As you may know, Unity 5.3, due early December, is currently scheduled to come with screen-space raytraced reflections. So earlier this year the Demo Team grabbed an early internal build with the SSRR and took it for a spin to see how it would behave. (Edited 11/11/2015 Unfortunately, the SSRR feature has been delayed, and won’t be released with Unity 5.3. Check the Unity Roadmap for the latest release schedule information).

We also wanted to see how an architectural interior would look in Unity and what level of visual quality we could get from our latest technology. Here is a video preview of the result we got:

Assets

Conveniently, there are some very useful online asset libraries for high quality architectural models and scenes, and they come with very affordable prices, so we just grabbed a scene that seemed suitable for the job and quickly set it up in Unity:

Most of the assets are used directly as-is, with some minor adjustments, mainly adding lightmap UV’s and the occasional optimisation of the high-poly meshes.

We thought it would be nice to be able to change colour and textures of some objects, so we added a simple interface that allows you to do that. For the additional textures of floors and wallpapers, we used again an online library.

Lighting

Setting up the lighting in Unity is quite simple. We have an environment HDR cubemap for the exterior, directional light for the sun, and a spot light in each lamp.

This was rather straightforward, but it also brought up the need for lightprobe cages. We made a temporary solution of our own for this scene, and at the same time elevated the need to our R&D team. The feature is now in development to go properly into Unity.

Lightprobe cages allow for transferring lighting information to large dynamic objects, or in cases where baked lightmaps cannot be used. We use them for a number of objects in our scene: blankets on the bed, rug on the floor, etc.

In the interface we also included the ability to move the lighting, so that it’s easy to observe the effects of the realtime global illumination in Unity. It makes for a nice, soft, realistic lighting in the scene, which is a good idea when an interior designer or an archviz artist wants to present their work in the best possible way.

Reflections

The reflective surfaces around the scene made for a good study of the behavior of our screen-space reflections.

These are the settings we used:

We also use a single realtime reflection probe which updates dynamically as lighting and materials change.

The Bedroom demo was shown at Unite Boston in September this year, and was available to all visitors to interact with and try for themselves.

We are now happy to ship the player publicly. You are welcome to download it for Windows (requires DX11) or OSX (requires OpenGL 4); download size: 337 MB. And here is an alternative download link. You can choose among different quality settings.

Note: We are not releasing the project for copyright reasons, as this demo is built entirely with library assets. Here is the original scene from the Evermotion Store.