Answered Soft shadows material inside VaM

[hazmhox]

With all the evolutions and new stuffs inside VaM, and the fact that my most complicated scene takes ages to load. I decided to convert a lot of things, especially one : the whole geometry was hand-made inside VaM (believe me it was a pain). So I decided to rebuild it and make it a bit sexier inside Unity with Probuilder.

And i noticed something : shadows are rendered really differently on a VaM's cube surface with a few jpgs loaded as diff/spec/normal than on a basic surface with a material coming from Unity ( standard mat with spec setup ). You will find two shots at the end of the post. On the shots, the wall on the top is the one coming from Unity's geometry, on the bottom is the wall made from VaM's cube. So here is what I notice :

First ( left picture ) : the shadows are way darker with the exact same setup. This first picture is took with the initial setup I had on the scene. Pixel light, low quality shadow, shadow strength pretty low.

Second ( right picture ) : shadows are rendered as soft shadows on VaM's cube... not on the Unity surface. This time, still pixel light, but high quality shadows and shadow strength all the way up.

I initially thought that it could be a script to change how the shadows behave on the lights. Like for instance the NGSS plugin sold on the Asset Store. But since this is the exact same light which renders differently on two different surfaces, I would assume that it is more something related to the base material / shader of VaM.

So my question is : is there a way to find a shader like that somewhere and reproduce it in Unity to have the same behavior when importing assets into Unity. Or is it something that is caused by the fact that it is a "custom asset" loaded in VaM and we won't be able to get the same quality as what is produced on a Cube surface ?

Thank you very much in advance for the answer !

 

[meshedvr]

The difference you are seeing is because of the difference in shaders. VaM uses a custom subsurface shader based on highly modified and optimized Marmoset shader, and actually adds NGSS on top for soft shadows. If you import an asset from Unity on CustomUnityAsset, it is using the standard shader that is lacking these features: Global Illumination, Subsurface, Soft Shadows.

There is a free plugin out there that can solve this for you by converting the standard unity material to VaM's standard shader material:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/script-35042892

I'm hoping NoStage3 can get this added to the Hub soon. edit: NoStage3 now has it added!

https://hub.virtamate.com/resources/unityassetvamifier.478/

 

[hazmhox]

Allright. Perfect

Is there any licence / intellectual properties issues to think (in the future) about a base bundle of resources for Unity that could help more advanced creators to produce final assets, materials, textures etc... that are exactly like what you did for VaM's build ? ( shaders, scripts and stuffs like that )

 

[meshedvr]

I can't hand out 1.X shaders for use in Unity due to licensing (even though I nearly rewrote the entire shader core to optimize it).

But something to look forward to in 2.X. I'm planning to allow users to be able to make custom atoms, skins, etc. all within Unity for use in VaM for much faster loading and consistent rendering. I'm planning to provide some free Unity tools to assist with this. In fact, it will probably be a similar asset pipeline that we will be using internally. 2.X shaders will all be written in-house and based on HDRP and will be shared so you can use them inside Unity and get the same results in VaM.

 

[hazmhox]

Sweet, so again like in the other question, can't wait for 2.x !
Thank you for the clear and fast answers.

 

[MacGruber]

I'm hoping NoStage3 can get this added to the Hub soon.

Here you go: https://hub.virtamate.com/resources/unityassetvamifier.478/