Fog Volume 3

Thanks now my clouds aren't hiding and it seems to run a bit faster too.

 

Nice! Here is the scene attached. I have added some more slides to the documentation to explain more in detail the concept of "Surrogates". Here is
This scene is using that:


You will find some variants:


Cheers and have fun

 

@IanStanbridge Humm, just noticed that you are not the user that wanted toony clouds, hehe. It was @BinaryLegend

 

Any word on the asset store release @David_MG ? I think Unity was tied up with GDC causing delays on a number of assets I've been waiting for. Some of them have emailed asking about their asset to get it approved shortly afterwards, might be worth a shot!

 

I've tried the new VR demo, and the performance is indeed incredible. The difference between looking at the floor and looking at the sky is about 0.5ms on my GTX 1070 (3.5ms sky vs 3ms floor). If there's no performance hit incurred by Fog Volume when looking at the floor then those are some incredible results. But even if there is, it's still very much usable, and means there's room for optimization.

It has one leftover eyesore - the horizontal stripes near the horizon (which I assume are due to exponential way of sampling that I saw mentioned somewhere) get really distracting when tilting the head (btw, do you have access to a VR headset? I assume you do but it's not impossible that you made these VR demos without actually having VR gear ). I'm totally oblivious to code behind it so I'll just throw this out there - maybe some randomization could be applied to the sampling rays based on the angle to the sky plane?

Unrelated to VR, I've noticed that in a lot of demos clouds have a noticeable flat bottom. Could this be solved by introducing a region of user-definable thickness at the volume boundaries, that would apply a gradient of increasing attenuation to the fog, or something like that? (I don't have the asset yet so I might be getting ahead of myself, maybe something like that is already in there)

 

@bgrz Thanks so much for your comment.
Flat bottom, yes. That can be improved now. I just have to edit the scenes.
The twinkling horizon: not enough resolution I would have to do variable coverage to make the horizon fully covered by clouds. I think that would fix the issue. Coverage is not variable atm. We only have one parameter for the whole volume.
I do have a VIVE. With a failing chinese cable causing red noise in the whole screen, but yes xD

@mons00n But you know what? I'm glad this happened. Because of my desperation I felt motivated enough to move my ass and build my own store. Now I can offer you INSTANT updates at any time. You find a bug? Tell me the problem and if it is easy to solve, I will fix it in few hours. That is absolutely fantastic.

 

ha! You said you'd give an asset store voucher if we purchase it from your store correct?

 

Yes Sir, as soon as it is available in Unity store. Im also distributing discount coupons to owners of the old version right and left all the day

 

It is already Check this (editing Scotland Demo):

 

Nice!

 

@bgrz

 

Oh yeah, GDC would most likely explain it. I'll ping the team.

 

Thank you so much! Checking them out right away!

 

There seems to be a missing script on the main camera, but other than that it looks great!
http://imgur.com/a/RWCHR

 

Ah, that is the tonemap from the standard package

 

Oh, btw, I have to make my UI design compatible with the bright theme!

 

I know one easy way to make the design compatible with the bright theme: don't use any custom colors

 

EditorGUIUtility.isProSkin is there, or you can make a theme switch for the user and point it to the built-in themes which generally are auto-corrected when you switch between pro/light skin.

 

Thanks @LaneFox! That's what I need

 

Okaaaay, this one was easy

​

 

Thanks! Its good that you guys try me with all of your challenges

Sorry for not giving more detail on this before. I have something for you.




Worried about size? This one is HUGE


See the camera far plane I had to set:


Camera far plane to 30000 to see the whole volume

Grab the demo here and let us know how it was in your machine.

 

Hi David,

We just grabbed Fog Volume from your website, and we're getting an unexpected performance issue. If we drop a fog volume (either creating one or one form the demo scenes) into a basic test scene with few objects, it all seems fine. The fog seems to be taking up very little CPU time in the profiler. However, placing one of these volumes into our actual game scenes results in a massive CPU overhead. I've screenshotted the profiler and attached it below.



Am I missing something? I have the Fog Volume Renderer component on the camera, and just created a fog volume from the GameObject menu. The scene view also runs incredibly slow whenever the volume is on screen.

Also, I noticed that it won't display correctly if temporal antialiasing from the Unity Post Processing pack is enabled. Is there some way for the fog to work with temporal AA?

 

First of all. Thanks so much for purchasing.

Okay, don't panic! I believe that if you uncollapse Culling until you find the bad guy, I bet you will find this function call: FindObjectsOfType(). That function has to be used very carefully.



Do you have "Primitives" enabled?
If this is the case check that you have "Real-time search" off

If you don't have that option that means you don't have the latest version. If so, update from my web (only main package)

I have to add this button to the pointlight tab too. If you have pointlights ON, it will be searching all the time, and that is very very bad. Im going to add the same option to that (Real-time search) right now.

Yes, that is explained in the documentation and it is totally normal since that view is rendered at full resolution. I will try to add an option to make it renderable in scene view optionally.

About temporal AA. I didn't know that. And yes, they don't work well together. You messed up my day very early in the morning

Thanks for the reports!

 

btw, its been 22 days since I submitted this. 22!!!



It will be better not to throw any opinion or feeling here. What do you think? Activating Zen mode in 3... 2... 1

 

Ok I ran the FastClouds demo on a couple PCs:

• Asus laptop with Nvida Geforce GT745M 2GB ====> 32 to 62 FPS
• Alienware Alpha i3 GTX 860M variant 2GB GDDR5 ====> 200 to 260 FPS

Clearly my laptop is weak!

 

Thanks

 

I told you to email them! =)

 

Ah, yep, that and the option in point lights did the trick. Thanks!

Oh right, I must have missed that. We might just use a script or something to turn them on at runtime so they're off while editing.

Hahaha, apologies! Do you think you know why that might be the case? I quite like the temporal AA in the Unity postprocessing pack, so it'd be nice to be able to use it along with your fog.

 

I already did it yesterday

Humm, I have not had the revelation yet ^_^

 

Congrats on building your own asset store and all, but hopefully you can poke the folks at Unity to get this into the main asset store as well. I am interested in using this with a Unity-based virtual world called Space, but they won't consider adding it to their whitelist until after an asset store release.

 

Well, Im not sure if this will be available at the asset store someday. After 23 days waiting it has been declined.
Deep breath and Zen....

 

What reason did they give?

 

I was holding out for the Unity Store, but I can always buy from your store too, so it's Unity's loss I guess.

Before I buy though, a couple of the demo scenes don't work on my MacPro with the AMD GPUs (I get a black screen with only the fps counter in the corner). The 2 that don't work for me are called NEBULA and MORNING. I'm not sure what Morning is, but I think Nebula is the one with point lights in it – that is definitely a feature I'd need…. All the other demos seem to work fine with decent framerates (although tbh, the demo itself sometimes freezes rather than return to the menu). Well, decent except the extreme quality of course, but I'm looking to do offline rendering.

 

I've got similar issues on a Mac with Nvidia graphics. I held off reporting them because I have a non-standard GPU in my mac (GTX970 added to an old mac pro) and didnt want to sound bug alarms if it was an issue with my system/drivers only.

My symptoms are similar to yours but not quite the same - eg Nebula does show the cloud but none of the point lights show up. Morning shows the rest of the scene but the actual fog volume isnt rendered, and the same with some of the other 'nature' type scenes. The scenes where clouds are inside a glass show cabinet dont render properly either. Simple scenes where I am flying through clouds or the atmosphere of venus seem to work.

 

Most likely there was a minor infraction of the submission rules, some "T" that wasn't crossed somewhere. See if you can can find it and resubmit.

Sometimes I think store employees must feel they need to justify their job by rejecting things. There have been a few senseless rejections lately.

Make a tweak, resubmit, and probably the next reviewer will pass it.

 

That Venus demo is making me try to swipe the monitor with my credit card.

 

Oops that reminds me I forgot to mention that my mac error report is in regard to actually loading the demo scenes in the Unity editor, not downloading executable demos, since I purchased the asset from Davids site some days back.

 

I'm sorry to hear it, hopefully they provided some notes or guidance to help understand the decision and get it accepted.

 

Thats why I asked what reason they gave - we usually hear about the bad decisions that are certainly made at times by the store but there are also good, test-based reasons why assets may initially fail to be approved.

 

That, or they were testing on one a machine with one of the nVidia or AMD GPU's that posters in this thread reported serious issues with (black screens or demo scenes not working have got to be some kind of red flag). Hopefully there's useful information in the response, and the communications blackout is over and done with.

 

Indeed. Although since I'm one of the people who reported an issue I should probably restate that I suspect its got more to do with mac/opengl than the model of GPU. ie I havent heard of any windows problems. In any case I'm sure that a correctly carried out asset-store approval would certainly red flag lack of compatibility in cases where actual compatibility varies from the stated compatibility/level of compatibility that the asset author intended.

 

"Due to possible compatibility issues between Unity versions, we would ask that you remove all Standard Assets from your submission. If Standard Assets are required for demo scenes, or to achieve a certain effect, please list which packages the users should import in your README or other documentation."

The upload tool builds a package but you don't see its content. Everything in the project is automatically included. So you have to:
A: Delete everything before submitting
B: Start a new project only with the content you want to upload

I have a clean project, but the Standard assets were in there too. So, I guess that the damn tool packaged everything. That's what happened, I think.

Wow, there are a lot of messages, I will read them later. Im submitting a new version to my server. And eventually to the store if I collect the required energy for such adventure.

Regards.

 

Yeah, larsbertram just had the same problem with review of an update for his AFS shader (which was delayed for a long time). Specifically, the issue related to use of the first person controller from Standard Assets in the demo.

So that's the new credo with assets - that is, don't use the Standard Assets any more - as over the years customers repeatedly got hung up over Standard Assets inclusions.

 

Yes, my programmer already fixed that issue. He made the menu and that bug
I have to update the build. Btw, he works on Mac and everything works fine on his machine. It could be the postprocess, who knows. I see differences between versions (using post processing stack). I have just updated many parameters, because Eye adaption returns a very dark image in the latest (Post-processing Stack 1.0.1)

Absolutely. You can include standard package stuff, and depending the day and wind direction, it can be rejected or not. I think dices play an important role in the process.
The evidence (screenshot from the asset store):

You can, I have implemented stripe on my store No excuses!
But thanks, many people like that one a lot. I remember playing it during more than 15-20 minutes. It was too awesome and addictive

 

If you can find out exactly what mac hardware he has, and version of macOS, and let us know, that might help narrow down the issue too.

I will do quite a lot of testing over the weekend with the mac and also have a windows pc which I can use to do comparisons to see what bits arent working properly on the mac. I will post here if I discover anything useful.

 

@elbows okay. I told him to visit the thread.

btw, lets do it?

 

Thanks I will also try a different sort of mac at work in an attempt to rule out any quirks of my system.

 

I would suggest you to refresh your installation. Delete Assets/FogVolume and redownload from the web

 

It's been already updated with the fix.

Server package updated to 3.1.3

 

I updated to 3.1.2 and it was the same as 3.1.1.

I was able to narrow the problem down quite a bit though. The scenes that dont render in the game view in editor on my mac do render in the scene view! This gave me a clue and sure enough if I turn downscaling to 0 in these scenes then it starts to render in the gameview as well (but obviously slowly).

I cannot say that the downscaling or FogVolumeSurrogate is completely broken on my mac though because some scenes that use downscaling do work. So it must be some combination of FogVolume features/settings that causes downsampling/surrogate issue.

Here are the scenes that work for me without needing to change any downscaling settings:

Infinite cloud
Interior Primitives
Pillars
Pillars Insane
Venus Atmosphere

The nebula scenes render stuff without needing to turn off downscaling but I think there is a point light issue that I will deal with separately when I have time in next few days. The mock-up and Showroom scenes have some other issue that I will deal with separately too.

Scenes that dont render in the game view on my mac unless I disable downscaling, when they then start to render properly:

Cartoony
Landscape Shadows
Moonlight
Morning
Scotland
Sunset
Time of day transition
VIVE Clouds

Thats with everything imported (including project settings) into a fresh project in Unity 5.5.2f1. Hope it gives some clue as to what might be malfunctioning for me! If it does not offer enough clues I will keep studying and hacking away over the weekend. I have only tried inside the editor so far, havent tried building any scenes.

Cheers. I owned both your fog assets since v1 and it was me who asked about clouds back when you had time to release v2 so I am obviously amazed and delighted at how far it has evolved for version 3!