Tenkoku - Dynamic Sky

None really, chances are if you are building a game that leverages TOD you'll be using DR.

 

rough price... between $45 - $65. It'll probably be closer to $65 but I still haven't completely decided.

 

I want both too! I do have a little concern about performance in lower end computers. Will there be a way to turn some of the fancy stuff off?

 

Yes, they're are already some performance options, quality/fidelity sliders for clouds, and weather systems.... this is where the majority of the performance hit comes in.

 

Any chance of a bundled option for those who are looking to purchase both?

 

Well I haven't put much thought into this as of yet. It's been brought up to me before, and I know some people on the asset store do this already. However Asset Store support for bundles leaves a lot to be desired at this point. It's also possible for me to bundle directly on my own website, but I don't have specific plans to do this quite yet. I'll definitely keep it in mind though, and will give more thoughts to it once Tenkoku and Suimono 2.0 are officially available.

 

TAKE MY MONEY! TAKE IT!!! Oh man, I'm so excited. I want it. And pls do a script so that Suimono reacts to the weather system.

 

Any news on when it is going to be available?

 

I'm really excited for this asset. I recently purchased SUIMONO Water and love it so can't wait to see what this brings

 

This is awesome, waiting for it, good job sir.

 

So guys. Someone needs to do this for the Unity engine (from min. 5:07):

You just draw a square shape and set a theme for what that street is going to be like (poor or rich for example) then hit generate and it places the houses inside the box you drew. Then if you don't like a house you just select it and cycle trough the models (by pressing the arrow keys i guess) and it just changes the house. You can also do different rooftops too. It would save us lots of time! Just posted it here because I know that if the guys at Tanuki do it, they will do it perfectly. If there's something similar to this in the store please point me to it![/MEDIA]

 

Thanks guys!

reocwolf - That building tech is pretty awesome. You can see how specific it was made for their game though, and I wonder how flexible it could be with different building "packs" etc. Certainly have hands full here right now with Suimono and Tenkoku but this is a great idea for the future There is at least 1 procedural building generator on the store, though I haven't personally looked into it to see how the quality/workflow is... https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/7292

I hope to have more Tenkoku updates here really soon, stay tuned!

 

How's the beta 2 for Suimono coming along? That's the version I've been playing with and it's really cool.

 

Hi Dustin, Suimono 2.0 is coming along great and it's about to get much cooler with the next release I just posted an update talking about some of the features in the next version here...
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/su...-beta-announcement.211653/page-8#post-1758805

 

Hi chingwa, like alot of people I am really looking forward to the release of Tenkoku, not to mention Suimono 2.0 and I hope that is going to be soon! I suppose I should sign up for beta access to Suimono as i did purchase the asset a while back.

 

Thanks S3an! I missed my end of the month deadline for Tenkoku but it shouldn't be much longer before the first version is up on the store. As for the Suimono beta, go sign up right now! http://www.tanukidigital.com/suimono/beta/

 

Is there anyway to make the rain refractive? More like the rain in batman arkham knight. Im tired of crappy looking rain in all these weather packs where they take the easy way out and make a grey transparent drop or streak.. that does nothing for reflectin the environment its in. It just looks lame and is the main reason i dont bother with any of these dynamic sky packs. because i need some REAL looking rain. The kind that gets illuminated by streetlights at night... the kind that reflects/reflacts the environment.

And if u want to make it really sick, make some dynamic puddles... and not on terrain. Thats another thing that is annoying.. everyone always showing things off on terrain..like every game made is an mmo... Lets see some uneven pavement nad bricks with rain starting, forming puddles... seeing the rain drops and ripples... and then even have some hard rain effects.. waves water spray across the street.

I feel like every rain system ive seen on unity comes from a game from 1992-96. Were well beyond that.

 

I'm waiting patiently for release so I can buy both Tenkoku and Suimono... I'm hoping this might be able to be done as a combo pack. For now I can't enter the beta for Suimono because I don't want to buy it and miss a combo discount for buying both at once. Is this foolish of me?

 

kurylo3d -yeah the environment effects in Arkham Knight look really nice. Perhaps a bit overboard for my taste, but they do contribute to a very nice environment aesthetic. I feel that what sells the rain most in these games are the overall environment effects as you mentioned... puddles, reflective surfaces, micro specular etc... the rain "drops" themselves are almost secondary.

In Unity building refraction effects into a rain drop shader would probably be a little overboard and unnecessarily degrade performance for a relatively subtle effect... though having environment refraction effects would be great! I would love to build in more environmental controls, but this will go beyond the spec for initial Tenkoku release. Of course I can add this into the wishlist though for future development.

Arcanor - a bundle package has been brought up before, and I may do this in the future... though I don't have a specific time frame. The Asset Store currently doesn't provide satisfactory tools for making combo packages, so it becomes a completely manual operation and can cause upgrade issues in the long term. I still need to think on this some more. I guess what I'm saying is if you're looking to pickup Suimono in 2014, I wouldn't wait for a bundle to come out

 

Thanks for the response chingwa. Do you have an updated estimate on the new deadline for Tenkoku's release? Within a week? A month? More?

 

Like I said in our mail correspondence back in July (sorry, never got back to you again - lots of busy days lately*), this will likely be a Day 1 buy. How customizable are the clouds? The main emphasis in the screen grabs seems to be on cumulus type clouds. Which is great, because those tend to be the weak spot in most sky systems. But how are the stratus and cirrus (if they're there)?

*) If you can't think of what mail correspondence that would be, my username here is my real name with a lot of letters left out - and I'm the shader newbie who nonetheless tends to work on the same things as you Ocean shader, sky system...

 

Amazing screenshots such a beatiful environment ambience, an environment that automatically adopts to fog if there is cloudy weather is very cool, good atmospheric lighting is just what most sky systems miss on Asset store and yours deliver, better cloud quallity and diversity aswell, and yours delivers just what i was looking for. Instant buy, hoping to see performance decent especially DX11 only would be very sad however as it would be no go for me.

Do you mind telling how is environment lighting combined with sky itself becouse i see that skybox color matches ambient/fog.

There is only maybe one problem overall. Unity 5 is about to ship with environment lighting from skybox which is very good artistic feature along with Skyshop, and since your skybox is dynamic i am guessing it will not be possible to use it, or if you have some idea please let me know.

 

Arcanor - I don't have a specific timeframe, and I'm starting to learn that I probably shouldn't give dates because they are very hard to stick to. I can tell you that version 1.0 it will be out this month... I just can't get any more specific than that yet.

Jither - There are two types of cloud systems in Tenkoku... texture-based clouds used for high altitude clouds, and the dynamic generated clouds (for cumulus-type clouds) which are generated based on a noise algorithm. The high altitude clouds have movement, but the texture doesn't actually change, whereas the dynamic generated clouds can be controlled with a number of attributes (cloud amount, overcast, speed etc.)

Janpec - Thank you! Tenkoku will definitely work in DX9. Without getting too specific, I can say that the sky sphere calculates it's color lighting based on the sun and moon positions... it then feeds these colors into the fog function which wraps them in worldPos based on the same sun and moon positions... so the fog is effected by the scene colors and creates a much more cohesive environment.

These functions do require Unity Pro, and maybe that's the reason no other sky systems have tried doing this...this is definitely a case of choosing between visual fidelity and Unity Free support. For Tenkoku, I'm choosing the visuals.

For Unity 5 there are some upcoming considerations which I'm still looking into so I can't really say for sure right now. But I assume there would be a solution for feeding specific colors from the sky into a Unity global variable for the new default shaders to use... I assume this is how the new unity5 skybox does it. But again, still needs research.

 

Thanks Justin. I know it's hard to make development commitments. I appreciate the estimate, and will regard it accordingly. Gonna save a few bucks to make the purchase ASAP.

 

Thanks for clarifing, actually even if your Sky solution doesnt work with environment lighting i will still probably use it i am willing to sacrifice env lighting for it.

 

Looking forward to videos or maybe webplayer.

Just checked your added picture of sunny to rainy weather transition, it looks fantastic. Athmospheric scattering makes non cloudy sky looking very nice and what i especially like are cloud formation and their density / size. Most weather plugins for Unity and also UDK - UE4 aswell just have either too large clouds or textured clouds which just makes whole space of landscape smaller, while yours have properly nice distribution.
I just really hope it wont be too heavy on performance. Do you have perhaps some numbers how many drawcalls / triangles / vram it takes by default?

 

is it possible to have some screen of the editor ?
i know it would not run on mobile as you said, but danm its so pretty, i would love to have a possibility to stripe down effects, for high end mobile device, what actually make it impossible to run on mobile ?

 

janpec - Thanks a lot for your feedback. I've been working quite a while on getting those clouds just right I don't currently have performance/specs to share but I'll try and get this posted for you soon.

Damien - The problem with trying to get Tenkoku up and running on mobile are twofold... the first being cloud performance. While the majority of the system runs very fast, those beautiful clouds don't come free I've been working on reducing their overhead just for desktop, I'm not sure how much could be done for mobile. the other issue with mobile is the sky depth buffer / rendering. I've never been able to get these functions to work properly on mobile (not in Suimono either). I suppose they could be removed from the shader and you could use the sky more as a traditional skybox if you REALLY wanted to, but at least for 1.0 I'm not offering direct support for mobile. Perhaps in the future.

As for a screenshot of the inspector... It's still a little messy, but I'll try and get one posted soon.

 

Hi, I'm trying to setup a scene with day and night cycle. The system I'm using is UniStorm. I'm eagerly waiting for Tenkoku!
Now the problem I am having is that the water ( Suimono ) doesn't darken as night falls. It stays the same as when the scene is fully lit. How can I make the water react to the different lighting schemes. Any help appreciated!!
Many thanks chingwa for your products!

 

I dont know about refractive rain drops being overboard. I tested refractive rain particles on my android tegra 3 tablet and it ran flawlessly. If it runs on a android... no argument can be made for it being a performance hog. In eitehr case rain has such depth adn detail.. that sort of thing is important to me. A simple additive shader looks like trash to me. Rain should come in waves and bursts... should interact with the environment. Espeacially the environments lighting... otherwise whats the point.. go back to the 1990s with that rain.

 

Something I did some time ago, I think that might interrest you :

 

Is there any news on release date and Skyshop integration ?

I am currently actively looking for a day night system that will be compatible with Skyshop IBL and work together well

This would be the single most important aspect in a buy right now, since i use Skyshop everywhere (with amazing result as well)

Also i wonder if Unity 5 will allow for dynamic IBL that will chage with the sky. This would open up new possibilities.

Did Suimono shader work with a directional light changes before Unistorm ? If the shader is self lit, you will have to change the shader when getting darker i guess or maybe you use a mobile version of Suimono water, check of there are more shader options that receieve global lighting properly.

 

Wow really impressive! Subscribed!

 

I am wondering the same. This is very important, becouse if dynamic sky cant fill that to Unity 5 environment lighting, you are just not going to be able to use it. I am thinking as long as dynamic sky system feeds sky state to skybox it should work, but becouse none of sky systems work that way i am thinking it just wont be possible.

 

I have to admit it feels strange we still dont have a global IBL + day/night solution , this is a must have and nothing concrete seems to be on the horizon.

 

malteins - Suimono SHOULD be handling the change in lighting as it does rely on scene lighting (not self-lighting). Send me a PM or an email with a little more info like what version of Unity, what version of Suimono... your lighting setup etc and I'll see if I can figure out what's going on.

Charkes - That looks awesome. It's really atmospheric, and I barely even register the actual raindrops... but I sure can tell it's raining.

Fishypants - thanks man!

janpec & nasos_333 - well it's interesting you guys are mentioning this because this is exactly what I've been working on for the past month. There has been a lot of interest with SkyShop, and I understand why... IBL is probably the best way to add dynamism to a scene, and Skyshop is probably the best way to do this in Unity...

Now I'd like to have a little discussion and I'll preface it by saying I don't have all the answers I'd like to know how you would want/need SkyShop to interface with a sky system like this.

One of the problems I've had incorporating Suimono and Tenkoku together is that it isn't just a plug-and-play operation. I first started by trying to feed color information that was calculated in Tenkoku into the Suimono water shader and then descrambling it by the light directions. This worked OK for general lighting but didn't work in extreme lighting conditions very easily, and required a lot of shader instructions on the Suimono side... making it not very portable. I ended up scrapping this whole idea.

Since the lighting system in Tenkoku is dynamic and is designed to change as needed, I decided to build/integrate a dynamic IBL capture system. It works by capturing a base scene specular cubemap at the position/resolution/parameters provided... and then can feed the cubemap out to other shaders as needed. This works very well with Suimono and the scenes I've tried it on...



In the above screenshot Tenkoku is displaying the sky and calculating it into a cubemap. Suimono is using the Specular cubemap as is for reflections, and the 8 ball objects are using the base Specular and then convolving it (as detailed below) from specular to diffuse, metallic on top and dielectric on bottom.

There are a few caveats with this system though...

Caveat #1 - Performance. While there are a number of ways in which you can limit the overhead of the dynamic cubemaps (fewer rendering layers,resolution, capture fps, etc). There is still a bit of an overhead. Because of this it is not capturing scene information in HDR cubemaps. It is also not performing intensive convolution operatons. Instead convolution (converting specular maps into diffuse maps) is simply done using mipmap-bias operations on the shader. This speeds up operations and allows for dynamic generation, but the quality is not as high as a pre- convoluted texture.

Caveat #2 - SkyShop does not support dynamic generation. This is it's biggest downfall in my opinion. For many people, maybe even most people, this won't matter to them. I've always been striving to get away from as much pre-computation and setup as possible... the more dynamic a scene can be the better for me! Because of this I don't exactly see how SkyShop can work into this system... and this is where I'd love everyone's feedback.

Because the sky in Tenkoku is dynamically changeable is there even a reason to have SkyShop integration and where/how would this best be done?

 

Fantastic picture! Water looks also very nice.

I am wondering what is exactly difference between Unity 5 environmental lighting and Skyshop. Are they both practically the same systems, or are there differences, as far as i understand (judging only from surface) they both need skybox pictures that are feed as IBL maps. Maybe Unity 5 env lighting has some better solutions for your system, instead of Skyshop in case if there are some feeding differences.

Completly agree with your point that focusing on dynamic aspect mostly is best way to go. The thing is only that Unity 5 env lighting makes a good unification of scene and is good atmospheric contributor, which something like your sky system makes sense to lean on.


"Because the sky in Tenkoku is dynamically changeable is there even a reason to have SkyShop integration and where/how would this best be done?"
-Yes it is, but as i said above as long as you can feed your changed sky image into Skyshop IBL shader or Unity 5 env lighting. If you can do that this wold mean that your dynamically changed sky would get feed into Skyshop shader and automatically adjust IBL look of all scene assets acording to sky change. Maybe with making Tenkoku creating IBL sky map every few seconds, and then feeding changed map to Skyshop shaders. I dont know i am really so far away from programmer i am just trying to shape some idea hehe.
What i am trying to say is that defenetly it would be very good ambience addition if you could make your dynamic sky feed into Unity 5 env lighting/Skyshop IBL changed maps. But since you said Skyshop doesnt support feeding maps in realtime then maybe Unity 5 env lighting is the only option.

 

I am not sure how this could be done properly

What i do right now is use IBL of Skyshop and will try to bypass the sky with the dome method of Time of Day or another similar asset. This means i will have to make a manager to change the IBL settings per time of day to match the intensity of the dome sky, though of course the IBL will not be from the sky but from any texture i have chose in the Skyshop sky and will be static or rotating without matching sun rotation.

This is a quick workaround though and i am not getting any asset yet (Time of Day for example) until i am sure will work well or there is something more integrated with Skyshop there.

On another note, i dont have a problem with a workaround solution, like pre-defining some Skyshop skies and using a lerp method to switch, but this would be best handled on Skyshop side i guess.

I can see how it is very hard to integrate Skyshop, since matching the sun in a sky that is a very well defined texture would create all kinds of issus during the sun rotation (or is simply not possible), so the only viable solution would be to bypass Skyhop sky and keep the IBL only, with maybe a method to match somewhat the dome sky with the IBL data or sky. That is the thing that could be handled by this system i guess.

 

+1.

 

Any updates?

 

I've been wondering that too.

Since Suimono still refuses to work with Unistorm in the like 4 months i've been trying to integrate the two, Tenkoku is really my only viable solution, so i'm really hoping something's available soon.

 

I sure hope this comes out soon, i've just discovered it but i can't wait to buy it..
I was making my own weather system and the quality isn't all that bad, i think what i have now is already better then most packages available, being able to make countless weathers now, and i have a sun/moon system and fading ambient and lightbrightnesses and moving clouds (multiple layers) that project shadows, but your weather system surpasses mine by far in quality from what i see..
So i stopped developing my own, and when you make it available i'll buy it rightaway..

so, you have any idea when it is available ?

 

Is this project still alive?

 

Hi Guys,

It's been a long time since I've posted any updates I know, but this project is definitely still alive I've been working on refining a lot of this stuff, and testing. There's still work to be done, but I realize projects like this are never ever really "finished". I'll be uploading to the Asset store soon, and will of course continue developing from there.

The past week I've been focusing on rendering distance issues, and mostly it's all working as intended. The screenshot below shows Tenkoku rendering with a 18km distance (this is more than twice the size of the entire Skyrim terrain, fyi). My poor terrain here is massive and still work in progress... please ignore the mono-texture and terrain seams )



Also, here is another view showing the same scene, both with Tenkoku on, and then turned off so you can get a feel for the atmospheric effects it is contributing.

 

Excellent! I am looking forward to purchasing. Any chance we could get a screenshot of tenkoku working with suimono out of the box?

 

Looking fantastic.

 

Well done, looking forward to videos.

 

Wonderful, my money is itching to get to you..

 

awesome dude

 

This looks amazing! Can't wait to see it on the Asset Store.