Photorealistic Environment With Shiny SSRR & Radiant Global Illumination (Unity – URP)

Producing photorealistic environments in real-time just a few years ago seemed like a huge challenge; an idea that could only be unlocked in the minds of the best graphics programmers and powerful enterprise-grade hardware. Today, everything has changed! You, reading this article, can create astonishing great environments and finally bring to life the world you’ve been building in your mind! In addition, you don’t need a big collection of tools to do so; you need THE RIGHT ONES.

Unity has been the main choice for many users who want to join the game development guild. With the easy-to-understand UI, limitless capabilities and a huge community to get aid from for the past years, the developers at Unity have always been working hard to keep pace with the latest users’ requirements. One of these requirements involved getting a more realistic result for the projects created with this software, whether a game or an ArchViz render. With Unity 2018, a new graphics pipeline was introduced, HDRP, and it was the beginning of a new era of achieving photorealistic results with Unity Software. In parallel, a different rendering pipeline, dubbed URP or Universal Rendering Pipeline, was designed to provide global platform support (including hardware not supporting compute shaders) for general purpose rendering. At Kronnect, we strive to boost the capabilities of URP with plugins for HQ rendering. Actually, what you’re about to see was created with the URP graphics pipeline!

To get these words to practice, we’ve made a beautiful combination of a photorealistic interior environment created by ArchViz Pro and our Ultimate assets to get the final touch of realism on any scene in real-time; Shiny SSRR 2 and Radiant Global Illumination. We challenged ourselves to take the most out of these assets and prove their potential by making an already great-looking scene become even more realistic, not only visually but also by calculating real-time lighting and reflection behavior.

Drag the slider from left to right to see the result with and without Shiny SSRR & Radiant Global Illumination:

As you can see, Shiny SSRR will calculate the reflective surfaces on the scene, creating a beautiful reflection effect and optimized at the same time since it renders only on the screen space. Radiant Global Illumination takes the lighting to a higher level of detail and, most importantly, behavior. Notice how the color of the objects will merge with the close objects, and it also respects ambient occlusion in the corners and areas of the scene occluded by other objects, thanks to the “Near Field Obscurance” feature.