Time of Day - Dynamic Sky Dome

I'm also having issues with the horizon glow overdrawing things, which is exacerbated by the TOD_Scattering script. Here's what happens at even very, very low levels of scattering.

Before:



After:

 

More docs on TOD_Scattering will come - it's primarily something I wrote for our own game and added it to 3.0.1 as sort of a sneak peak for you guys. What it essentially does it add aerial perspective to all objects in your scene, the color of which is calculated using the same equation the sky scattering uses. It's not meant to be used as thick fog 10 meters in front of the camera together with a clear sky, since that will just look like objects are part of the sky. It looks great for distant landscapes since it fades them out nicely as they get further away from the camera. If used together with a high TOD_Sky.Atmosphere.Fogginess value you can also achieve something that looks a lot like common fog.

Setting TOD_Sky.Fog.Mode to "Color" or "Directional" will make your scene / object fog fit the sky (as good as a constant global color can). Increasing Atmosphere.Fogginess will then automatically adjust your fog color as well, even without using TOD_Scattering.

You can set TOD_Sky.Clouds.Density to 0 for them to disappear when running very thick fog settings.

You should either use tonemapping (it's an image effect from the Unity Standard Assets) or, if that's not possible for you, reduce TOD_Sky.Atmosphere.Brightness for less extreme horizon glow. The TOD_Scattering image effect enforces HDR on your camera, if you're not using TOD_Scattering you can set your camera to LDR and TOD will apply basic tonemapping on its own. Note that this is merely a workaround for the lack of tonemapping in the free versions of Unity 4 and below, on Unity 5 or Unity 4 Pro you should absolutely use HDR and tonemapping if your target platform allows it.

So, to summarize:

• Using TOD_Scattering with a high TOD_Sky.Atmosphere.Fogginess value and a low TOD_Sky.Clouds.Density value allows for something that looks a lot like common fog
• Using TOD_Scattering with "clear sky" atmosphere settings (i.e. low TOD_Sky.Atmosphere.Fogginess) should always be combined with a low TOD_Scattering density value to give distant objects aerial perspective
• You can set TOD_Sky.Fog.Mode to "Color" or "Directional" and use a high TOD_Sky.Atmosphere.Fogginess value to get your scene fog to fit the sky as a cheaper alternative for TOD_Scattering

I hope this helps!

 

Is there any way to get TOD to replace the skybox clear flag on reflection probes? And taking that a step further, has anyone looked into updating the probe based on TOD instead of every frame or 9 or 14 or whatever? Thanks.

 

How can I disable the advancement of time without disabling the TOD_Time component. I like 'Use device time' at startup but I don't want time to advance automatically. Thanks.

 

I noticed that the scattering effect doesn't seem to play nice with the standard material shader when it's set to 'Transparent' rendering mode. I have some glass panels in the scene and it's like the scattering doesn't apply to them, so they stick out in the distance as darker shapes when everything else around is a nice scattered / foggy white. Not a big problem, but I thought I'd let you know in case it's an easy fix.

 

Turn off time advancement, set the time at the start of your scene/re-awakening, etc.

 

You have to set TOD_Sky.Reflection.Mode to "Cubemap" to set the scene skybox to the TOD skybox. I just realized that this is a bit counter-intuitive, so I'll make sure to always set the scene skybox in a future update.

You'll have to write that on your own, but it should be pretty straight forward using the TOD_Time.OnMinute/OnHour events.

While what OnePxl said works, it's correct that this should be supported out of the box. I'll make sure to add a checkbox for time progression to the TOD_Time script.

No per-pixel fog image effect plays nice with objects that don't write to depth since Unity doesn't support overriding the fog function for transparent objects in a centralized place. There are a couple of solutions for this however - cull transparent objects in the distance, have them write to depth where possible or manually patch in the fog function into their shader. Culling is usually the best approach for particle effects and small objects, for everything else things get a bit more tricky.

 

So I comment out a portion of TOD_Time.cs? Can you provide me the line numbers to save me some time. Thank you!

 

No I think what OnePxl meant was to disable TOD_Time and manually set the current ingame date and time to the real-life date and time in your own script. Like this:

Code (CSharp):

1. TOD_Sky.Instance.Cycle.DateTime  = DateTime.Now;

 

We were working to make our asset Horizon[ON] compatible with the ToD atmospheric scattering effect and i think we got everything working. Atmospheric scattering really shines with a large scale environment. Wanted to share the first results here.
ToD + Horizon[ON] = pure awesomeness

 

With TOD reflection set to Skybox, it locks the scene Reflection Intensity to 1. Is there a way manually set that.

 

Very nice, we should really get together for a demo scene!

Yes, you can adjust this using the Night.ReflectionMultiplier / Day.ReflectionMultiplier inspector variables.

 

yeah TOD and Horizon[ON] are symbiotic i'll write you a PM later today with some thoughts on this.

 

hi,

what is the name of the function of different types of clouds & weather in TOD_weather script?

i plan to call the functions to make a real time weather changing effects

 

I can see in the changelog that the tod_camera script changed, when i apply this on one of my camera's i can't configure the sky anymore. What do i need to chanage to get this to work ?

 

By setting the TOD reflection mode to Cubemap and having it affect the Reflection Probes, it seems to override the mesh renderers ability to control how it handles Reflection Probes. For example, I have a wall in a pretty dark room that receives the full outdoor reflection even with the renderer set to Cubemap only. I would expect it to only be influenced by what the reflection probe can see. This appears to only be happening at runtime. Please advise, thanks.

 

TOD_Weather adjusts the sky parameters in its Update() method according to what the public variables "Clouds" and "Weather" have been set to. So if you set TOD_Sky.Instance.Components.Weather.Clouds to TOD_CloudType.Overcast at runtime then the sky will automatically fade to that cloud type. The same is true for the "Weather" variable and TOD_WeatherType.

The only thing the TOD_Camera change affects is that it automatically switches the camera clear flags to something other than "Skybox" on a camera that has a TOD_Camera component, since using "Skybox" clear flags as well as the sky dome on the same camera is redundant. If you want to use a skybox on a camera then just don't attach the TOD_Camera script to that camera, but you also shouldn't render the sky dome on that camera if you do that. If you want to use a custom skybox at night then change the shader of the "Space" material to the cubemap version and set your skybox there.

You should of course still be able to adjust all parameters on the TOD_Sky sky dome no matter whether or not you have TOD_Camera on your camera of course. Nothing changed in that regard.

Which cubemap setting are you talking about? Mesh renderes don't have a "cubemap only" setting for me. In any case, "cubemap only" sounds like it means only the fallback cubemap is used, no reflection probes. So since the fallback cubemap is essentially a reflection probe that renders nothing but the sky you'll see the sky reflect on walls even if they're inside a building - so that part is working as intended if I understand you correctly.

If the issue also happens with renderers that use reflection probes then this is most likely an issue that's caused by the Unity reflection probe blending and will require some investigating as I cannot reproduce it on my end right now. Does it disappear if you set the the sky dome reflection setting to "None"? If that's the case you should be able to leave it set to "None" until we find a solution. Your windows should still render the sky dome as long as you don't manually remove the skybox material from your scene lighting settings.

 

I'm having trouble with TOD on Unity version 5.0 keeps on losing its component references. Only way is to remove the sky dome and then drag the prefab back into hierarchy. Is this a known issue?

 

If you are not using the TOD_Camera script on your camera, you may have skybox instead of solid color on your camera's "Clear Flags" setting. Once you have TOD_Camera on the camera it will always force solid color (or you can just set it by hand).

Not sure if that's your cause, but it will create what you are describing.

(Also for testing make sure Clouds are set to None and Weather set to Clear.)

 

Okay, have IE's working but having other issues.

I am using RTP. Can ToD be used with RTP? Is there something special I need to do?

During the day, the world looks great but when night falls, the ground turns a gray color while they sky looks a fabulous dark blue. In my test terrain, without RtP, the ground was dark. What do I need to do to make the RtP terrain look dark?

Also, I took out my directional light because ToD has a sun. If I leave the directional light in, it never gets dark. When I take it out, I get an error on the ToD light saying the light is disabled in my scene.

I have tried to hunt the forums, but 20 pages and no proper thread search function is frustrating. I am not asking anyone to do the work for me but a few pointers would be nice. Again, the code is very well documented but it doesn't help me since I am not a coder.

Thank you.

 

I noticed that this also happens on some image effects from the Unity Standard Assets, so it's not specific to Time of Day. I'm still trying to isolate the cause to work around it or submit a bug report to Unity. So far I know that it only happens if there are compilation errors in one of your scripts, but other than that it appears to be fairly random. You don't have to remove the sky dome, reopening your scene also fixes it.

It doesn't exactly force solid color clear flags as depth-only and none are also allowed. However, if you set your camera to skybox clear flags TOD_Camera will automatically change it to solid color as skybox clear flags shouldn't be used together with a sky dome.

First of all, please understand that I cannot provide solutions for issues that only occur when using RTP. Time of Day only uses native Unity 5 features for its lighting, so everything that works with Unity 5 lighting will work with Time of Day. It's possible that this is just a configuration issue - you can try different ambient light modes on Time of Day and reduce the ambient light multiplier at night to isolate the cause and contact the author of RTP with more information about which Unity 5 feature specifically is causing this problem.

It's difficult to debug this without any detailed information, but I'm guessing your sky dome prefab is messed up. By default the Time of Day sky dome doesn't care about any directional lights other than its own. It will never access them or even look for them. Try reimporting TOD and dropping a fresh sky dome prefab into your scene.

 

Thank you. I have turned off RTP's scripts and still have the problem. I realize you can't help me with RTP related issues, but I thought maybe someone else might have used to two together and have a solution to the problem. At this time, I don't think is related to RTP.

I figured out how to make the sky dark, so that is not an issue. Beautiful, by the way.

My current problem is the ambient light. At night, the ambient light shows as dark blue and it looks dark blue in a sample terrain. However, it is causing a light brown glow on my terrain at night in my project. RTP on or off does not affect it. I have some ideas that I am going to play around to see if I can figure out. I can get it to work somewhat using tonemapping and I might try one of the color adjustment assets.

 

Hello, web player doesn't work for me, "Failed to initialize player's 3D settings." Tested both in chrome and firefox.
GPU: Intel HD Graphics 4600.

 

I've just got Horizon[ON] and am really impressed with it, I've also been thinking about getting ToD for quite sometime if RTP Horizon[ON] and ToD were fully compatible it would be enough for me to make the switch from my current Day/Night asset.

 

I think the new lighting in unity5 means we could finally have spectacular Sunsets like the ones you see when you type sunset into Google images.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=s...AK&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAQ&dpr=0.98#tbm=isch&q=sunset

I watched a youtube video by a guy called Glen Rhodes and he does something interesting with the sun he has a color gradient for the sun color at various times of day. he does the same with the fog colour too.

This makes the sunset much better imho

Anyways he's done a tutorial video

We've got 3D volumetric clouds, Sun shafts ambient IBL fog Bloom water reflection yet most sunsets look like a white disc disappearing over the horizon[on]

Come on guys sort the sun out
Think of the asset screenshots!

Roy

 

Can you advise if there's any other method you could think of to change a spotlight intensity at night-time? Your example is good but IsNight doesn't kick in until it's fully dark - it would be great to have it kick in as the sun starts going down before the transition from day to night.

It's for a road project and I would like the streetlights to turn on well before it's fully dark. I can't really see any exposed properties that would work (apart from possibly hacking something to do with the sun light colour).

Thanks!

 

In real life street lights turn on at a certain time, you could read out the time?

 

I could, but the time does vary with the months - they switch on earlier in winter for instance, with the variability increasing as you travel to the north or south of the equator.

I could just write a big lot of if statements / case switch depending on the month but I was hoping to find a more elegant solution!

 

Hehehe, or just read out the date and plot the month (normalised from 0-1) over a normal distribution/parabolic function and add that to a baseline of x hours to turn on the lights later in the summer than in the winter…

 

Use the Y component of the sun or light transform, .2 ish

 

haha, you just stomped all over the limits of my scripting / maths ability... I'll have a bit of a think about your reply and see if I can wrap my head around it. Thanks!

 

I'll have a look at this, but from memory the light also controls the moon so it might not work?

 

I tested it with the sun mesh.

 

Of course... the mesh would work. Thanks a lot!

 

Regarding this issue:

I've got 3.0.2 now, but dusk/dawn are still darker than I need them to be. I tried cranking up the ambient light to white, but then the rest of the nighttime is too bright. See screenshot. While having it darker before the moon rises may be accurate, it's a problem if players can't see anything. Or could I simply disable the moon and change the Ambient settings for a consistent all-night brightness?

 

ToD looks fabulous now that I got it to work, with a little help from some folks here. Thanks!

I do have an issue with the fog though. I am using global fog because, well it is the only thing to use now. Usually, I change the color of the fog but I can't seem to do that with ToD. Is there a way to change that? Maybe via script?

Thanks.

 

Following the instructions exactly, this is the result. The clouds (and billboards) all appear in the foreground now for some reason. We're using AFS but you can't really blame that because again, it happens to the clouds too. The commonality is that this only occurs when you add the Scattering prefab to the camera and not otherwise. What's going on and how do you fix it?

 

A screenshot of the problem might help. But what you're observing sounds like fresnel? Since it doesn't happen on a sample terrain, maybe your terrain textures haven't been updated to PBR yet?

Horizon[ON] and Time of Day are fully compatible. I'm collaborating with the author of Horizon[ON] to make sure it stays that way.

Please make sure your web player is on the latest version - this issue occured for me before I updated my web player: http://unity3d.com/webplayer

This is supported by Time of Day.

The sunset in Time of Day certainly doesn't look like a white disc. :O Have you checked out the demo scene and screenshots?

If you don't want different brightnesses at night depending on whether or not the moon is visible I do recommend setting Night.LightIntensity to 0 and working with just ambient light. Since the ambient light color is a gradient you should be able to specify it exactly the way you want for sunset / sunrise and night?

Unity global fog is not the only way - Time of Day also offers aerial perspective (see the TOD_Scattering image effect). If you do use Unity global fog make sure you've updated it to the latest version, then you can set Fog.Mode to "Color" or "Directional" and have TOD set the scene fog color automatically, which is then used by the global fog image effect.

Are you on Unity 5? Unity 4 has a bug with all image effect fog that causes the depth buffer to get screwed up. If you are on Unity 5, please check your camera clear flags and check if they are set to "depth only" - this is supported by Time of Day, but maybe an incompatibility with one of your other image effect exists, so try "solid color" and see if that fixes it. If nothing helps, please check if it happens in a minimal test scene with just Time of Day.

 

There are various properties in TOD_Sky you can access to do this, for example LerpValue (1 at day, 0 at night) and SunZenith / MoonZenith (0 at zenith, 90 at horizon and 180 if exactly opposite to zenith).

 

last week i switched to unity 5 and also use the TOD asset. In unity 4 it seems to be the best option for solid light work. i'm now experimenting a bit with the lighting and atmosphere in 5 and it looks really cool. I'm still having some challange with the color of the light and the scene look. It seems that the color of the sun stays white, in unity 4 there was a nice transition from dawn to dusk, now there is only 1 color, no idea if i can change this.

In the TOD_sky i can see a transition from withe to orange, but when i test it out it all seems to be white. The blue sky color is an overkill in the scene, it needs more warm colors from the sun to get the right mood. any idea ?

 

We're using Unity 4 Pro, not 5. And about the second thing you said - It's automatically setting the camera to solid solid no matter what.

How do you fix that depth buffer thing you talked about?

 

First of all, if blue colors dominate your scene make sure to reduce Day.AmbientMultiplier and Day.ReflectionMultiplier to tone down the light coming from the sky. Also make sure Ambient.Mode and Reflection.Mode are correctly setup - they offer a lot of new options in Unity 5. Once that's done select the "Light" child object and verify that its color is correctly fading to an orange tone at sunset. If that's all working as intended you should be able to adjust the Day.LightColor gradient and be able to achieve the exact light source color you want.

As far as I'm aware you cannot and just have to live without fog image effects in Unity 4, but let's verify that it's actually the reason first. To do so, add the "global fog" image effect from the Unity Standard Assets to your camera. This should result in the same issue.

 

I am going to use the new version (March 22 2015) and Unity5.

1. I did discover (you should write it in the Getting Started section of the manual) the camera clear flag should be set solid color=black, am I right?
2. I also tried with a terrain and the ground stays at the same luminosity also during the night. Suggestions?

 

I am picking up a reflection of the sun on all reflective surfaces inside the building. I guess I never noticed this before because nothing was very reflective. Is there something I can do to eliminate that? Again, it's only in reflections. Thanks.

 

I solved selecting the terrain and setting Windows/Lighting, Object Tab, unchecking the Lightmapping static check box. Is it correct?

 

I have the day/night cycle set to one minute (for a museum kiosk, it has to be fast). But on some computers, especially Windows, the entire terrain shimmers as the sun moves across the sky. I have pretty high quality settings for the shadows (on Unity 4.6). Is there anything I can do to minimize or eliminate the shimmer?

thanks

 

Does somebody know how this system could use an android device hour/time and start the dynamic sky dome at the same value?
I mean, is 13:24 in the android device, an app with this asset starts, the user select a scene that uses the sky dome.
The app checks the device hour and return a variable, the skydome reads this variable and automatically uses it to start the system in the same time. It only needs to do it once, it doesn't need to check the time and return a variable every frame.
A real time feature.

Thanks.

 

Hi Salazar, the plugin does have a 'Use Device Time' option - have you investigated that? It gets the current time according to the device at runtime, although I'm unsure if it keeps polling the device time or just switches over to an internal time progression after that.

 

Do you have shadow casting enabled? Since the sun is a normal directional light this is not related to Time of Day, you just need shadows to block light from simply going through objects.

RE 1. The latest version automatically sets the clear flags to something other than "skybox" if they're set to "skybox" - all other clear flags are allowed.
RE 2. You are correct, you cannot use static lightmapping if the light source intensity or position change dynamically over time. I recommend completely disabling it in the new lighting window. I'm not disabling it automatically since people might want to use Time of Day without a dynamic day / night cycle and with static lightmapping.

I'm not sure what shimmering you mean, but my guess is you're talking about delayed reflection probe refreshes. Try setting Ambient.UpdateInterval and Reflection.UpdateInterval to 0 and see if that resolves the issue.

UseDeviceTime / UseDeviceDate on TOD_Time do exactly that - they set the ingame time to the device time on start and use the normal ingame time progression speed from there.

 

Hello,

I'm discovering this asset and I would like to know if the weather could be scheduled randomly.
I mean, I would like a scene where the weather could change indefinitely. I know the TOD_Weather Script can make a transition from a clear weather to a storm or fog. However, it seems this script only allows the transition and once the transition is finished, the weather remains fixed on the last state.

How should I do if I want the weather to change always?
Thanks