[Released] kode80 Volumetric Clouds (Ver 1.1.0)

setting sub pixel size to 4x4 helps to get stable 90 fps, thx

Another thing i noticed is that clouds location differ too much for each eye.
When the distance is so big there should be no difference at all. I couldn't find a parameter responsible for that(obviously changing this for camera is not a good idea as it works perfectly for all other objects)

 

The convergence issue is due to a change in VR projection matrices in Unity 5.4. This is fixed in the develop branch and will be merged into master very soon.

https://github.com/kode80/kode80CloudsUnity3D/tree/develop

 

Hello, very nice clouds!
But I have a little question. How do I draw things behind the clouds? I would like to draw moon and stars behind these clouds so they get occluded by them. I am using particle system for stars. Should I change the render queue in the stars shader or in the clouds shader? Currently the beginning of the stars particle shader looks like this:

Code (CSharp):

1. Tags { "Queue"="Transparent" "IgnoreProjector"="True" "RenderType"="Transparent" }
2.     Blend SrcAlpha One
3.     AlphaTest Greater .01
4.     ColorMask RGB
5.     Cull Off Lighting Off ZWrite Off Fog { Color (0,0,0,0) }

Again, thank you for your great asset!

 

The clouds are rendered to a RenderTexture and then composited with the scene as a full screen quad at the far clip distance from the camera. This means that anything in world space will appear in front of the clouds, just like a skybox. If you don't want to create an actual skybox shader, one approach you could use is the following:

1. Set your particle system to a new layer, for example "Skybox"
2. Duplicate your main camera, set it's Layer & Culling Mask to "Skybox"
   
3. On your original camera, set Clear Flags to "Don't Clear", set Depth to 1 and remove "Skybox" from the Culling Mask

Using the above, anything on the "Skybox" layer will be rendered first, then your scene and the clouds will be rendered on top.

 

Hello, thank you for a suggestion, but that is a problem. Deffered rendering modes (both legacy and new) break these things, especially if there are some image effects present. I have already tried it, but the sky always goes crazy. Well... I guess I need to just write a skybox shader, which is quite hard to get the same procedural effects of default sky. Anyways, thank you for your help and effort put in these clouds.

 

I have a similar problem, I am using volumetric light solution and clouds are rendered after the volumetric light, is there a way to change the rendering order of the cloud?

 

Also, is there a way to blur out the clouds? I mean for the sake of making clouds look in low sub-pixel setting. 4x4 seems to bring really good performance, but everything gets pixelated. I can solve this by having a DOF effect with bigger range so sky gets blurred, but it would be nice to get such thing built in (or I am blind and it already is there).

 

Cascades are a no go unfortunately. The problem is that having shadows rendered at all far distances introduces to many acne artifacts. The issue is bigger the lower the cascade resolution density is. Having cloud shadows in the directional light cookie would eliminate this problem completely.

 

At how long of a distance problems emerge? 1000-2000-3000 meters? I also wish to test in my outdoor scene.

 

It's hard to say exactly. The issue is with the cascade resolution. If your cascade covers many hundreds or thousands of meters, then there will not be enough shadow resolution to render without horrible acne artifacts. Floating precision issues become a problem too. Unity 5.5 is supposed to introduce a fix to the precision issue at a later date.

A cookie would sidestep all of these issues.

 

Again, could I have a screenshot with your scene and cascade setup? It should look something like 1500 shadow distance and with 0.1 cascade 1, 0.2 cascade 2, 0.3 cascade 3 and 99.6% cascade 4 that will be used for the distance. Again I might be wrong but try out with that.


(Attached my setup. I absolutely wanted shadows for my far tree billboards)

 

That's fairly close to my setup, except that my world is much bigger and the other cascades are much smaller. General z-fighting issues with shadow mapping acne show at large scales.

 

Hey, anu update on Unity 5.5 beta? The clouds seem to be rendering in front of everything.

 

Hey, I'm a little bit confused right now. What is a current latest version? 1.1.1? Because on the previous page there were talks about 1.2.1 and I don't see it anywhere.
And how are the optimization tweaks you were talking about? I mean just roughly when should we expect them? Thanks

 

hi

I am interested in buying the license kode80Clouds, but I have some doubts.

I am testing the free version ...

1) Do not make clouds shadow on the scene (terrain, water, etc, etc)?

2) The color of the clouds are not affected by the color of the ambient light. Do I have to change the color of the clouds manually using script to go coordinated with the ambient light?

3) This is is most important to me, Your asset can work integrating it in the Asset Azure sky from the store?


Greetings.

 

hi again.

I've seen that if you can generate shadows with clouds. But other questions remain unanswered.

I have another question more.

When I change some parameter of clouds in runtime (eg the color of clouds), I see clouds animation back to the beginning again and all position to begin the cycle animation from the beginning.

Is there any way to avoid this? If we have to change the color of the clouds manually at runtime because they alone are changed with ambientColor of the Skybox, it is a very big problem if you want to cycles of day and night dynamic ...

regards

 

Hi, I use your Volumetric Cloud and I am having an issue. With Time of Day asset (stars, moon etc ) they can seen through clouds. I think its related to depth but i don't know which one is causing that. (your clouds or time of day shader) I need help. Thanks

 

Hey, again, any update for 5.5? The clouds are drawn on top of everything. If they're not supported any more, tell us, at least, where the problem might be.

Thanks a ton!

 

Z-buffer is inverted in 5.5.

 

Thanks!

 

Unity's new TAA seems quite efficient, is there a way to incorporate that into the clouds to improve performance?

 

Yeah, I see a lot of asset authors moving to using a pass inside the new combined stack Unity just released here https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/new-post-processing-stack-pre-release.435581/ with command buffer I guess, or something...

 

It's interesting that recent posts also direct to the same issue we have. Is it possible to have the clouds rendering into the camera's depth buffer?

I want certain objects/effects to be hidden behind clouds.

 

Are you using Unity 5.5+?

 

Thanks for pointing that out but No, I'm in 5.4 and already read about the inverted z-buffer. But seems like the clouds are not included in the shader's _CameraDepthTexture!

 

Hm... Weird. I've used the clouds with 5.4 but I've had no problem. Are you encountering this with all objects or only some?

 

This happens to all objects so any objects in the scene will be drawn on top of clouds regardless of their distance to the camera. I think the clouds are rendered behind everything just as skybox's behavior and this has been set somewhere in its shader.

 

Weir that it happens in 5.4. I have that problem in 5.5 when the depth buffer is inverted.

 

Before 5.5, could you place any objects to be rendered behind the clouds and get them hidden? What setup did you use for that?

 

Wow, how did I miss that post! That's exactly what I thought, the clouds quad is located at the camera's far clip distance so the camera's depthmap considers clouds at its farthest value (fully white) just like the skybox.

Will try to change some settings to see if I can give it an arbitrary value so that any objects further than this value from camera will be drawn before the clouds. Any tips from the developer will help though

 

Hi

Is there support for this asset? Almost a month ago I asked about a problem and kode80 has not yet been through the forum.

Maybe I'm having some personal problem, but if it is not, I think it's a bad support for what your asset costs. I'm seeing that there are people who have problems or doubts and are not resolved

I was very excited to buy it after using its trial version, despite how expensive it is, but now I do not know if I will finally buy it.


I ask again what I asked:

regards

 

You need to add a @kode80 so that he sees an alert.

 

hi

Forgive my ignorance but I do not understand well

Are you telling me that if I put the message here in the forum with "@kode80", does the alert come to him?

Or do you simply mean to send him a private message?

Greetings and thanks for replying

 

@ftejada

The forums are a little bugged. It helps to tag who you are talking to. That alert apparently works always.

 

Thanks.

Let's see if you answer soon ...

regards

 

@TerraUnity did it work? Or am I doing something wrong?

 

The clouds always stick just on top of the sky and everything is rendered before it. Still didn't have time to tweak any shaders/scripts but I'm wondering why the developer does not help us for this great asset. Also read somewhere there will be fly-through addition to this asset which makes it more amazing but no updates have been made recently.

 

The developer was last seen in August.....

 

So, we have to fix the clouds for 5.5 ourselves. Any ideas?

 

well if you go into his github and into the develop branch, you will see a version that is 5.5 compatible.

 

https://docs.unity3d.com/550/Documentation/Manual/UpgradeGuide55.html probably with this

 

My humble suggestions for this impressive volumetric cloud asset:
1)Presets (like in PostProcessingStack/SEGI for example). It's really hard to understand and use cloud coverage painting function in first hours - this advanced function is cool but users forced to use this somewhat tricky tool because there simply no other way to get decent clouds. Some presets of various beautiful cloud setups will save a lot of artist nerve on first encounter + editing existing preset often easier way to achieve desired result.
2)First 8 hours with clouds was mix of excitement and frustration; this negative part mostly produced by my ignorance because there no video tutorial with "How to start makes great clouds in seconds for noooooobs" (only text in docs and text is not for nooooobs). In that forum thread I found announcement of tutorial ("I'm going to be putting together in an in-depth tutorial video over the next week that will demonstrate all of the properties, what they do, how to achieve certain looks and all of the performance tweaks I've mentioned above.") but it was in April XD. Voting for 5+minute video introduction here.
3)This is not my field of competence but ... why this asset not in store? Looks decent enough , but hidden in the depths of internet for ~99% of the customers.

 

Thank you for sharing your work @kode80! I just tried it with Unity 5.5.1, out of the box.
Good looking clouds, nicely interacting with sun, but... the clouds are drawn in front of the geometry (your terrain or my meshes as well).
I tried to change the shader render queue to background or to override the material queue, with no results. Strange.
Any suggestion?

 

Got it working. Zdepth inversion since Unity 5.5...

CloudBlender.shader, replace line 52 with:

o.position = float4(v.vertex.x, v.vertex.y, 1.0-v.vertex.z, 1.0);

 

Thanks @thieum. I've been trying to find the fix for this myself. Nicely done.

Also need to do the same in CloudBlenderEditor.shader on line 57 to resolve the problem in the Coverage Editor window.

 

These clouds look great! Can you fly through them?

 

Good to know. I'm not using this in-house editor btw, just to say that you can play around with Photoshop instead, works fine and much quicker feedback.
I checked that red channel brings vol clouds in, blue channel seems to cut holes in the haze and horizon effects, green and alpha channel not used apparently.

No you can't, it's a camera effect applied behing geometries.


The effect remains quite heavy to process, you can spare a lot of fps from the main settings (downsampling). So I'm using it only for figuring a storm, in addition to a more simple clouds plane.

 

Maybe it will be some-kind of inspirational for long unseen author - here is the scene where these volumetric clouds used (and working good enough!):

 

What are the requirements for this asset to work? Unity version and shader model, etc.

 

I have the version Unit 5.5.2. I have the problem that appears in the image. I do not know why it happens. Does anyone have any ideas? Thank you.