Youtube Tutorial

NEW 5 Minute Quick Start Video!

NOTE: This guide assumes you have purchased the VRSL GI system from Gumroad and have verified your license. This guide also assumes you know how VRSL's DMX system works and have set up DMX enabled rigs and worlds in VRChat before. If not, then please look at the VR Stage Lighting Wiki"s Getting Started With DMX page.

Requirements:

To run VRSL GI DMX you'll need the following packages.

• VR Stage Lighting 2.5.5+
• VRSL GI ShaderPack 1.2.0+
• VRSL GI (DMX Ver.)

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Intro

Hello, and thank you for purchasing VRSL GI! This page will guide you on how to set up a fresh VRSL GI project and get it up and running with DMX as quickly as possible. If you want more in-depth details on other features of VRSL GI, please look at the other pages under the DMX section. There will also be a video tutorial covering most of what is covered here.

The Example Scenes

If you want to just start playing with it, there are example scenes for both Horizontal and Vertical modes in Packages\com.acchosen.vrsl-dmx-gi\Runtime. Open them, open your grid node and DMX software of choice and hit start. All the fixture are pre-patched with different examples of different use cases of VRSL GI!

Getting Started (Setting Up the Scene):

Once you have all the packages imported and properly set up, you'll be ready to begin setting up a basic scene. This guide will show you how to get a dark scene with a box, a single mover light with GI, and a projector for avatars.

First, we'll go ahead and set up a basic scene with an inverted cube, a dark starry sky box, and VRSL Setup with a TekOSC Horizontal Grid Reader. Both the inverted cube mesh and the starry sky box can be found the base VR Stage Lighting package.

VRSL GI can light entire scenes on its own, so we're starting with a very dark scene so we can see the effect a lot more clearly.

The VRSL GI Manager

The first prefab we'll need to import is the VRSL GI Manager. It can be found here:

Drag the Horizontal variant into your scene.

This is where you can see where your GI-enabled fixtures are and where their information is being fed into.

Make sure to place the manager in the middle of where you want the lights to be rendered. From there, you'll need to increase the Volume Size attribute so that it covers the area you want the lights to render in. Any pixels outside of this volume will not have VRSL GI working in that area.

Once you've got the panel imported into your scene, you're going to want to pull in the avatar projector.

The Avatar Projector

The avatar projector makes the GI system work on avatars without needing them to use a special shader. For now, we'll keep the settings default. You can find it here.

One thing you may notice as that the size of the projector is very small and it might also be positioned incorrectly like so:

You'll want to reposition the projector so that it's more in the center of the room like this:

And then scale it up by playing with the Near Clip Plane, Far Clip Plane, and Orthographic Size respectively to get it surround the entire cube so that it can properly affect all avatars in the area.

The Inverted Cube Material

Let's go ahead and get the material set up for the environment. Since our environment is just an inverted cube. We just need to make a new material and set it to the VRSL GI Standard Shader, then set the cube to use that material.

In the material, let's go ahead and disable the specular module on the material. Our cube doesn't necessarily need to be shiny and it'll be easier for us to tell if the lighting is working with just diffuse lighting.

Optional: Setting Up Post Processing:

This scene is kind of bland and what can really make it nice is to add some post-processing. I find that the ACES color grading and a little bit of bloom make the lights really pop. In the VR Stage Lighting Package, you can find some basic post-processing prefabs here:

Add these two prefabs to your scene.

Then add a Post-Processing script to your Main Camera object and set its Layer to the PostProcessing Layer.

You should now have some basic post-processing set up for your scene.

Setting Up The Fixtures

Finally, we'll need to set up the fixtures. For the sake of speed, we're going to use a premade prefab that has the VRSL_GI_Setup script on a 13CH Mover Fixture.

You can find that prefab along with many others for other fixture types here:

Go ahead and drag that highlighted prefab in. Once you do that, you should have just about all the prefabs you need in your scene.

Hooking Up The Fixture To The GI Manager

Before we start testing we need to hook the fixture we spawned to the GI Manager. We can do that by hitting this button here on the GI Manager script:

This button, as its name implies, retrieves all the GI lights in the scene and adds them to its array like so:

It also auto-populates itself into the GI Manager slot on each GI light it finds.

With both references populated, we are ready to start testing!

Testing

When you hit play, the scene will be pitch black. This is because the light is turned off! Use your DMX software and Grid node to give the fixture some light, and the GI should start working automatically like so!

This mover prefab has the GI point set up to follow the fixture's pan and tilt functions, so moving the light around should cause the GI point to follow along.

Conclusion

You are more or less ready to go. Add some more fixtures from that prefab folder, patch them, and then hit the Get All Lights button on the GI manager to add them to the list. You can keep adding up to 32 lights by default. This limit can be raised, but it will require a restart of your editor. Information on that and more will be available in the other pages!

If you set up a stream panel to send the VRSL data in (like with the USharp Video Player Prefab), you can test out the GI in the world and see your avatar light up!