SilverLining for Unity: 3D volumetric clouds, sim-quality procedural skies [DEPRECATED]

What's the easiest way to use SilverLining with a world scaler?

To work around a bunch of other Unity bugs, I'm scaling my world down by a factor of 100. So while the environment is still scaled as one unit per meter, the world coordinate system isn't and my cloud system ends up being huge. Looking at the SL scripts, when you instantiate the cloud prefabs, you set the parent after setting position and scale. By assigning the parent first, I can keep all the settings in 1:1 scale...but the particle systems still don't scale correctly, of course.

I notice that there's a public SilverLining.unitScale, but it's not clear how that should be used. When I set that to 0.01f, however, the project hangs. How do you recommend this be used, Frank?

 

Hi,

You're on the right track with SilverLining.unitScale. The missing piece is that you also need to scale down the cloud layer dimensions and positions. So if you set unitScale to 0.01, also multiply your cloud dimensions by 0.01 as well as their altitudes. Otherwise, you'll end up trying to fill up a huge area with tiny cloud particles - and run out of memory and crash.

Hope this helps.

 

Wait, what? Deprecated? Why?

I've got it heavily integrated in a project that I need to upgrade to Unity5 soon. Will it work?

 

I can confirm it's working in my 5.3.0f4 the same it was on 4, for everything I'm using it for. It also works nicely for WebGL (although I want to compare its performance to others).

However I may have to switch to something that's in active development like TENKOKU Dynamic Sky, or Time of Day. Really sad this asset is gone from the Unity market, but understand the reasons, which he talks about on his blog.

 

Yup, it works fine in Unity 5. And since it has no native components, it will most likely continue to work fine for some time to come.

The announcement is at http://sundog-soft.com/sds/2015/11/were-pulling-our-packages-from-the-unity-asset-store/

 

Wow, that is very sad. I know that asset developers have issues with the asset store, but I didn't realize it was that bad. Can't blame you for pulling it.

But very glad it works fine in 5 and webgl.

 

I just imported SilverLining into a project in Unity 5.3 and get a bunch of compiler errors...

 

I think those errors are really more like warnings, and are safe to ignore for now. Can you run the scene regardless?

 

no, can't run it until compiler errors are fixed

 

I just updated to Unity 5.3.1f1 here, and imported the latest SilverLining into a clean project. I saw a few errors flash up briefly during the import process, but they disappeared before I could even read them and were replaced by just a few warnings about using a few deprecated particle system fields. I was able to run the demo scene without a problem.

While importing, you should have been prompted to convert SilverLining to the new Unity 5 API - perhaps you didn't allow that? I could definitely see that resulting in these errors.

If that's not it, make sure you're using the newest SilverLining - the last revision came out in June 2015.

 

When I switched to 5.3 I did so by starting with a blank project and re-importing everything to eliminate years of cruft. SL worked for me right away.

 

Oh ... so just to be sure I get this right: You have pretty much completely dropped Unity support, not just the Asset Store?

We're currently using PlayWay Water, which is coming along quite nicely, but for some of our levels we also need a really good cloud system (this is in a VR project that also is targeted at PlayStation 4). Having both, clouds and Ocean, from the same company would probably have benefits, so that's what got me interested. Also, the shorelines looked really good (those will eventually also come to PlayWay Water but no specific release date is announced, yet).

When you have dropped Unity support, I guess Sundog SilverLining vs. Simul TrueSky probably is a little outdated?

Don't get me wrong - I can totally see why you'd pull out of the Unity Asset Store (I have a few packages on there as well, and really cost me a lot more than it brought in; the best thing really were nice customers and contacts that emerged from that, even though I also had one or two not so pleasant people ;-) ).