[RELEASE] Nuaj', the 3D clouds simulator

Hi,

I have just released a new dynamic cloud and atmosphere renderer for Unity Pro called Nuaj' (http://www.nuaj.net/).
Nuaj' is not simply "yet another cloud renderer" but is rather a state of the art rendering solution that delivers true realtime volumetric clouds for the first time.
It makes an extensive use of 3D textures and HDR rendering to bring a visual quality and a realistic atmospheric system never quite achieved before in video games.



Nuaj' is packed with cool features, too many to list here but the main ones are :

• Real volumetric clouds you can fly through
• 2D clouds
• Volume fog (sandstorm, mist, rain, etc.)
• Full HDR rendering with 5 possible tone mapping operators
• Up to 4 simultaneous layers that can each contain an infinity of clouds : these are NOT particles like in every other techniques !
• The density of each cloud layer can be controled via a texture mapped on a plane for custom cloud shapes
• 2 sky models : a simple sky model and a complex one that shows godrays and allows flight to outer space
• Full 24 hours day cycle simulation
• Lightning bolts !
• Handles different types of satellites (Moon with phase, Sun, Starry Background, Custom)
• Nuaj' computes an accurate Sun Ambient color to light your Unity scene in accordance to actual cloud cover
• A simple orchestrator template allows you to transition, via a single slider, from clear sky to rain, to storm, to fog or to any custom weather preset you see fit
• Can be used for realistic Earth simulation or extra-terrestrial planets with funky tweaks
• Highly scalable to target any platform
• Nuaj' works as a post-process and is compatible with other post-process (Glow, DOF, etc.)
• Special support for Glow post-process

(see the complete list of features at http://www.nuaj.net/features/)


Here is a video of Nuaj' in action :

And the link to the web player if you'd like a foretaste :
http://www.nuaj.net/WebPlayer/


The documentation comes in 2 flavours :

• the User Manual (http://www.nuaj.net/user-help/) for the standard user
• the API Manual (http://www.nuaj.net/API.html) for the programmer wishing to use Nuaj' at its best.

Performance :

• Nuaj' takes 4ms on a GeForce 285GTX with a volume fog layer, a 3D clouds layer, a 2D cloud layer and the complex sky model with 32 ray-marching steps.
• Nuaj' posts about 40 draw calls per frame on average if you enable all the options, but only about 20 with limited options.
• There are many options to tweak so Nuaj' is really scalable to target any type of hardware (the webplayer demo has been tailored for medium hardware).

Restrictions :

• Shader Model 3.0
• Unity Pro only
• PC and Mac only

You can buy Nuaj' from the Asset Store here http://u3d.as/content/patapom/nuaj-/2vS.

Thanks for your consideration, I'm really eager to see what you can come up with my baby !

. Patapom . (http://www.nuaj.net/)

 

AMAZING! To bad it's for Unity pro only.

 

Beautiful...downloading the web player now.
(Unfortunately, my work machine can't handle it I'll check it out when I get home.)

Does it actually have a rain effect particle effect or something, or does it just get more cloudy?

 

Very nice but for flight sims it would be a bit strange given the clouds are of a set thickness. Real clouds will of course be of variable height within the same threshold. When I view the movie, I noticed that there's a flatness to them. For ground based games I do think its the best cloud sim I've seen.

 

Hi.

@Rush-Rage-Games : Well yes, it works as an Image Effect and this is only available in the Pro version unfortunately...

@jc_lvngstn : No, no rain particles, I only focused on the atmopsheric perception here. That's something you have to add yourself but I'm planning to write a tutorial about that.

@hippocoder : Well thanks. For the web player demo, I only used a single deck of 1 kilometer thick clouds but you can add up to 4 of these if you like, each casting shadows on the layer below. Also, if you increase the thickness (like up to 8 kilometers thick) you get much nicer results but that eats more machine time though, I tried to target middle-end hardware with that demo.

 

Realistic but no sounds when I play the Demo. Are there sounds included? (Storm and Wind synchronised)

 

Hmmm nope, sorry, visuals only... It's not much work to add a lightning sound by yourself I believe, and I didn't want to impose on the kind of sounds you would need (sound is not really my branch TBH).

Maybe for a next version of the demo I'll add some sound indeed...

 

You can grab the user documentation here :

http://www.nuaj.net/Download/Nuaj'%20-%20User%20Documentation.pdf​

This way you can have a look at the massive amount of customization and parameters available in Nuaj'.

 

looks good, can u add fps counter to demo?

 

It looks very good, i am probably gonna buy it even that i already purchased Eldweist cloud system. It is however quite expensive and a little cheaper price would be more attractive. 40 draw cals sounds very nice for whole system.

 

You got it ! Click the "Show Controls" check box then click "Show FPS".
Please note that I tried to target middle-range hardware with the demo, Nuaj' is highly scalable and you can always reach your target framerate if you know the tricks about how to use it (cf. the documentation's "Performance" section).

Well, I tried to find the appropriate price compared to other cloud systems available like Unisky (100$) and SilverLining (300$). How much would you offer for Nuaj' then ? I'm not really sure of the price yet and I'm not convinced a lower price would decide more people to buy it... It's really my first try with Unity here.

As for the 40 draw calls, well as I said earlier, Nuaj' doesn't rely on particles and uses 3D textures to achieve truly volumetric effects so the amount of draw calls is dependent on the amount of cloud layers (up to 4) you decide to use, not the amount of clouds.

 

Price always influences purchase decisions, If I could affort to buy 100 unity scripts of 10 dollar then just 10 of 100 dollar, so with this logic I could get more value when the price is lower

 

Just bought it, please check for compatibility with upcoming unity 3.5 I would love to use this in that version once released.

 

I thought Unity didn't support tex3D? Also, the price is very reasonable, and for lower performance machines, you can always RenderTexture it.

 

Overall, awesome product. In the interest of encouraging it to become even better, I'd like to point out some oddities I noticed:

Sun shafts...when I turn, they go crazy. I'd have to turn them off.
Clouds in front of the sun are too bright...blindingly so. When I even get close to looking at the sun, I just see a big blob of color. Can that be adjusted?
Maybe related, sunrises and sun sets are mostly awesome...except at certain points, they are very bright, bright orange/red blobs of color
I looked straight up and crashed the demo, not sure if that is just a fluke or what.


I'd be interested in seeing how the clouds look when they are lower than the mountains Could you put an elevation slider on the cloud layers to do that?

 

Well it does not. But I managed to come up with a small workaround that is working nicely.
Thanks for your support !

Could you define "crazy" please ?
Oh you mean, they are flickering ? Yes that can happen, did you try to increase the shadow map "Smooth Size" (3DClouds tab > Shadow map > Smooth Size) ?
I'm not satisfied with the way I compute the shadow map's bounding volume either, I think I need to review the code here.

Yes. Everything can be adjusted. Color burning can come from 2 sources :
* the tone mapping maximum luminance that clamps intensities your eye should not be able to see.
* indeed, bad settings in the forward light scattering. This is a factor you can easily change, I tried to set it to a value I thought best but I'm far from being a competent artist.

It's not really related to color burning but rather to the shadow map issue discussed above. I believe when the Sun is close to 90°, the volumetric shadow map collapses to an empty region of space, leaving all light go through... It's clearly a bug and I clearly need to fix it. I have attempted to fix it for quite some time now... I thought I did.

Oh ! Someone told me it had happened to him too but as he was the only one, I believed it was a fluke too. It has nothing to do with Nuaj' I believe, rather with the camera controller I used for the demo...

I'll do that as soon as I can, really easy to add. I'll keep you posted when it's done (I will also try to reduce the size of the webplayer demo, I still don't understand how it comes up to 60 Mb ! Nuaj' is really not that big ).

 

I'm getting errors when trying to run the demo scene, on a macbook pro 2011 quad core AMD Radeon HD 6750M.
Any ideas how I can fix this?



[EDIT] It was because I had the target platform set to iOS, when I set it to mac/pc everything is fine. sorry for the confusion, but to help others which might encounter the same error I will keep this post intact.

 

Oh I'm sorry to hear that ! You can contact me at support [at] nuaj [dot] net for direct support if you like...
I'll need a snapshot of the inspector viewing the "Nuaj/Resources/Shaders_Release/ComposeSkyAndCloudsComplex" please, there should be some errors showing here I suppose...

 

That's done.
Even better, I reduced the player size from 60Mb to only 7Mb ! *WOOT*

 

Awesome, Patapom! Can't wait to check it out

 

Well, I have to say, this looks absolutely brilliant!

I have to ask though, I want to integrate this on my project (KSP), which is based on a planetary simulation. That is, there are moving, spherical planets orbiting in a solar system, and the player can freely move in and out of the atmosphere.

I'm wondering how well Nuaj' would integrate on such a setup. I read in the docs that the whole system is based on a spherical planet model, so I'm hoping it will work well with an actual spherical planet. For multiple atmospheres on the same scene, I'm also hoping it's possible to just 'warp' the atmosphere to another planet, and change it's parameters before it becomes visible.

Also, one more question, would it be possible to create a gas giant with Nuaj'? I mean, going down into a completely dense cloud, with no solid surface below.

 

Wow, it is really amazing. I spents several minutes with the player.
______________________________

Some comments ( of the "bad")

The volumetric layers feel a bit confined within a range. It would be nice if they would have variable thickness.

The sun in the sunset is too red, all the enviroments becomes ultra red. Ate least in my city its not so obvious.

_____________________________

But despite those things, it feel awesome.

 

Hi !

Well, to be completely honest, there are some limitations to my atmospheric model. When I started developing Nuaj' I really wanted to add an "atmospheric material" that you could bind to a sphere object that would represent the atmosphere of a planet (a secondary sphere) but I really didn't have time for that.
So for the moment (version 1.0) you're stuck with the "simple" model of a single planet. Moreover, this model is quite limited in the sense it's better suited for ground view, although you can escape the atmosphere and view it from outer space.
But there are 2 restrictions to account for :
1) you won't get the amazing sunrise you would expect when the Sun is appearing from behind the planet. You can fake it with a lens flare and glow I suppose (and I just saw in your nice project that you already have a lens flare so it's just great ).
2) the clouds seen from outer space, although mapped on a sphere, will look quite repetitive (lot of tiling). This is an effect you can alleviate by painting a density map for the entire planet though (I think I'll make a tutorial for that). Although you have to keep in mind the density map is a plane and will be mapped to a hemisphere. I can talk more about that in a private message if you like.

Otherwise, on the good side, you can totally "switch" the planet you're watching to another one. The planet has its own coordinate system : center, radius, normal, tangent, bitangent you can change depending on the position of the camera... But at the moment, you can only have 1 visible planet with atmosphere at a time.

Yes, I think it's completely possible to create a gas giant yes, you could for example mix two 3D cloud layers, color them with the emissive color map to create something that looks like the brown and white Jupiter, then change the planet-wide density map by animating a render texture to make the clouds look like "evolving and twirling" (a fluid simulation would be ideal) (perhaps for version 2 ).

Thanks.

Well, for the layer confinement, this is only in the demo : I created a 1km thick layer with not many steps or ray-marching so it's okay on most hardware. But if you start playing with 8km high cloud decks, then you'll need some more ray-marching steps (and that doesn't slow down framerate that much) but it will also increase the volumetric effect 10-fold ! Check one of my latest screenshots here : http://www.nuaj.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Gallery-Ominous.png you can see a 6km high cloud and believe me : you feel really immersed in it !
Anyway, when the camera exits from the top, you totally forget the "confinement" effect. Another solution would ebe to add a 2nd layer of 3D clouds to increase the volumetric effect.
But you're right, there should be a way to somehow "paint" the height of the clouds.

For the "very red sunset", there is a parameter for this in the demo. This is the second slider below the one controlling the time of day, it's called "Sunset drama" and if you set it completely to the left then the Sunset should be quite yellowish and standard. Although I agree there is a total nuclear blast at exactly 90° as discussed earlier with jc_lvngstn. This is totally a bug with the shadow map, and I should fix it quickly ! (I thought I had already)

Cheers !

 

Merry Christmas and bump !

 

Hi,

your work is very cool and interesting.
I have a couple of question for you:
1) are you planning to update your work using new SHURIKEN particle system for near future Unity3D 3.5 release?

2) do you think is possible to reach with your package results similar to LUMION (http://lumion3d.com/)?
Here you can see an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhOvBICNE9Q

Thanks and Merry XMas!

 

This is the sort of stuff that makes unity so great!

 

Hi !

Well, there is no need for that because Nuaj' does not use particles like all other methods but rather a volume 3D texture. It will work the same in version 3.5 as in any previous version.

Well, I think it will never be as detailed and crisp as a static HDR cube map obviously but yes, it's possible to have very nice results if correctly tweaked.
You cannot yet create gigantic cumulo-nimbus clouds as the ones in the video though. But I believe you may achieve some nice results if you mix several layers of more simple 3D clouds, and hand-paint the cloud density to draw the places where you want your clouds to be...

Huuu, thanks.
Let's hope it takes momentum... I'll certainly have to reduce the price and go "promo" at some point because people are not that enthusiastic I'm afraid.

Cheers and merry X-mas again !

 

Hi Patapom

I really like your product , very great to produce interesting atmospheres .
I think that Lumion uses also i kind of volume 3D technique , you can easily
change the amount of clouds with a slider. there is a demo you can download.

would be nice to match these summer clouds

thanks

norby

 

Keep advertising it!

 

You piqued my curiosity : I downloaded the demo and played around, you can indeed change the cloud coverage with a slider and it's really really nice !
Anyway, it confirmed what I was suspecting when I watched the youtube video : no parallax. This is not 3D rendering but a smart cube-map with splatted "cloud billboards". It does the trick though, but you lack immersion and definitely can't fly through the clouds as they are always at infinity. They're ones of the best clouds I've seen though, along with the ones in Skyrim which is basically a blend of scrolling hi-res cloud maps.
They are definitely interesting but would require an entirely different method, perhaps in Nuaj' 2.0 ?

Of course !

 

Well, I certainly think you have some excellent work, I guess it depends on how often people need such in their types of games. I love your product, and hope my project gets far enough along for me to use Nuaj.

 

And I really need to start some tutorial videos to motivate people !
(but I'm too stuffed with Xmas food to start working right now )

 

I have just tested it and sadly it runs very slow. 10 frames per second. I have 6GB RAM, dual core 2ghz, 512 mb graphic card, Patapom can you please explain why performance is so slow, considering that you mentioned only 40 draw cals per system?

Anyways it looks beyond amazing, very quick solution to make excellent cloud athmosphere. Ability to adjust wind speed and cloud ammount is just making it even more perfect. I hope that some more work gets put into this system for more features. A little better sun flare -lighting would be great.

 

Well, sorry to hear that, what's your graphic card model ?

Anyway, the amount of draw calls is not the only factor that drives the rendering speed.

Obviously, 1 draw call of 10 million triangles will be slow. And also a modest amount of draw calls invoking heavy shaders, as is the case with Nuaj'.
Indeed, the main 3D clouds and complex sky model shaders in Nuaj' are very intense in term of computation. They are called in screen space because Nuaj' acts as a post-process and are thus executed for every (downscaled) screen pixel.
Each call performs ray-marching in a uniform volumetric atmosphere model where each ray-marching step calls complex functions for evaluating extinction and scattering. In the web player demo there are about 40 steps of ray-marching per pixel, which is a standard value so it looks okay on most machines.
Fortunately, Nuaj' is very customizable for various target hardware and there are many parameters to tweak to achieve correct framerate (also make sure to read the "Performance" chapter in the documentation).

If you're interested, you can read more on the subject of rendering 3D clouds on my wiki here : http://wiki.patapom.com/index.php/Clouds.

Thanks.
You can custom render the satellites if you like so you can use a very nice bright flare texture for the Sun rather than the poor disk I chose for the demo. Also, Nuaj' has special support for the Unity Glow effect that works pretty well to add a nice glow to the HDR rendering.

 

@Patapom: hey matey, sent you a pm as your websites support email doesn't exist.

 

Here's a little demo I put together



It's a mix of Nuaj, dogzerx Archer and rocks pack.

http://www.larssteenhoff.com/2011/12/31/archer-prototype/

Direct link
http://www.larssteenhoff.com/games/archer/web

 

The image looks promising but your link leads to a web player showing your runner demo...

 

Added a direct link that should work,
http://www.larssteenhoff.com/games/archer/web

 

That's just great !
Happy new year all !

 

This is starting to shape up to be a must buy for 2012 for me!

 

I bought this the other day and I am very impressed, well done.

It has some issues with the 3.5 beta of Unity though, a script compile error and then if I fudge that code to make the error go away, there are problems with it forgetting what is set as camera and sun every time I press play. I don't know if its a bug in the unity beta that will be fixed, or if there is something you could change to make it work ok on 3.5. Would you be able to take a look at this issue?

Cheers

 

Sure, I'll look into that very soon (I'm not at my place at the moment though) !
Thanks for your support.

 

Hi Patapom.

Nuaj seems very promising and I am going to buy it in the near future.

I saw on your website that you have made some reserach on realtime Global Illumination.
Have you made any performance tests on unity with it?

 

Hi !
Well, that depends what you mean on "research"... I've been playing with GI for about 12 years now so what are we talking about here ?

Anyway, Nuaj' is my only product for Unity. Otherwise, I've been playing a bit with Google O3D, the ancestor to WebGL (you can see my GI cathedral here) and I've also written a DirectX10 Renderer for my amusement, which is also called Nuaj' (more info here).
Perhaps that's what you're referring to ? I know that's confusing but both Nuaj' are different products.

Cheers.

 

Hi Patapom.

I was referring to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tA17pGfzcZw

Is it the nuaj engine?

 

Yep. It's my DirectX 10 renderer...
Moreover, this "technique" is quite lame and would be overkill for Unity. It consists in storing your scene in a 3D texture then propagating light bounces multiple times. It's actually real radiosity with form factors and everything, except it's performed in a very low resolution version of the scene and the "pseudo-realtime" term means the propagation is performed in a background thread which updates the solution every N frames, N being quite large (up to 30) depending on scene complexity and amount of light bounces.

Anyway, it's making heavy usage of geometry shaders and the SM4.0 paraphernalia so definitely not for Unity I'm afraid. And that was just a test really, not a serious attempt at realtime GI like the guys at Dice or Enlighten (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFHxluXS3KM).

 

OK I found that the Orchestrator slider for wind direction doesn't work properly. I looked into the code and figured out that its because you aren't doing Mathf Deg2Rad and Rad2Deg stuff on that slider, but you do such things when dealing with the wind direction slider directly inside cloud modules. By copying the relevant Mathf stuff from line 223 of ModuleEditorCloudVolume.cs and putting it into line 84 of OrchestratorEditor.cs, I fixed the problem.

 

I've managed to get it working with 3.5 but I don't know if any of my botches have poor consequences.

In NuajEditor.cs I commented out your alternative SetDirty stuff and uncommented the full SetDirty lines to stop the manager from losing vital settings such as camera gameobject.

In EffectComposeAtmosphere.cs I had to mangle the line about Graphics.Blit because Unity 3.5 didn't like it being given just a _Source and a null.

Things then work in the editor. But when I went to build a project I had problems with it, it was upset that some of the Shaders were marked as not save, but were set to be included in the build. So I commented out the line in the NuajMaterial helper script that is setting shader hideanddontsave flags. Then I reimported the shaders and I could then build the project for the mac using unity 3.5 beta and it seemed to work, yay

 

Amazing job ! I could retire right now !

I'm heading back home today so I'll soon be able to integrate your fixes plus some others that were reported to me and submit a new 1.01 version soon !

Cheers !

 

Just wanted to toss out a thanks to elbows and others, for making the product even better for everyone else. I'm looking forward to purchasing this in the future.