UniSky - real-time procedural sky tool - now available on the Asset Store

@wicked208 - Check if the materials in the UniSky folder still have the correct shaders applied to them. I think it's possible that the project upgrade might have broken some of the file associations.

If you're unsure of what goes where, you could also try deleting the UniSky folder and reloading it from the Asset Store interface. (Might want to note down the settings you're using first though).

 

I'm having trouble implementing it to work within my own scene. I followed the Read Me.txt file included within the package; placing the UniSky prefab within my scene and assigning the camera. But when I run the scene the the cloud layer (dome/mesh) is way to high, thus not showing the clouds. I can move the prefab down, but if I do its significant enough to not be able to see the transform arrows when trying to select or move it again. I tried dragging the prefab close to my First Person Controller, as well as dragging-and-dropping it to my Hierarchy window. Both have the same effect.

From the attached image it seems that the prefab's center is extremely lower that the other components of the prefab. Maybe that has something to do with it? What am I missing?

 

Nice job but as a broke ass ill stick to the free version made by Pixel Studio. Btw Does your Skybox also requires shader 3.0? I really needed a procedural skybox that needed at least shader 1.0 for low end users.

Thx :>

 

@Larsa334 - the weather upgrade uses a windzone.

@adamzeliasz - Are you dragging UniSky directly into your scene view? You need to drag in into the hierarchy, because if dropped into the scene view it will be displaced. UniSky is centered around (0,0,0) so as long as your scene isn't positioned incredibly far away from that you should be good. If you're still having issues with this, PM me and we'll work it out.

@Vinicius Sanctus - Yes, the instruction count on the clouds is high enough that it requires SM 3.0.

 

i try already but doens work, i try then in windows xp, and have no errors bad the sky looks so bad, screen:
http://s2.subirimagenes.com/otros/previo/thump_5958111unisky-problem.jpg

 

increase your camera far clip plane till you see the moon and clouds

 

its in 100 000 i try with 200 000 and looks like the screenshot, thanks anyway

 

@wicked208 - It looks to me like it might have been imported wrong. Try importing the .unitypackage again and dragging the UniSky prefab into the hierarchy, making sure not to drag it into the scene view. Also, try just opening the example scene and if that doesn't work send a screenshot that is bigger so I can take a look at everything.

 

thanks very much, its work now, i fix it, draggin in the hiearchy instead in the 3d windows

 

Hi,

I was just wondering... has anyone tried using uniSky on planetary simulations?

How well would it work if the game allows climbing out of the atmosphere and looking down at the sky?

I see that UniSky implements Sam O'Neill's atmospheric scattering from GPU Gems 2, and the original shader does work for viewing the atmosphere from space... sadly, my knowledge of shader programming is next to nil, and my feeble attempts to implement it shouldn't even be mentioned...

I know there are a few atmospheric scattering projects for Unity that do this already, but they're all from 3 years back, and don't work too well on Unity 3... UniSky, on the other hand, seems quite active, and being a commercial project, presumably has much better support (or at least attention )

So, it this at all feasible?

Cheers

 

are there anyone using unisky without any problems under Unity3d 3.2? Coz I have got some may issues like textures missing and shader errors. Just wanna confirm it's my unity's problem or not. is that possible that my graphic card is not good enough?

 

Does it really work with the free unity license?! <3

 

@CAESARGAO

I am using it with Unity 3.2 pro with no problems at all, I am not sure about Indie.

 

@HarvesteR - No, this system doesn't include the shader to view the planet from the outside. I did this because the sky dome is automatically centered on the camera, so that you don't ever actually approach the edge of the skydome - which also means you can't leave the skydome.

@caesargao - You do need an SM 3.0 capable card. If you are getting shader errors mentioning that they aren't supported, then that may be the case. Send me an e-mail with a screenshot or two of the issues you are getting and I will help you out (chris AT sixtimesnothing DOT com).

@RoiDanielsen - As of version 1.1 the system is functional in Indie, but lacks 3d cloud illumination. However, come version 1.2, the weather effects rely on Render Textures so the weather effects will be Pro only. Note that these effects are optional and you can turn them off with a single checkbox. Honestly, for this reason and the reason that many of the future planned features will likely be Pro only, I'm not sure I would purchase this with an Indie license - unless you like the clouds alone that much

 

Thank you for your response. That gonna save me a lot of time to look around

 

Thanks Chris! yes i do got issues and i will email you for sure.

 

I see. Yeah, I saw some other guy with a 3D cloud pack, dont know if it is released yet Might see what that costs and compare. But I will be buying the Unity Pro License when summer hits. Is the price for UniSky going to increase when new features are added?

 

@RoiDanielsen - Nope, the price for UniSky will never be increased.

 

@Chris seems like I'm buying this then! How is the support? Do you help people who run into problems? And how long do you plan to work on UniSky, will there ever be a "finished" release? Or will you just keep adding and polishing features as you go?

 

@RoiDanielsen Chris offers some of the best support for anything on the asset store. I think when I first bought it I emailed him something like 16 or 17 times just to get it up and running as well as request help setting up my own custom features.

Truly a great buy!

 

@RoiDanielsen - I do offer support to the fullest that I can. The goal for our team's tools is first and foremost to contribute to indie game development. We only put a price tag on UniSky because we are raising money for our own indie game. For this reason, I enjoy answering as many questions as you have, to the fullest of my ability and as quickly as I can.

I will continue to develop UniSky until I feel it has fully fulfilled its description as a complete procedural sky, weather, and atmospherics tool. When I feel I have completed this, and it is (mostly) bug free, I will probably slow development.

@TheLlama - Thanks! I really do appreciate that.

 

Thanks guys. I'll buy it as soon as I get my next paycheck! I'm glad to hear that you support us in the way that you do, keep doing that! I'll remember to tell people of your tool as well!

 

@Chris: It appears that the scattering radius has no effect. It gets set to a constant in Awake() and then after that never gets recalculated or resent to the shader.

The fix is simple enough, I added some code to the AtmosphereSettings update and it works now. Just wanted to bring it to your attention.

BTW the problem exists in both JS and C# versions.

Besides that, and being slightly horrified at the sky and cloud meshes , it's working pretty well for me

 

Ah yes, this was pointed out just recently. Thanks for the heads up

I'm about to send through another update in the next few days that will fix this - also, funny you mention the meshes, I recently decimated them and greatly reduced the poly count without losing any visual quality. That will be included as well as a few other optimizations to speed it up.

I mentioned this in the other thread, but for those of you looking at a roadmap of the the future updates - A mobile version is being released soon, followed by version 1.3 that includes snow weather effects.

 

Great stuff, Chris

Could I make a feature request (or bug fix, depending on what it is )

It seems that if I rotate the UniSky gameobject that the Rayleigh effects rotate but the sun and moon placement don't (they seem to always rotate around the world X-Axis).

A method to set the sun and moon axes would also be great, so we can simulate different world locations, times of year, etc.

Thanks

 

I will be buying this in a heartbeat the minute the snow effects are added and released, though it already looks incredible as it is. Might I suggest when making the snow effects that you look at Unity 3's Snow particle prefabs and see how they did it? Those particular particles look incredibly well done and may serve as guidance when implementing the snow.

Great work, Chris!

 

@Wahooney - A better way of rotating the sky is to just rotate the sun, instead of the gameobject. The sky and moon define themselves relative to the sun, so simply rotating that will rotate everything else. To do this, inside of the "DirectionalSun.js/cs" at the very end of the update function add this (there may even be a line resembling this that is commented out):

transform.eulerAngles += new Vector3(0,100,0);

Then just change these numbers however you want to rotate it to your specific needs. The moon and sky colors will automatically follow this rotation.

@Sigma - Thanks for the suggestion I'll definitely take a look. Our look will be similar to how we did the rain - a small number of particles on screen, with the effect of density with distance using an offscreen RT for performance.

 

Awesome, snow effects! I this just gets better and better!

That will complete the weather effects I need for my current project

Amazing product.

 

Thanks, Chris, that fixed one half of my problem The other half is that I need the position of the sun for sunshafts to be over the sun "spot". (I guess I should have mentioned that too )

Any ideas on that?

 

Ah, yea I forgot that that would mess up the position calculation. In the SetPosition2() function, however many degrees you added to the Y rotation, add that same number to sunDirection.y before the sun's position is calculated - that should fix it.

 

That works 100%, thanks

I had to comment the transform.eulerAngles += new Vector3(0,100,0); out again, but it works without it now.

I don't know how I'll be able to merge future versions of UniSky now, I've made many changes But dang, has it saved me time!

 

Hey everyone! I'm having an issue with unisky. Its working great but the moon is just a grey blob! i went on the shader and it was sized to 7000 so i sized it down to 0 and i could see the moon in the shader tab but wen i saved then pressed play it went back to 7000 again :/ can someone please help?

 

@rj - that sound to me like either the moon texture isn't set, or somehow fog in your scene is effecting the moon shader (which it shouldn't because fog is disabled in the moon shader). Does this occur in the example project?

P.S. - the best way to change the moon size is in the main UniSky GUI under the "moon" tab, rather than doing it directly on the moon Game Object.

 

2chris: Would be possible to somehow increase quality of clouds? I mean make color gradient more fluent or something like that.

 

@Demostenes - I'm not really sure what you mean by the color gradient of the clouds, can you elaborate? I'm always thinking of ways to make the clouds look better, and this is exactly the kind of thing I will be working on after the weather updates are complete.

 

Major props to Chris for UniSky and his support. He's going out of his way to make sure customers (i.e. me) get their money's worth. Kudos!

 

Still interested in buying this, what's the status on the weather updates?

 

Definitely great system and the current version is a joy, even if its just to "relax" as in my case and see what strange things you can create when toying long enough with it

 

@Sigma - Still putting the finishing touches on UniSky Mobile. Turns out it's a bit harder than I thought to get good performance, but I think I'll be finished in the next few days. After that comes v.1.3 with the snow update - I'll be working hard to get this out ASAP

@dreamora - Thanks! I really appreciate it.

 

@Chris and team at 6x0 - UniSky is truly awesome. I'm a huge fan.

Having used UniSky for awhile now I do have some requests that perhaps you'll consider:
1) Setup a means of creating a baseline fog that Unisky will default to when not explicitly managing the fog for weather or other purposes. Right now when day rolls around there's usually no fog at all, which may or may not be desirable for the specific scene.

2) Be able to configure difference ambient sound for different times of day. 3 or 4 pre-defined points in time (sunrise, day, night?) would be nice or better yet, being able to dynamically define specific times and assigning a sound to them would be even better. For example, having a calm wind during the day and wind with crickets chirping at night.

3) Being able to setup a list of pre-defined one-shot sounds to play for different conditions. For example different wind gusts or other ambient sounds to break up the looping tracks.

Again, UniSky is an incredible package. Thanks for all your continued hard work!

 

@Zeruel - Thanks for the kind words! Those are good suggestions. UniSky's next version will likely be released some time this week. I've improved performance and added a mobile version. I can definitely add your first suggestion before the update. The next BIG update (1.3) adds another type of weather, and this would be a good time to work on the sounds (your 2nd and 3rd suggestions) because I agree they can get repetitive.

Thanks for the feedback

 

I need to change the path of the sun during daytime in Unisky (to match a realworld location) -- is there a way to do that?

 

@gecko - sure, check out "DirectionalSun.cs/js" - look for the parameters of latitude, longitude, and date

 

Are those parameters exposed in the API or the GUI?
I don't remember having seen those parameters (although they would be very useful).

 

can we still use the old controllers within the editor also can't find the old detailed read me file ( the old one )

 

Chris, off topic, but you should write a triplanar texturing shader that works with unity terrain (you seem pretty keen on writing terrain related extensions)

 

Chris, thanks, that's very helpful....but what I really need to do is rotate the cardinal directions. Currently the sun is rising in the west in my game world, and I need it to rise in the east. Not sure how to change that with lat/long/date.

 

@davidgutierrezpalma - These are not exposed in the GUI, but are easily available in "DirectionalSun.js/cs"

@mrbdrm - v1.2.4 didn't have the full GUI, but we reimplemented it in v.1.2.5, so if you aren't running the latest version you might not see the full GUI. Also, the readme has adopted the new setup instructions, which are shorter and easier than previous versions. For a full explanation, you should check out the video tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG7Bmv2pjlM&feature=channel_video_title

@Legend411 - I have received requests for that, but haven't had the time to get to it. Most of what we work on and release is stuff we've written for our game that we decide to go public with. Tri-planar texturing is too expensive and not very useful for our game, so I'd have to find some freetime to work on something like that.

@gecko - Ah okay, there is a much easier way if you just want to rotate it to rise in a different location. "In DirectionSun.js/cs", if you look at the code inside the Update() function, there is a line commented out under "Rise in the east". That line rotates the sun about the world Y-axis, so you can use any value in there to rotate it to your needs:

transform.eulerAngles += new Vector3(0,100,0);

Just change 100 to whatever you need.

 

Damn... there has to be a performance-effective solution to solving the stretching on steep terrain, doesn't there? I wonder how Crysis does it?

 

The two ways I've known of solving that is by using meshes on steep parts of terrain (rocky cliffs, etc.) and tri-planar texturing.

Tri-planar texturing can be okay performance wise, but it triples your texture lookups - if you have bumpmaps, displacement maps, texture maps, and detail maps, each one of these lookups requires 3x the amount, so they can add up quickly