[subsurface scattering]

that would be a nice feature to have, to get the lighting from the backface to check whether something is lit from the back or in in the shadow.

But that's translucency, and still not what subsurface scattering actually is meant to do.

SSS means to simulate light bounces under the surface, exiting as reflected light - but not reflected on the surface but somewhere deeper, meaning it's a value that's dependent on a different fragment being lit.

 

here's a rendering with blender's eevee of a cube with SSS on, hovering over a plane without SSS.

there's translucency along the edge, but the interesting part is where the light cone cuts off the light, and you still get that orange-y glow. because some pixels nearby are being lit. Without this, skin looks pasty and dead.

you can actually see the banding from a low number of samples (eevee allows you to increase it, but then, eevee is not designed to hit 60fps or more)

[subsurface scattering]

42 minutes ago, Josh said:

 

yes... I've seen those, that's why I'm here ^-^

[subsurface scattering]

though that would be cool, it's not what I meant, sorry. The volume would be great for transmission, i.e., when light and camera are on oppsite sides of an object, but I'm not sure what it would do if light and camera are on the same side, looking at a surface.

I tried to find anything about SSS in the Khronos specifications, but only really found that an SSS extension is still upcoming.

The problem with SSS, separable or not, is that usually it is done by rendering the lighting to a buffer and then convolving it. In a deferred renderer that's not much of an issue - just sample from the lighting pass a few times - but in a forward renderer it needs to be its own pass, as far as I know.

I'm mentioning SSS specifically because unity's universal render pipeline doesn't come with it at all, and all third party assets are a bit clunky to use. I wrote my own SSS at some point, but it ended up just as clunky in practice....

 

btw. - these glTF specifications look quite intense on the shader instructions... how is Ultra-engine performing with these heavy PBR shaders?

[subsurface scattering]

will there be subsurface scattering in Ultra Engine, and if so, what I'd personally like to see is the option to mix in a texture, rather than just have the separable SSS preintegrated kernel ( https://users.cg.tuwien.ac.at/zsolnai/gfx/separable-subsurface-scattering-with-activision-blizzard/ )  everyone seems to be using. (Parallax-offset that texture and you got yourself some really goodlooking organic surfaces, particularly in VR, where you can actually see the depth).

[a node based shader editor for artists]

...

I can write shaders, I just don't do it often because I'm an artist by trade, and anything that doesn't require me to remember syntax is greatly speeding things up for the likes of me.

I get why gamecode gets messy quickly with node based programming, but for shaders I consider it one of the nice convenciences of modern life...

[How Ultra Engine will grow]

Hi, I'm one of those indie VR developers with at least some experience (app was commissioned, is in public beta, and now got a second round of funding- yay).

One of the main problems I'm having with performance is that the VR market right now is mobile, and clients aren't interested in buying enthusiast gaming PCs when the VR-novelty-effect can be achieved with a standalone headset like the Quest2 or the Pico Neo3 or older 3DOF HMDs which can be used with zero introduction to the device itself. And I genuinely hate developing on mobile, tiled GPUs just make it really hard to create anything that's not looking like it comes from 2004 (i.e., no normal maps, no shadows, no post-processing).

I'm interested in Ultra Engine and its promises, but I also don't know when or if there will be a PC-VR market anytime soon. Certainly for now, in particular the consumer-facing corporate stuff is all on mobile (and I'm hating it. PC-VR can be so gorgeous, and mobile-VR is a battle for every polygon).

Is Ultra-engine going to run on android anytime soon? and if so, will any of its nice features run on mobile GPUs?