2020.11.22.1118 - Added Reflection Probes, including in-game baking support
Reflection probes are finally here! Neos now has full support for reflection probes, including in-game baking! Time to make your worlds look prettier and shinier. Realtime Reflection probes are supported as well, but they're very heavy, please be very mindful when using those.
Generally baked reflection probes are quite cheap, especially at original resolution of 128x128 (rarely you'd need more, unless you have mirror-like surfaces), which take only 96 kB of VRAM for each HDR probe instead of 1 MB, thanks to the recently implemented BC6H compression.
There is also a wizard, which makes them easier to bake in mass. You can filter them by tag, part of hierarchy or enabled/disabled status. The wizard can teleport you to each probe as it bakes too in case you have culling systems setup in your world.
A few other tweaks and additions, notably Valve has released new Steam Audio version, hopefully that fixes some of the audio spatialization issues!
[h2]New Features:[/h2]
- Added ReflectionProbe (under Rendering), which provides baked or realtime reflections to the scene and significantly improve visual fidelity (requested by @Toxic_Cookie, @Groxxy the Quote Warden, @Enverex, @Aegis_Wolf | Art Director and many others)
-- You can easily create one by going to Create New -> Object -> Reflection Probe, which will make a new probe and bake it immediately
-- You can (re)bake any probe at any time using the "Bake Reflections" button in the inspector
--- Baking will automatically exclude all users, gizmos, debug visuals and child objects of all probes from baked result
--- Baking process generates a new Cubemap asset, which is placed in the world's "Assets" Slot and will be saved with the world. You can use the cubemap asset as any other cubemap, there's nothing that ties it to the specific probe that baked it (other than the probe's position and configuration which is used for the baking process)
--- Asset variant system will automatically compress the baked cubemap. For HDR this will use the BC6H, significantly reducing VRAM usage
-- You can assign arbitrary cubemap to baked probe to create variety of effects or switch between versions (e.g. using AssetMultiplexer)
-- Area of effect of each probe is determined by the BoxSize. The bounding box of reflection probe is equivalent to this size
-- You can preview baked reflection by enabling the "ShowDebugVisuals", this is nonpersistent
-- Note that Realtime reflection probes are very expensive, use them VERY sparingly
- Added Reflection Probes Wizard (Create New -> Editor) which allows working with all probes in the world
-- You can filter probes by part of hierachy, tag and disabled status
-- If you have a culling system, you can use "Teleport me to each probe" option, so you get teleported to the probe as it gets baked (Noclip/Fly is recommended)
-- Using this you can mass bake multiple probes with a single button press
-- You can also show/hide the debug visuals for all the probes
[h2]Tweaks:[/h2]
- Upgraded to Steam Audio beta 19 (from beta 18)
- Default filtering mode for Cubemaps is now Trillinear (this is crucial for reflection probes to work well)
- Optimized Selective/Exclude renders to avoid marking same parts of hierachy as hidden multiple times if there are overlaps
- Light Sources Wizard is now localizable
- Merged Japanese locale additions by @Aesc
- Merged Korean locale additions by @MirPASEC
- Merged Polish locale additions by @art0007i
- Merged Japanese, Esperanto and Chinese locale additions by @Melnus
[h2]Bugfixes:[/h2]
- OnStart event node won't fire anymore if it's already destroyed (this can potentially fix a bug reported by @H3BO3)
- Fixed moderator badge being 2048x2048 instead of standard 128x128 (reported by @Groxxy the Quote Warden)
Generally baked reflection probes are quite cheap, especially at original resolution of 128x128 (rarely you'd need more, unless you have mirror-like surfaces), which take only 96 kB of VRAM for each HDR probe instead of 1 MB, thanks to the recently implemented BC6H compression.
There is also a wizard, which makes them easier to bake in mass. You can filter them by tag, part of hierarchy or enabled/disabled status. The wizard can teleport you to each probe as it bakes too in case you have culling systems setup in your world.
A few other tweaks and additions, notably Valve has released new Steam Audio version, hopefully that fixes some of the audio spatialization issues!
[h2]New Features:[/h2]
- Added ReflectionProbe (under Rendering), which provides baked or realtime reflections to the scene and significantly improve visual fidelity (requested by @Toxic_Cookie, @Groxxy the Quote Warden, @Enverex, @Aegis_Wolf | Art Director and many others)
-- You can easily create one by going to Create New -> Object -> Reflection Probe, which will make a new probe and bake it immediately
-- You can (re)bake any probe at any time using the "Bake Reflections" button in the inspector
--- Baking will automatically exclude all users, gizmos, debug visuals and child objects of all probes from baked result
--- Baking process generates a new Cubemap asset, which is placed in the world's "Assets" Slot and will be saved with the world. You can use the cubemap asset as any other cubemap, there's nothing that ties it to the specific probe that baked it (other than the probe's position and configuration which is used for the baking process)
--- Asset variant system will automatically compress the baked cubemap. For HDR this will use the BC6H, significantly reducing VRAM usage
-- You can assign arbitrary cubemap to baked probe to create variety of effects or switch between versions (e.g. using AssetMultiplexer)
-- Area of effect of each probe is determined by the BoxSize. The bounding box of reflection probe is equivalent to this size
-- You can preview baked reflection by enabling the "ShowDebugVisuals", this is nonpersistent
-- Note that Realtime reflection probes are very expensive, use them VERY sparingly
- Added Reflection Probes Wizard (Create New -> Editor) which allows working with all probes in the world
-- You can filter probes by part of hierachy, tag and disabled status
-- If you have a culling system, you can use "Teleport me to each probe" option, so you get teleported to the probe as it gets baked (Noclip/Fly is recommended)
-- Using this you can mass bake multiple probes with a single button press
-- You can also show/hide the debug visuals for all the probes
[h2]Tweaks:[/h2]
- Upgraded to Steam Audio beta 19 (from beta 18)
- Default filtering mode for Cubemaps is now Trillinear (this is crucial for reflection probes to work well)
- Optimized Selective/Exclude renders to avoid marking same parts of hierachy as hidden multiple times if there are overlaps
- Light Sources Wizard is now localizable
- Merged Japanese locale additions by @Aesc
- Merged Korean locale additions by @MirPASEC
- Merged Polish locale additions by @art0007i
- Merged Japanese, Esperanto and Chinese locale additions by @Melnus
[h2]Bugfixes:[/h2]
- OnStart event node won't fire anymore if it's already destroyed (this can potentially fix a bug reported by @H3BO3)
- Fixed moderator badge being 2048x2048 instead of standard 128x128 (reported by @Groxxy the Quote Warden)