it totally to Unity tools or maybe find a plugin if I didn't like it myself. If the Unity lightbake or GI wasn't doing what I wanted, I'd probably look for a different engine before trying to roll my own tools pipeline because I jsut don't really want to get into the backend process. Figure it's even more important for one-man outfits like yourself (or small indie teams etc.) to pick the battles to get most bang for buck from their dev effort. I reckon you get more dynamic and interesting gameshine out of decent shaders, dynamic lights and fancy use of shader constant tweaking on the fly so that's where I figure you get the most return for dev code effort in the final look of the game. But hey, if tools and light bake is what tickles your biscuit, then go for it!
 

You're a good ways ahead of me on this stuff Chump, even if i wasnt covering a bajillion bases i have noone to tell me any fecking thing, assuming i could understand it at all in the first place, but i mostly understood that post and it was hugely appreciated so cheers! Moar pics soon as i've finished blocking in the critical level detail

No probs - I have absolutely no artistic talent so you're light years ahead of me there cos I can't draw for shit  I need to start learning so that, like yourself, if I get the urge for a spare time project I can do the code and artwork and have full control over the look!
As for shaders and render code - I tend to work by taking what works and trying to add as much dynamic stuff as poss (without blowing the frame), cos static lightmaps can be baked real pretty but they don't react to game events so I much prefer the dynamic stuff!

Unity does sound like the "go to" indie engine these days - if I ever could be arsed to do anything at home after work I'd probably start there as well. 
IMHO "cutting edge" is a means to an end really - just a tool to achieve the art director's vision - it shouldn't be the ends in itself, but sometimes does get treated that way for hype purposes and back of the box checklists for pitches/greenlight etc.  It's fun to experiment and all, but unless it serves some kind of final result on screen, there could be more cool stuff to spend the time on - especially for solo and small team projects. Still, a nice GI solution with support for lots of dynamic effect lights is always impressive  

If it's phone stuff you're after there's probably a more phone-focused book - RTR is an overview kind of book with info on lots of stuff, but not practical implementations of shaders - it's more background on the lighting models, rendering techniques etc.  There's no OGLES and it's geared towards current gen console and PC - whereas mobile is gonna be much more concerned with instruction count limits and thus performance optimisation