[BEST ARTISTIC TOOL - UNITY AWARDS 2019] Aura 2 - Volumetric Lighting & Fog

Discord is not reporting any issues so I am confused to how servers work on Discord. I am a bit worried that I have an asset that I can't get to work and have not been able to get an answer for weeks on here or Discord from the author. I have seen this before with a couple of other assets that just after going through a big sale they make some announcement about the future of the asset, either being taken over or going open sourced. My project is currently stalled with Aura in it as their is no help so I have to remove it and hope the author returns soon.

 

Reported it to Unity that app is no longer under development, see if anything happens.

 

The OP was last online on

Dec 30, 2019

here. Discord I don't know - never been there before, so I don't know his username there. Maybe something bad happened to him?

 

Has anyone got any replies or response from the author, the Discord server has been in 'maintenance' for 4 days, there are no replies to emails or forum posts, the last thing on Discord was nearly a month ago. This really does seem like an asset that has just been abandoned for some reason.

 

That's why I "love" assetstore so much. Every tool and library is just so risky.
The only thing safe are sound assets and graphic assets, when they don't use custom made shaders.

 

The guy wrote that on his discord yesterday. Why do you guys think he is no longer supporting the asset?

THE AURA SERVER WILL BE BACK NEXT WEEK. THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR PATIENCE

 

They don't have any of the patience that was mentioned in that message haha

 

Well perhaps a message should have been placed to say what was happening from the start? And the fact that there has been no support for very nearly a month is acceptable?

 

@MikeUpchat seems to me it is 1 guy working on this asset, seems reasonable that he takes some time off. He might not even work on it as his main income (I am guessing here, I have no idea what his situation is). I got Aura from Humble so I was worried that it is no longer supported thats why I looked on discord. Anyway if there will still be updates than I am fine, if the author can't help all the people who have problems with the asset its not ideal but I prefer him to support the product with bugfixes etc than doing customer care only. Its a hard thing, obviously in an ideal world you want both. As I said IDK how much money you can make from an asset and if it will be able to sustain you, seems not that likely to me but who knows.

Seriously though are there a lot of buisnesses that do assets only for these asset stores?

 

I doubt that anyone has anything against that. But if that's indeed the case, then it would've been nice from him to let people know about it here, too Not everyone uses Discord.

By the way, this post isn't meant to be offensive in any way.

 

@Mauri no arguement from me on that point

 

@Mauri, I just happened to catch it on discord right before he left, because someone here had mentioned that he doesn't visit the forums much and stays on discord basically. That's when I could feel the frustration in his comments on the crazy questions he was getting from the Humble Bundle. I'm sure he won't do any sales like that again.

It is a shame that this has happened, something like that can force someone to decide if they really have time to deal with the frustration or just drop it all together and go back to doing these for themselves only.

His first one was free, then he updated it to do much more and work faster. But before the bundle, the questions were legitimate. After the bundle, many of the questions on discord just got kind of silly.

I hope he doesn't give up on us, we need these small asset makers to give us the things that we haven't even thought of or realized that they were possible.

I personally think he should close discord and just come here, that would be easier for us and keep everything in one place. But a lot of devs are moving to discord, so not much we can do about that.

 

Back on January 19, I've contacted raphick via email and he replied today

To make it short: Aura 2 has not been abandoned! He did took some time off and encountered some personal struggles along the way. The discord server is currently receiving improvements and should re-open next week (it's still the recommended way to get help for Aura 2).

His exact email to me (I got the permission to share it):

Spoiler

I shall also note that we are free to contact him. "Support is still here, though a little bit wrecked these few days".


Hopefully, this clears things up!

 

Thanks for doing that! We all appreciate the good news!

 

Ok, after losing frustrating fight im posting my problem here.

System: OSX
GPU: Radeon RX580

1. AURA2 2.1.5 with Unity 2018.4.0, 2018.4.13, 2018.4.15, 2019.2.18.
No fog visible. No scattering. Errors:
(Can post exact one, shortcuts atm)
- Cant Copy Texture source null
- Invalid Size of Shadowmask (512x512) required (512x256)

I succeeded to defeat second error by setting Shadow Cascades to x4 on all quality levels.
Then proceeded to build player on 2019.2.18. It went ok. After starting player multiple times - program hanged for 30 sec, then system crashed. Repeated 3 times.

2. AURA2 2.0.2 with unity 2018.4.0, 2018.4.13, 2018.4.15
Works ok. Performance heavy thou. On Aura lowest quality settings i set, performance drop is around 20fps.
From 68fps to 50-58 fps on radeon.
From 32fps to 7fps on discrete gpu GeForce GT750M.

I was hoping that updating to newer version of Aura will give me some performance. But it's not working at all.
Sticking with version 2.0.2 and added button for players: Disable Volumetric Lightning

 

It's not officially supported I know but has anyone figured out a way to get AURA to work with RAM 2019?

 

@Unplug gave this solution, but I have not been able to make it work yet. But haven't tried real hard because I'm not quite there in my scene for it and trying to decide whether to go back to Weather Maker fog.

here is what he said, you might PM him if you can't get it to work, though.
Got it to work,instruction wasn't clear for me (newbie with shader) and it is incomplete
For newbie like me: the "add finalcolor:aura2_fog" is actually the text you want to add in the surface pragma line of RAM shader. So at the end of line 87 for Water River Tesseled Vertex Color Flow shader (you don't actually add a prama line but just the text to the existing one)

void Aura2_fog have to go after the struct and you must change SurfaceOutputStandard to SurfaceOutputStandardSpecular

float Aura2_getfogvalue and void Aura2_Applyfog goes before the struct.

by the way, Aura 2 is really an awesome package and it is easy to use. Great effect. I'm using enviro sky and combine with aura it is marvelous

 

Has anyone got Aura 2.1.5 working with Unity 2018.4 or 2019.2 on Mac? The Aura toolbox gets added to scene view, but there is no volumetric light or fog visible.

 

I have tried to use it, but I can't get the results of the store screenshots, it just adds a fog that doesn't seem to be affected by lights :/

I added it to the camera, to the directional lights and to the spot lights, none seems to function correctly.

 

I've actually had this problem too. The volumetric fog it gives is really nice, but I can't get it to behave the way it behaves in the Asset Store video. I feel kind of stupid because I'm pretty sure I'm doing something wrong. I messed with all the settings and couldn't get anything other than fog. I think it's not as easy to use as the HDRP volume lighting.

But hopefully when the dev gets back to support we can get some help, or an answer from someone here that understands the asset a bit more. For now I've removed Aura 2 from my project and will wait till there is some kind of update on the forum, discord, or the asset store.

 

Thanks for the replies. Aura 2.1.5 is not working at all for me, but an older version (maybe 2.0.2) was mostly working in Unity 2018.4. If anyone has any ideas how to get latest version working in Unity 2019, please let me know!

 

hi all - bit of a long shot this one but I thought I would ask as the developer is away and discord is still down. Has anyone else experienced (and maybe even ahem fixed) problems where deferred fog (post processing stack v2) interacts with Aura2 (unity 2018.4, aura2 2.1.5 PPV2 2.3.0) in such a manner that deferred fog is broken and essentially overwrites nearly the whole display? This is perhaps one of the causes of seeing "very heavy fog" with aura2. In my case it seems to only apply when building to standalone player, not during editor which is additionally tiresome...

 

Update (and an apology). The issue described above was unrelated to Aura2. It was caused by the build process of unity stripping the FOG_LINEAR variant keyword, meaning the PPV2 deferred fog shader fell back by default to implementing exponential fog, which was incorrectly configured in the shader parameters (as the scene assumed linear fog), hence heavy fog. Explicitly including FOG_LINEAR in the build options fixed it.

 

Where's the discord invite to the server anyway? I'd love to chat with other devs using Aura 2. I've got a couple problems I need to iron out.

 

It was/is on the store page. here you go. Good Luck!
https://discord.gg/9Upuey2

 

Hello everyone, very big kudos for being so patient. The discord will reopen this week, probably friday.

In the meantime I have a very good news for those who are running on MacOSX/Metal and desperately wait for support on version 2.1.5.

I managed to track the main issues preventing Aura 2 to run on MacOSX and I will publish a fix next-week.

Normal support and development will be then back to normal

Cheers

 

Sweet, looking forward to the Mac fix!

 

hello! finally made it work, but how can I increase the particle count (I guess), because it looks like very low quality right now, you can see the individual particles (not many and big).

Edit.- Nvm, figured it out.

 

Looks like that Discord server isn't gonna be unlocked anytime soon

 

Next week hasn't come yet. lol

 

Hey everyone!

The Discord server is finally back -> https://discord.gg/9Upuey2

Thank you so much for your patience!

 

All the sudden i started getting hit with this error. Unity 2019.2.18

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. Graphics.CopyTexture called with null source texture
3. UnityEngine.Graphics:CopyTexture(Texture, Int32, Int32, Int32, Int32, Int32, Int32, Texture, Int32, Int32, Int32, Int32)
4. Aura2API.Texture2DArrayComposer:Generate() (at Assets/Aura 2/Core/Code/Classes/Texture2DArrayComposer.cs:221)
5. Aura2API.LightsCommonDataManager:GenerateLightsMaps() (at Assets/Aura 2/Core/Code/Classes/LightsCommonDataManager.cs:736)
6. Aura2API.LightsCommonDataManager:Update() (at Assets/Aura 2/Core/Code/Classes/LightsCommonDataManager.cs:394)
7. Aura2API.CommonDataManager:UpdateData() (at Assets/Aura 2/Core/Code/Classes/CommonDataManager.cs:105)
8. Aura2API.AuraCamera:OnRenderImage(RenderTexture, RenderTexture) (at Assets/Aura 2/Core/Code/Classes/AuraCamera.cs:202)
9.  

 

Did it work before?

 

Ya idk why it started doing it. Didn't change unity versions or anything. Woke up one day started work and started getting that error.

 

Welcome back!!

 

You haven't changed any Rendering/Lighting settings or Camera scale/properties recently? Sometimes importing Assets can override your Scene settings also.

 

Has anyone had a problem, that just for some time, aura drop fps to lowest values like 18. For me it's happening for no reason. Unity 2018.4.11f1, after restart all working fine, then after some count of start play mode, it drops again. gfx.waitforpresent going to high values. It's second project when i see that thing\bug and cant use Aura 2 for my projects.

 

How do you know it's Aura 2? GFX.WaitForPresent means your CPU is waiting for your GPU to catch up, so you are GPU bound somewhere in your game.Look to see if Aura 2 is actually causing this or see if your GPU is bottlenecking your project.

 

Late to the party here but hoping someone can help.

I have a single point light all setup and working great with Aura2. How can I give this some noise? I assume a noise mask but really have no clue.

 

@Freznosis is right, Aura 2 is per se heavy so it just highlights that you gpu is very busy.

What do you mean by noise on the light?

 

Update 2.1.6 submitted with the following changes :

Changes
- [Core] Fixed compatibility for Metal (MacOSX, iOS)
- [Editor] Prevented serialization of generated render textures on Aura Lights
- [Editor] Improved performances of the Aura Camera custom inspector

Additions
- [Editor] Added option to display/hide the buttons in the hierarchy

 

Guys cmon, if it was something else, i didnt post this question. Becase when i disable aura script, fps come back, or even i used a gpu profiler, and it was huge drop at "image effect", which belongs to aura 2 script.

 

And i can write more. When i disabled everything exept aura 2 script, it still drop my fps.

 

What are you running on? Of course Aura 2 is demanding, there is no volumetric solution that is not. Best is to find where your bottleneck is.
FYI : Aura 2 is one of the most performant with unique optimization techniques and options to balance quality over performances.

 

Update 2.1.7 submitted with the following changes :

Changes
- [Core] Slightly improved performances when the fog is dense
- [Core] Improved resources destruction on disabling Aura Lights
- [Core] Fixed point lights cookie copy
- [Core] Fixed point lights cookie orientation

 

FWIW I have the same problem using HX volumetric lighting, so it is not exclusive to Aura. When I start the scene, everything is fine for like a half hour, then suddenly boom - performance drops to a crawl, even though no changes have been made to the scene. It could be related to the combination of volumetric lighting and Unity's Post Processing Stack, but I really don't know. I've been trying to solve it for a long time.

 

@raphick I am having the same error when I try to build. Even with the latest update. Please help. I m going to miss the test build for this weekend

 

I answered you on the discord

 

yes thank you so much!
I posted here too coz this issue was experienced by others as well. Hoped one of them would tell how they fixed it

 

How did you fix the issue?