Global Settings

Profile

This is an input field for a custom profile with your own specific set of parameters. Profiles store all HTrace SSGI settings and can be quickly swapped or replaced. They can be used as your own quality presets or for other purposes (e.g. a debugging Profile with certain Debug Modes enabled). Profiles can be created through Assets -> Create -> HTrace -> SSGI Profile.

Profiles are especially useful for the HDRP version, since it doesn’t work as part of Unity’s Volume system. For the URP version, Profiles are available only if the Volume workflow is disabled in the Renderer Feature.

Preset

Presets are pre-made sets of parameters that help you quickly tailor the asset to your performance and visual requirements without digging into what each individual parameter does or tuning everything manually. There are 4 presets: Quality, Optimized, Balanced, and Performance, ranging from the most visually accurate but performance-demanding to the most lightweight, with some visual compromises.

Unlike Profiles, Presets affect only the options that have a meaningful impact on performance or visual quality, and they do not affect features such as, for instance, Debug Mode. Presets are also a good starting point when configuring the asset - you can begin with a preset that performs within the range you can afford for a GI effect and then fine-tune the parameters manually to achieve the best balance.

Debug Mode

None: debugging is disabled.
Main Buffers: see the next section.
Direct Lighting: displays how the scene looks without GI. Non-black pixels in this mode are essentially the light sources for indirect lighting, so this debug view is useful for understanding how much direct lighting is available in the given frame to produce GI. In the URP pipeline, it has the additional purpose of showing the result of the Ambient Override toggle.
Global Illumination: displays the final denoised indirect lighting buffer produced by HTrace SSGI.
Temporal Disocclusion: displays the state of temporal accumulation in the denoising pipeline. Freshly disoccluded areas, where no temporal history is available, are marked in red. Accumulation progress is shown in grey, and fully accumulated pixels are displayed in white.

Main Buffers: displays all pipeline buffers used by HTrace SSGI at different stages.

Multi: shows a grid output of the four most crucial buffers: Depth, Diffuse, Normals, Motion Vectors (.rg) + Motion Mask (.b). All of them can also be inspected in full resolution via their respective debug modes.
Depth: shows linear depth, which defines the geometry against which tracing is performed. If an object isn’t present in this buffer, it will be ignored by rays and won’t cast GI or indirect shadows.
Diffuse: shows the diffuse (albedo) color. If an object isn’t present in this buffer or has an incorrect color, it won’t produce a proper color bleeding effect. This buffer is filled by Unity in Deferred mode or by HTrace in Forward mode.
Normal: shows the shading normals (including normal maps) of objects.
Motion Mask: highlights moving objects. If a moving object isn’t visible in this debug mode, it may receive incorrect denoising. This buffer contains valid data only in the Game view.
Motion Vectors: shows the motion vectors of the camera and moving objects (only in the Game view). Objects with missing or incorrect motion vectors may receive improper denoising.

Exclude Casting

Excludes objects from casting GI on a per-layer basis via the Rendering Layer Mask. This feature works by clearing the pixels of excluded objects from the local Depth Buffer used by HTrace (while leaving Unity's original Depth Buffer intact).

Performance impact: small

Keep in mind that excluding objects does not make other objects behind them visible to screen-space rays, since this operation only erases data from the Depth Buffer but cannot restore the information behind the excluded areas.

Exclude Receiving

Excludes objects from receiving screen-space GI on a per-layer basis via the Rendering Layer Mask. Objects excluded from receiving GI will instead rely on the Fallback method (Sky or APV).

Performance impact: small

Fallback

Defines the method used when rays fail to find a hit in screen space (for example, when they go offscreen or behind an object).

Performance impact: small

APV Parameters [URP]

When APV is active as the Fallback method, four additional parameters appear:

View Bias
Normal Bias
Sampling Noise
Intensity Multiplier

These correspond to the native parameters available in the APV Volume Override, but take priority over them when HTrace samples APV as a fallback. For example, to add View Bias to an APV bake, you must use the View Bias slider from the HTrace SSGI UI rather than the one in the APV Volume Override.

Sky Intensity

This slider is only visible when Sky is selected as the Fallback method. It controls the intensity of the Sky used for ray misses, without affecting the original intensity of the Sky in the scene.

Performance impact: none

Denoise Fallback

Defines whether the fallback data should be included in the denoiser. This option can be useful for reducing excessive noise in APV bakes, as shown in the comparison below. The intensity and quality of denoising are defined by the Spatial Filter parameters in the Denoising tab.

Performance impact: none / beneficial in some cases