Space Graphics Toolkit & Planets

Is there a way to make a 3D planet (or any object like star, etc) part of the background scenery? Similar to how the starfields can be rendered as "background"? Not sure if this is an already implemented thing that I haven't found yet.

Thanks

 

Yes, just set the 'Layer' of your planet's GameObject to something else (e.g. make a layer called background), then remove this layer from your main camera's 'Culling Mask', then make your background camera only render that one layer via the culling mask.

The 'Background' setting you can find in the starfield inspector only changes the rendering order of transparent objects. By default these transparent objects are rendered in order of reverse distance to the camera, but this behaviour isn't always desired, so I added the setting to change it. You can find the same setting in other transparent things (e.g. corona, atmosphere, accretion disc).

 

Hi Carlos,

I have a question about SGT Atmosphere component.
I have a scene with with a 1 point light and a planet with atmosphere component on it. Did a test build on Galaxy S5 and noticed hard flickering of atmosphere. If i disable the light source on atmosphere component it get rendered correctly but ofc no scattering on it. Have to mention, object rotate around source of light and also around local axe.
In editor everything looks ok. Camera is perspective with Forward rendering and observer attached.
Any suggestions? Maybe it's Mali gpu related?

Thanks

P.S. Unity 5.3.2p2 MacOS

 

Does this issue also occur on your Mac, or some other device? I'm not really sure what's up with Mali GPUs, but they always seem to have issues calculating colors that go outside of the 0..1 range, even if they get scaled back before output. Does this issue go away if you disable scattering?

 

Hi Carlos,
I don't have the possibility to test on other devices at the moment, maybe tomorrow i will have a Galaxy S2 and i will take a look but it's also a Mali gpu

You can see how it looks on device, just did a small recording.
test1 - lights disabled. Config in attached image test1_cfg

test2 - lights enabled. Config in attached image test2_cfg

I can take it as is and use it like a glow, but it won't look as i want.

Thanks

P.S. In Editor on Mac everything it's ok.

 

Interesting, that kind of flickering isn't something I've noticed before with settings like these. I have a Mali device tablet here that I can test on, so once I free up my schedule a bit I'll run some tests and see if I can replicate and hopefully fix the issue.

 

I have a question for everyone. I've been making a realistic scale solar system with another terrain generator, but still using the rest of the SGT. The clipping planes of my camera are not far enough to render the planets at the distances that I need to be able to render them at. When I increase the clipping planes, I can see the planets just fine, but it's outside my skybox. Any ideas of how I could fix it?
EDIT:
I figured it out. I added another camera to just render the skybox.

 

Hi all i have added 120 spacetime wells to a scene i but i only see 10 or so deforming spacetime does anybody know why this is or how to correct it
thanks

 

There is a shader instruction limit of 12 active wells. This is described in the Spacetime Wells scene, as well as the documentation for this component.

If you need more wells then you'll have to force the shader to compile to shader model 3 and add support for more.

 

Hi Darkcoder thanks for the quick reply, i wanted to create an interactive animated gravity wave effect. i guess the more optimal way to adding 120 wells would be to create a well that cancels the other wells, so in this way the amount of overlaping wells in spacetime would be the amount of riplles in spacetime. I see however that the shader distorts only from one direction and not from the opposite as well. I will try the method you proposed, any suggestions are greatly appreciated of course.
many thanks

 

I see, in this case it's best to modify the spacetime shader so each well has a ripple. If you have a good video of the exact kind of effect you're looking for then I can see if I can implement it.

 

Thank you for your offer to help I greatly appreciate it here is a video explaining the effect and the image from the link below that, the kind of effect I am looking for

http://www.scientificamerican.com/video/watch-how-gravitational-waves-dance-across-the-universe/

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/...physics-go-from-here-now-that-weve-found-them

http://www.astronomynotes.com/relativity/s4.htm

[EDIT]
but i belive this video is the most representative
http://video.mit.edu/watch/ligo-detects-gravitational-waves-32759/
at 1:36

 

I've finished making changes to the SgtSpacetime and SgtSpacetimeWell component, here's the result for the gravitational waves:

​

This will be available in SGT 3.1.9 which I just submitted.

 

WOW This looks amazing thanks so much cannot wait for the update!!!

 

you can put in some way on a planet of the seas / lakes? (Not as a static texture)

 

Are you requesting a feature? Oceans are something I plan to add when I get around to improving the planet generation code. For now you can just make a sphere or use an SgtTerrain, then apply some kind of ocean shader to it though.

 

Thanks! Have a way to place objects on the surface directly from the editor and to create the oceans on planets (maybe even to model the planets themselves as a land of unity) would extend the functionality!

 

Hello,

Can you please look into these warnings

Shader warning in 'Hidden/Dof/DepthOfFieldHdr': gradient-based operations must be moved out of flow control to prevent divergence. Performance may improve by using a non-gradient operation at line 92 (on d3d11)

Code (CSharp):

1. Shader warning in 'Hidden/Dof/DepthOfFieldHdr': gradient-based operations must be moved out of flow control to prevent divergence. Performance may improve by using a non-gradient operation at line 97 (on d3d11)
2.  
3. Compiling Fragment program
4. Platform defines: UNITY_ENABLE_REFLECTION_BUFFERS UNITY_PBS_USE_BRDF1 UNITY_SPECCUBE_BOX_PROJECTION UNITY_SPECCUBE_BLENDING UNITY_TEXTURE_ALPHASPLIT_ALLOWED
5.  
6.  
7. Shader warning in 'Hidden/Dof/DepthOfFieldHdr': gradient-based operations must be moved out of flow control to prevent divergence. Performance may improve by using a non-gradient operation at line 97 (on d3d11)
8.  
9. Compiling Fragment program
10. Platform defines: UNITY_ENABLE_REFLECTION_BUFFERS UNITY_PBS_USE_BRDF1 UNITY_SPECCUBE_BOX_PROJECTION UNITY_SPECCUBE_BLENDING UNITY_TEXTURE_ALPHASPLIT_ALLOWED
11.  
12.  
13. Shader warning in 'Hidden/Dof/DepthOfFieldHdr': gradient-based operations must be moved out of flow control to prevent divergence. Performance may improve by using a non-gradient operation at line 168 (on d3d11)
14.  
15. Compiling Fragment program
16. Platform defines: UNITY_ENABLE_REFLECTION_BUFFERS UNITY_PBS_USE_BRDF1 UNITY_SPECCUBE_BOX_PROJECTION UNITY_SPECCUBE_BLENDING UNITY_TEXTURE_ALPHASPLIT_ALLOWED
17.  
18.  
19. Shader warning in 'Hidden/Dof/DepthOfFieldHdr': gradient-based operations must be moved out of flow control to prevent divergence. Performance may improve by using a non-gradient operation at line 200 (on d3d11)
20.  
21. Compiling Fragment program
22. Platform defines: UNITY_ENABLE_REFLECTION_BUFFERS UNITY_PBS_USE_BRDF1 UNITY_SPECCUBE_BOX_PROJECTION UNITY_SPECCUBE_BLENDING UNITY_TEXTURE_ALPHASPLIT_ALLOWED
23.  
24.  
25. Shader warning in 'Hidden/SSAO': 's': loop control variable conflicts with a previous declaration in the outer scope; most recent declaration will be used at line 228 (on d3d11)
26.  
27. Compiling Vertex program
28. Platform defines: UNITY_ENABLE_REFLECTION_BUFFERS UNITY_PBS_USE_BRDF1 UNITY_SPECCUBE_BOX_PROJECTION UNITY_SPECCUBE_BLENDING UNITY_TEXTURE_ALPHASPLIT_ALLOWED
29.  
30.  
31. Assets/Space Graphics Toolkit/Examples/Basic Pack/Scripts/SgtGui.cs(61,59): warning CS0618: `UnityEngine.Application.loadedLevel' is obsolete: `Use SceneManager to determine what scenes have been loaded'
32.  
33.  
34. Assets/Space Graphics Toolkit/Examples/Basic Pack/Scripts/SgtGui.cs(61,37): warning CS0618: `UnityEngine.Application.LoadLevel(int)' is obsolete: `Use SceneManager.LoadScene'
35.  
36.  
37. Assets/Space Graphics Toolkit/Examples/Basic Pack/Scripts/SgtGui.cs(66,49): warning CS0618: `UnityEngine.Application.loadedLevel' is obsolete: `Use SceneManager to determine what scenes have been loaded'
38.  
39.  
40. Assets/Space Graphics Toolkit/Examples/Basic Pack/Scripts/SgtGui.cs(70,53): warning CS0618: `UnityEngine.Application.levelCount' is obsolete: `Use SceneManager.sceneCountInBuildSettings'
41.  
42.  
43. Assets/Space Graphics Toolkit/Examples/Basic Pack/Scripts/SgtGui.cs(73,37): warning CS0618: `UnityEngine.Application.LoadLevel(int)' is obsolete: `Use SceneManager.LoadScene'
44.  
45.  
46. Assets/Space Graphics Toolkit/Examples/Basic Pack/Scripts/SgtGui.cs(78,49): warning CS0618: `UnityEngine.Application.loadedLevel' is obsolete: `Use SceneManager to determine what scenes have been loaded'
47.  
48.  
49. Assets/Space Graphics Toolkit/Examples/Basic Pack/Scripts/SgtGui.cs(80,50): warning CS0618: `UnityEngine.Application.levelCount' is obsolete: `Use SceneManager.sceneCountInBuildSettings'
50.  
51.  
52. Assets/Space Graphics Toolkit/Examples/Basic Pack/Scripts/SgtGui.cs(85,37): warning CS0618: `UnityEngine.Application.LoadLevel(int)' is obsolete: `Use SceneManager.LoadScene'
53.  
54.  
55. Assets/Space Graphics Toolkit/Scripts/Library/SgtRangeAttribute.cs(33,34): warning CS0618: `UnityEditor.EditorGUIUtility.LookLikeControls()' is obsolete: `LookLikeControls and LookLikeInspector modes are deprecated. Use EditorGUIUtility.labelWidth and EditorGUIUtility.fieldWidth to control label and field widths.'
56.  
57.  
58.  

 

These error aren't related to SGT.

 

Hi, I have a small issue with the loading of planets in my scene, I feel I've simply missed a checkbox or something so hoping it's an easy fix.

I have the solar system all set up, I have also created a simple script that makes the different planets active after a short audio file has played. So for example a voice over would talk about Mercury, then when complete the planet Venus would be set active and appear and another voice over would play until all the planets are visible.

The issue I'm having is that each planet when it appears flashes hot pink/magenta for a split second before the textures appear, now I believe I've tracked it down to the Atmosphere component as it doesn't appear to happen when I turn this off (not ideal) and it appears that planets such as Jupiter etc don't have this script applied so I can't use that as a fix.

So does anyone know if I have missed something simple?

 

It sounds like the planets are being rendered before the materials for them have been set up. If this activating logic is handled in Update then you may be able to fix this by making sure the SgtAtmosphere component has a higher script execution order than the script that's enabling them.

 

Were, my bad. I didn't realize there was an update - all is well now.

Thanks

 

Hi.
I think how to use Vector3d (double) in space graphics toolkit for better precision. Some ideas?

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/double-precision-vector3.190713/

 

It depends on the component you want to implement Vector3d on.

Most features of SGT don't touch the transform.position, so you're free to use whatever coordinate system you like by simply changing the transform.position yourself.

However, modifying certain components like the SgtTerrain would require a bit more advanced C# knowledge.

 

Could some one link for me some tutorial or example with convert Vector3 to Vector3d ?

 

Thank you for the help, unfortunately it doesn't seem to have helped me in this case. I've added the "SgtAtmosphere", "SgtCoronaOuter", "SgtJovian", "SgtJovianModel", "SgtRingShadow", "SgtSphereShadow", "SgtCloudsphere", "SgtCloudsphereModel" and "SgtSimpleOrbit" to the script execution order placing them above the Default Time. I still get the pink flash as each planet loads.

My planets are set to be active inside a simple script that activates a single co-routine on a button press, each planet is set to be active within this co-routine once the previous sections voice over has completed, for example below is the code section that activates Earth.

Code (CSharp):

1.         // 07
2.         EarthObject.SetActive (true);
3.         EarthOrbitObject.SetActive (true);
4.  
5.         GetComponent<AudioSource>().clip = Earth;
6.         GetComponent<AudioSource>().Play();
7.         yield return new WaitForSeconds(GetComponent<AudioSource>().clip.length + gap07Earth);
8.         // end

This is a very simple script so I can't see this being the problem, or is it?

 

I'll check it out tomorrow and send you an updated build.

 

Since I'm too lazy to trawl nearly thirty pages to see if this has been asked, I'll ask here.
What do the planets look like on the surface? I mean from the perspective of a dude standing on one. Is the terrain still max quality or are the polys big and textures bitmapped? Can trees, bushes, buildings, animals, rocks, water, caves, or other things like that all be used?
Important for me as the game I'm planning will need this.
Also, I'm particularly excited about the separate shadows thing you did. I've been having issues with Unity's normal shadows when making planets on a 1:1 scale and still trying to get good res shadows inside the cockpit. I just want to know if the planets can cast shadows on ships as well, or if the normal Unity ones do that fine, since all my issues arise on planets over 100km away, which ain't really far.

--IronDuke

 

How the terrain looks on the surface is up to what shader you use for the planet. Right now there is no built-in component to procedurally spawn stuff on the surface, so unless you know how to code it's unlikely you can get a planet with buildings, rocks, and other things on the surface that you didn't place by hand. In the future I will expand on these procedural planet features, but expecting a 1:1 scale planet to look great up close would probably be unrealistic, as there are many limitations imposed by Unity that make such things slow. The shadow system SGT uses is only for planets and rings casting shadows on compatible shaders (e.g. other planets and rings, or other shaders you customize), so it will not have any use with your cockpit casting shadows on things. If you need these kind of massively dynamic scale shadows then you will probably have to do something like in the Blacksmith Demo by Unity.

 

Hi Darkcoder, I'm currently using SGT to render procedurally generated planets with textures generated by numberflow. Everything is working great so far but I've hit a bit of a snag when it comes to Jovians as they take a cubemap. The textures I'm generating through numberflow are spheremaps at the moment, and so far I haven't found a way to convert them to cubemaps at runtime.

Is generating the cubemaps at runtime possible? If not, is there a way for the Jovian class to take a spheremap rather than a cubemap? I seem to remember versions prior to v3 working this way...

 

Jovians no longer use sphere maps because calculating the UV for them in the fragment shader is insanely expensive, and requires a lot of shader instructions. If you look at the Cubemap API you can see you have the ability to set the pixels for each cube face, so it's just a matter of going through each cube pixel and converting to spherical mapping and sampling the spherical texture there.

However, a better solution is to generate the cube map faces to begin with. I'm not familiar with NumberFlow, but if it has the ability to generate from 3D noise then you should be able to just tweak the input coordinate to lie on the cubed sphere surface, and have it directly output the texture you want.

 

Yeah, I had a feeling the solution would be to alter the output from numberflow. My maths isn't too hot though so was hoping for a way to use what I've already got (took me a while to get this far!). Nevermind, thanks anyway.

 

*Facepalm* I just remembered that Unity can have objects outside the shadow range cast shadows inside the shadow range. Like say shadow limit is 1500 units. A planet might be 100,000 units away. While it would not cast a shadow on itself or anything outside the shadow range, it would actually cast shadows on things closer than the range - such as the ship cockpit. I observed this behavior when working on mountains and day/night cycles for another game. Mountains outside the shadow range still cast shadows on things inside the range. Also, if I really do need the close-up shadow detail increased, I can easily pull the Blacksmith Demo's shadows into my game. Thanks for that tip/reminder!
TLDR The shadows won't be a problem.

I can understand surface details like buildings and rocks having to be placed manually; there's only so much you can put in this thing. I could add those with a little bit of work, which I'm not completely adverse to. Following on from that, I also asked how the terrain looks close up, like polys and textures. I noticed a picture on the asset store page of the camera being quite close to a planet, with the LOD system increasing polys closer to the camera. Can the settings for that be cranked up to look good when walking around? And do the textures gain higher resolution as well?

--IronDuke

 

If you crank up the LOD settings then the terrain will just keep subdividing until float precision becomes an issue. If you set it up right then your planet will always have the same ratio of detail to distance in front of the camera. How this terrain actually looks on the screen depends on your planet surface shader, and the components you use to deform the vertices. For example if your height data is based on a heightmap then even with an 8k x 4K texture, you will have detail and precision limits you can easily calculate. If you use the procedural noise components then you can get around this limitation, but without modifying the components your terrain will probably look boring as it's just simplex noise that you can add together. Another consideration is calculation time, as generating each terrain patch takes time, and having tons of subdivisions can quickly bog it down.

 

Have you had any luck with this issue?

 

Gotcha, thanks!
For the shaders, I'm planning to use the Relief Terrain Pack: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/5664, assuming that they are compatible, since you're sounding like custom terrain shaders can be used.

 

Experimenting with it now.

The atmosphere effect is just drawn on top of the terrain, so you can use whatever shader you like for the terrain. If RTP relies on vertex data (e.g. color values to define material) then you'll have to modify the terrain components to output these though.

 

Hello, great work here! I'm using the wrapped starfield to create an endless star warp effect like in your demo scene. However every so often I reset the position of my objects back to zero to make it seem like I can keep going forever. When I do this, the warp effect glitches out till it catches up, is there anyway to reset its position so it looks like it keeps moving?

Thanks!

 

You will have to calculate the amount of discrepancy yourself using the size of the starfield and the amount you reset, then offset the starfield by this amount.

 

Hello,

sorry to bother you.
I've tried using the support email link on the asset store but the link seems to be broken.

I've just updated SGT to 3.1.9, I'm running Unity 5.3.3 (pro) and I'm getting 3 compile errors reporting that the class SgtEditor doesn't exist.
Does anyone knows how to fix it?

thanks in advance

 

Do you get this error when you make a new project and import only SGT into it?

 

I already have a project that uses SGT. I've just updated to 3.1.9 and the errors showed up.
With previous versions all run fine.

I'll try making a new project and tell you what happens

 

If you get no errors in a new project then that means you updated from a really old version of SGT, modified its files to break it somehow, or updated it incorrectly. If this is the case then I recommend you back up your probject, delete the SGT directory, and reinstall it.

 

Hi,

I started a project with SGT this week, and my console is constantly being flooded with this error:

"InvalidOperationException: The following game object is invoking the DontDestroyOnLoad method: SgtObjectPool<Mesh>. Notice that DontDestroyOnLoad can only be used in play mode and, as such, cannot be part of an editor script."

is this a Unity 5 thing? Am I doing something wrong?

Also a bit of a dumb question: What is the best way to just create a planet? Start with an empty or spehere object and then start adding components to it?

Thanks for the help and the great asset!

 

Interesting, I guess Unity recently added that warning. I'll fix it in the next build, thanks for pointing it out.

For planets I like to copy and paste them from the example scenes I made, because tweaking all the colour values and making the textures can take some time if I just want to test something out. If you're making them from scratch then sure you can just make a new sphere, add the SgtAtmosphere, make a new material for the surface, tweak textures and colors, etc.

 

Thanks

 

I bought the space toolkit a while ago, but will be using it in a new project - does it include the ability to fly down to a planet surface from space seamlessly?

Also, I will need a stars, nebula, a few moons and a massive planet with rings (and maybe a far away galaxy) to be in the background - but I do want it to stay still when the player moves, so that if her back is to the planet, it's not in view.

How would I do this?

Mike

 

Yes, but only for a free flight camera. If you need a spaceship to fly down then you would have to implement that yourself.

You can place the background items in a separate layer and make a second camera that only renders that, and make this camera's rotation match your main one.

 

Hey there, I just realized this comes with spaceship thrusters

Do you have a short video showing how to set it up?

 

There's no video for this yet.

The thruster component itself is fairly simple though, and the 'Simple Thruster' example scene shows you the kind of media you need. Basically, you set a thruster flame sprite, and a thruster flare sprite, set the current throttle value, and it works like magic. You can of course adjust the scale of all these things, the amount they flicker, the amount and type of Rigidbody force it adds, etc, but the inspector tells you what those all do in more detail.