Cinematic DoF and fast lights

Programmer news:

• Dedicated shaders for non-shadowed surfaces, huge speedup on high quality shader profile.
• Severe renaming of shader constants due to refactoring.
• Added set of functions for access to packed files (engine.filesystem.getNumUngPackageFiles and others).
• Per-node storing of properties and materials (use this feature carefully with materials because it can affect performance).
• More verbose scripts parser: filename for #warning and #error, added __FILE__ and __LINE__ defines, more informative asserts and breakpoints.
• Fixed PSD saving code.
• More samples with lights.

Artist news:

• New LightSpot object: very fast omni light without shadows, which can group by 4 sources and render at once.
• Adjustable diffuse scale for all light sources.
• Independent LOD system for lights, there are three new parameters: light distance (after this distance light starts fading), shadow distance (after this distance shadow starts fading), fade distance.
• The same LOD model for particle systems with visible and fade distances.
• Corrected ambient color calculation for water.
• LightCube R.I.P., LightOmni now can be modulated by a cubemap, if needed.
• ObjectMeshMorph support removed.
• Fixed lack of accuracy in color dialog (HSV colorspace).
• Adjustable background color of the scene (useful for blue/green screen composing systems).
• Bokeh filter, available in DirectX10 and OpenGL with geometry shaders (it can be turned on by "render_dof 2 && render_restart" console command).

Bokeh filter is disscussed in blogs for a while, for example inVincent Scheib's one, "Beautiful Pixels". Here are examples of Bokeh filter usage in Unigine:

Ordinary DoF	Bokeh filter
Ordinary DoF	Bokeh filter

That's how multiple LightSpots can improve a look of the scene, where it's hard to use that many LightOmni:

LightSpot disabled	LightSpot enabled
LightSpot disabled	LightSpot enabled

Resulting image quality of LightSpot + lightmaps mixture is very good for night modes, especially taking into the account nice performance (the screenshot is taken from an unnounced Unigine-based game, developing by our content department):

We're also pleased to note that two more game developers have joinedour crew, Alexey "FadeToBlack" Egorov (developer) and Stanislav "brrrrr" Zagniy (3D artist), welcome aboard! They shipped a funny game "Sumotoha" recently and now are working on our internal projects.