☁ Weather Maker ☁ AAA Clouds, Sky, Weather, Water, Volumetric Light & More!

Weather Maker 4.3.0 is now in the asset store with more water improvements like water profiles and improved shoreline and wave height reduction using water height depth map.

 

@jjxtra Is the apk is up to date i would like to see how it's perform on mobile before purchasing it

 

Mostly up to date yea, not 100%

 

Weather Maker 4.3.1 is out with lots of bug fixes and water improvements. I've also added a complete setup tutorial video to ensure everyone can get this working from scratch in a blank scene.

 

Thank you for your continued, consent, support and development of this.

 

You are very welcome!

 

Weather Maker 4.3.2 is now submitted to the asset store, with water tesselation

 

@jjxtra , How is it going? How are those volumetric clouds coming along?

 

Knee deep in it. My guess is Nov/Dec release, I want them to look amazing AND have performance and it is going to require a lot of work, but I'm going to do my best and release it only when both criteria are met.

 

@jjxtra , more strength to yiur arm! Good luck!

 

What is the difference between this and enviro?

 

Hi SickaGamer.

If you read the asset description of Weather Maker you will see it has much better performance and number of features vs enviro. But I encourage you to try both and pick the best that works for you.

Off the top of my head, things that Weather Maker has that enviro does not:

- Max performance, especially mobile/vr
- Water (with tesselation and waves)
- Single pass stereo water reflection
- Null weather zones
- Rotating night sky that does not need a cube map
- ONE pass volumetric fog that does all lights
- Fog noise 3D texture support
- Full screen snow effect

Coming soonish will be better looking and better performing volumetric clouds vs enviro clouds.

I probably missed a bunch but that is what I came up with in 60 seconds of thinking.

 

Thanks that answered my questions.

 

Hi, I really like Weathermaker, I got it free during the summer promotions and just started using it recently. The Date and Lat/Long features are great and really are a help for my game.

For some odd reason though, the Sun and Moon no longer show in Play mode, but do show in the Scene editor.

The Sun and Moon show up fine in Scene.


Also, in Play mode, the water plane gets lit up way too much. This is the same shot as above but in Play and no Moon.


And again, in Play mode, the Western sky stays lit up like this all night. Not super bright, but enough to ruin the darkness.


I haven't adjusted any settings except increasing Ambient light intensity a bit and I have changed the Sun and the Moon's "Rotate Y degrees" to 180 because the Sun and Moon were rising in the West(left side of map) and setting in the East(right side of map), but changing that back to zero hasn't helped. I've deleted Weathermaker from my project and re-imported from the asset Store twice, but that didn't help either.

I did accidentally Reset everything in the Inspector Tab but reimporting did give me back all of my Day/Night settings. It would be nice if there was a Reset to defaults button.

Thanks for any help.

 

Looks like you are using an older version, can you remove weather maker entirely, redownload it and try demo scene water, feel free to post back or email support@digitalruby.com and I can get it sorted for you.

 

Okay, I removed WM again and reimported from the Asset store, and the Sun and Moon DO show in the Water Demo scene during Play. The Sun and Moon weren't even showing in my scene editor, but after opening and closing the Water Demo scene, they do appear to be showing again. But they're still not showing when I go into Play mode and everything above still happens.

I'm using Aquas instead of your water, because your water doesn't have a dirty river texture. I'm going to try creating a new Project and see if that works.

Thanks for your help anyways. I really didn't like the lighting when I first started using WM because the regular Unity settings didn't work, but after figuring out where to adjust everything(Day Night Cycle Manager script), it's really awesome.

 

I created a new project and only loaded a few assets, Weather-maker, Aquas, Landscape Builder, and UFPS. The Sun and Moon do show, even in Game, but the Sunrise sky and Sunset in Game don't look nothing like the Scene.

I removed Landscape Builder to see if there was any conflicts between it and WM, but that didn't change anything.

Perhaps there is something I'm missing, do I need to change the skyboxes or something simple like that?

 

Double check that demo scene blank works, and then ensure you've done all of this:

 

Well, I found the culprit. My character's FPS cam has a Weapon cam in the hierarchy. I already had the FPS cam set up so I set the Weapon cam's settings like you show in the video and now I have Sun and Moon again, and sunsets and sunrises. I had watched the video when I first got WM, but somehow missed setting up the other camera. Thanks for your help.

I have another question for you that's not really related to WM, but since you're a smart Unity developer I thought that I would get your opinion. I want my character to be able to wade through water, and I can set it up so that I get a water splash sound based on a texture. But I really don't want to do that because the very shallow water is a combo of a mud and a grass texture plus I want to be able to change the splash sound depending on if it's from say ankle to knee for one sound and knee to hip depth for another sound. After watching your setup video again, I was thinking that I could maybe mount another camera to the player(maybe 2) to determine if it was under the water plane, and of course wouldn't want it to render anything. Maybe you can point me in the right direction on this, but I'll understand if you don't want to get involved in this.

 

So. I'm currently using Enviro and Suimono for a 10x10 kilometer tropical scene designed to run on desktop computers (Win/Mac). Underwater rendering essential; I also need to detect dusk and dawn, in addition to day and night. Other essential components are Vegetation Studio Pro, MicroSplat, MapMagic and WorldStreamer. Minimum Unity version is 2018.3.

Should I switch to Weather Maker?

 

I would suggest that you compare the water surface y value with the players feet (just put a game object on the feet if you haven't already). Then see if that is inside the water. If it is, compare the transform.y of the feet vs water surface, that will tell you how deep in you are. Then play sounds or do game logic according to depth in water.

 

You can always try it out. I thought bundling some nice water would be great and save people some money, along with reducing integration pains. But I am biased so of course I will say yes

 

I followed your advice, and well, let me put it like this: the increase in frame rate alone is worth the switch. The settings indicate there's feature parity and more; all I need to do is figure out how to use them to get the same results as with Enviro and Suimono. So far, the sun seems a little less bright in comparison, shadows are less pronounced, and the water doesn't seem to be affected by fog but reflects the scene as if it wasn't there; also at night it's far too bright, giving an illuminated effect. But I guess I'll find the settings eventually.

The only features I miss so far is underwater debris and flotation. But then I've only scraped the surface so far.

 

Make sure you have allowed reflections on the fog so that the water reflects the fog. If you already have this turned on in the fog script, let me know.

Shadow strength will be reduced by both clouds and fog, you can configure how much the clouds block shadows on the cloud profile.

You can also tweak the night ambient colors if you are not happy with them, see the day night cycle in the prefab (profile property).

Also double check you don't have two dir lights.

 

Reflections are allowed on the fog:



As you can see, the reflection of the landmass on the other side of the bay is visible, but the landmass itself is almost completely hidden by the fog.

Here's another example:



There's only one directional light in the scene.

Metal, Mac, deferred rendering, latest 2018.3 beta (8)

 

I don't have 2018.3 working, any chance you can try 2018.2 latest?

 

Sorry, that's not possible with this project, as Vegetation Studio Pro requires 2018.3. I could try creating a new project, of course, but that's a lot of work.

Another thing is that everything looks flatter, if you know what I mean. There's something about Weather Maker which seems to require precomputed Global Illumination: with Weather Maker, the shadow side of large rocks, houses, etc, are very dark, if not black. With Enviro, this is not the case, and with huge worlds like this the less you need to precompute, the better.

Again, it's probably a setting somewhere. Is there a manual that describes all settings?

Grateful for any pointers.

 

The readme.txt and tutorial videos are all the documentation. Weather Maker does not require precomputed GI. So my guess is something is off with the shadow or rendering parameters, but hard to say without combing through your project and scene.

I've also not done as much testing on MAC (I do have an iMac I use sometimes), and I will ensure to do a round of testing before sending my next update.

You could also try deactivating parts of the prefab, maybe just keep the root object and the day night profile and light manager and deactivate all else. Then it could be narrowed down to ambient light or dir light settings.

My guess is that it is a 2018.3 problem that I will need to work out once it goes out of beta. Until then you could try installing 2018.2 and start a new project and load Weather Maker. Then import standard assets. Next load the demo scene and ensure that things look as you expect. Maybe drop a few of your rock prefabs in. If it looks OK, then it's probably a 2018.3 issue. If not, then there is a bug I need to fix ASAP.

I'll see if I can fire up 2018.3 and fix any problems in the next month or so.

Let me know how it goes...

 

All parameters so far are straight out of the box, so they should be your default settings. I'll follow your advice and investigate the shadow and rendering parameters. I'll also check out the tutorial videos. On the whole, I'd say Weather Maker seems like an excellent product; the best investment you could make in your own product is probably a detailed manual, as the settings are many and powerful.

I'll let you know what I come up with. But for now, I'll investigate both tracks: Enviro + Suimono on one hand, and Weather Maker on the other.

 

I'll look at getting a nice manual online somewhere in the coming months.

 

Vegetation Studio Pro is working with 2018.2, for me VS Pro and 2018.3 don't work (bug report filed with Unity, something about the Garbage collector letting the project crash on execution). Just FYI.

 

Hi,
great work! Looks amazing.
Just having some trouble with the water setup. I pulled in the "WeatherMakerWaterPrefab" and tried to lower it's Y-position. But the water seems to start fade to a clear color below a Y Value of around 8.5... At y 0f its nearly invisbile. I checked your readme file and the Youtube tutorials linked in it, am I missing a parameter to lower the WaterLevel?

Thanks!

 

Nervermind, my fault... the groundplane beneath the water was to close to the water surface

 

Hello, I just started using Weather Maker by following some of your tutorials but I encountered some issues with Fog and lighting in general. I've used Unity 2017.4.2.f2 and 2018.2. Also downloaded and reimported the asset several times with no changes.

I followed your volumetric light/fog tutorial and I simply cannot find "enable fog lights" on this profile (or any fog profile) and no matter what I try, I can't really make the sun penetrate through the fog. Rain, clouds and snow overlay seem to work fine though.

On top of this, the scene lighting is very flat when compared to your tutorials (this might be my fault since I'm lacking lighting practice), but everything looks too dark, I get better light with the basic directional light and post processing. Lighting setup was done with your getting started tutorial and the readme file (plus a couple of days of playing with every setting I can find).

Any advice is greatly appreciated, thank you.

 

It took me a while to get used to the lighting set-up in Weathermaker. Once I got used to it though, I really like it. I can get the days as bright and the nights as dark as I want. You have to play around with the Ambient settings in the WeatherMakerDayNightCycleProfile_Default and you should be able to make the lighting to suit your needs.



I haven't messed with fog yet, so you're on your own there.

 

Have the clouds been tested with VR headsets? They look great, but performance seems to be an issue for me. I’m going from 104 fps and cpu frame time of 9ms to about 50 fps and cpu frame time of 20ms.

I’m using 2 clouds layers and disabled everything except the cloud scripts.

 

Hi,

I am considering purchasing this asset, but I was wondering, is it possible to move and rotate the Weather maker "Object"?

I have very large, spherical planets in my project, and I would like to be able to create weather at the players location, and rotate it to match the players local up vector (which will vary depending on where on the planet they are standing).

As the player moves, I would also like to move the weather asset, to keep it at a reasonable distance from the player.

Is this possible with this asset? Or does it assume a fixed y-up axis and position?

Thanks!

 

Hi,
is there a way to generate a deterministic Cloud appearence? My Problem is that if I restart the game, the clouds are not looking the same at startup... I already remove the part in the WeatherMakerCloudProfileScript.Update Method where cloudNoiseMaskVelocityAccum1-4 & cloudNoiseVelocityAccum1-4 are modified over time... DayTime and Speed are also locked...
You have any idea how I can achieve this? Already checked your shaders, but didn't find anything...

https://imgur.com/a/iCWham7
Here are 2 screenshots right after starting the game.

Thanks!!

 

Hi there - is there plans for support for HDRP now or in future?

Best regards
Karsten

 

Hiya jjextra,

I just purchased and downloaded WeatherMaker, and I ran across some errors. The RainScript and the BaseRainScripts couldn't be found, while they are in the folders. Is this because they're in a different namespace?

Best,
Maarten

 

Any big updates coming soon?

 

He told me he was working on new clouds
Can’t wait to see them

 

Ok, this Pink thing will NEVER get resolved if we have to wait for Unity to push something out. Has anyone resolved this issue with the Water?

EDIT: The water looks ok if you disable the reflection script

 

Hi, is there a way to keep FullScreenEffects (clouds) stable for all the time at screen?
I mean, I have rally track and I use World Streamer Plugin because it is ~20km long. What world streamer does is it moves me after every 1km back to 0.0.0 of the world. And this is the moment when Clouds at screen reloads (visual change). Is any solution possible to avoid this and keep them look exacly the same no matter if ride normally or being moved 1km back by streamer?

 

I upgraded to 2018.3 release today, I don't know if that's relavant or not, but thought I should mention it. When I added WM to my project I got a few alert messages that I thought I should pass on to you.

This is not a situation where I need you to respond, I simply thought you'd want to know.

Have a great day


Assets\WeatherMaker\Prefab\Scripts\Extensions\WeatherMakerUNetScript.cs(11,30): warning CS0618: 'NetworkIdentity' is obsolete: 'The high level API classes are deprecated and will be removed in the future.'

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Assets\WeatherMaker\Prefab\Scripts\Extensions\WeatherMakerUNetScript.cs(13,43): warning CS0618: 'NetworkBehaviour' is obsolete: 'The high level API classes are deprecated and will be removed in the future.'

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Assets\WeatherMaker\Demo\DemoResources\Scripts\WeatherMakerNetworkDemoPlayerScript.cs(8,56): warning CS0618: 'NetworkBehaviour' is obsolete: 'The high level API classes are deprecated and will be removed in the future.'

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Assets\WeatherMaker\Prefab\Scripts\Extensions\WeatherMakerUNetScript.cs(62,10): warning CS0618: 'ClientRpcAttribute' is obsolete: 'The high level API classes are deprecated and will be removed in the future.'

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Assets\WeatherMaker\Prefab\Scripts\Extensions\WeatherMakerUNetScript.cs(71,10): warning CS0618: 'ClientRpcAttribute' is obsolete: 'The high level API classes are deprecated and will be removed in the future.'

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Assets\WeatherMaker\Prefab\Scripts\Manager\WeatherMakerConfigurationScript.cs(261,17): warning CS0618: 'NetworkBehaviour' is obsolete: 'The high level API classes are deprecated and will be removed in the future.'

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Assets\WeatherMaker\Prefab\Scripts\Manager\WeatherMakerConfigurationScript.cs(261,84): warning CS0618: 'NetworkBehaviour' is obsolete: 'The high level API classes are deprecated and will be removed in the future.'

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Assets\WeatherMaker\Prefab\Scripts\Manager\WeatherMakerConfigurationScript.cs(277,17): warning CS0618: 'NetworkBehaviour' is obsolete: 'The high level API classes are deprecated and will be removed in the future.'

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Assets\WeatherMaker\Prefab\Scripts\Manager\WeatherMakerConfigurationScript.cs(277,84): warning CS0618: 'NetworkBehaviour' is obsolete: 'The high level API classes are deprecated and will be removed in the future.'

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Assets\WeatherMaker\Prefab\Scripts\Manager\WeatherMakerScript.cs(226,53): warning CS0618: 'NetworkManager' is obsolete: 'The high level API classes are deprecated and will be removed in the future.'

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Assets\WeatherMaker\Prefab\Scripts\Manager\WeatherMakerScript.cs(499,17): warning CS0618: 'NetworkIdentity' is obsolete: 'The high level API classes are deprecated and will be removed in the future.'

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Assets\WeatherMaker\Prefab\Scripts\Manager\WeatherMakerScript.cs(499,65): warning CS0618: 'NetworkIdentity' is obsolete: 'The high level API classes are deprecated and will be removed in the future.'

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Assets\WeatherMaker\Prefab\Scripts\Manager\WeatherMakerScript.cs(502,60): warning CS0618: 'NetworkIdentity' is obsolete: 'The high level API classes are deprecated and will be removed in the future.'

 

This is nothing to worry about, the messages are simply because unity is depreciating unet. It is safe to ignore it.

 

Cool. I thought it best to mention it.

 

This will be fixed in the volumetric cloud update which is coming out this week!

 

ooh I'm excited about the new volumetric clouds! can we get results with the quality of the clouds seen in red dead redemption 2??

 

Hello,

I'm having an odd situation with a new game, I add the WeatherMakerPrefab and the moment I run the game I get the following two errors. Please let me know what I should do.

I am running Unity 2018.3 Let me know what other info you need.

EDIT: I just created a new project with just Weather Maker added. I placed the prefab into the scene, ran it and got the same two errors.


null buffer passed to RemoveCommandBuffer
UnityEngine.Light:RemoveCommandBuffer()
DigitalRuby.WeatherMaker.WeatherMakerShadowMapScript:OnDestroy() (at Assets/WeatherMaker/Prefab/Scripts/Manager/WeatherMakerShadowMapScript.cs:152)

---------------------------

ArgumentNullException: Value cannot be null.
Parameter name: _unity_self
UnityEngine.Rendering.CommandBuffer.Dispose (System.Boolean disposing) (at C:/buildslave/unity/build/Runtime/Export/RenderingCommandBuffer.cs:32)
UnityEngine.Rendering.CommandBuffer.Dispose () (at C:/buildslave/unity/build/Runtime/Export/RenderingCommandBuffer.cs:22)
UnityEngine.Rendering.CommandBuffer.Release () (at C:/buildslave/unity/build/Runtime/Export/RenderingCommandBuffer.cs:48)
DigitalRuby.WeatherMaker.WeatherMakerShadowMapScript.OnDestroy () (at Assets/WeatherMaker/Prefab/Scripts/Manager/WeatherMakerShadowMapScript.cs:158)