Fog Volume 3

Also rainbows….. RAINBOWS!!!!!!

 

hehe, yeah. Ive thinking in how Im doing that. It will change in the future. I will integrate that into the light absorption rather than adding it on top

 

David worked out the cause of the point lights not showing problem yesterday as well - a marathon, poor guy! Hopefully he feels better once it is all fixed and we make very pretty things with it!

 

Well well well. I have something.
Emotionally, this is a mix of happiness and anger after knowing what was happening. Seems like _CameraDepthTexture is inverted in target level 3 O_O
Solved doing the following:

Code (CSharp):

1. #if  UNITY_REVERSED_Z!=1
2.      Depth = 1.0f - Depth;
3.  
4. #endif

4 days, more than 70 hours of suffering to find it.


And if I take care of Android texture format, I can solve it too:


@elbows Thanks! We should test this version on your machine, my friend.

 

How do I create my own 3DNoise texture? Also, I'm apparently blind and I can't find anywhere to assign Noise Volume except to enable the Debug interface.

 

I don't know another method than coding it in C#

 

Yeah, I just didn't know how to serialize it. Figured it out, AssetDatabase.CreateAsset().

 

Glorious news - the fix David came up with after many hours work regarding scene collision not working on some platforms such as mac was successful, at least on the mac I have at home (old style mac pro with modern GTX970 added and nvidia webdrivers used). I will test it on an imac at work tomorrow but it's looking very promising indeed. I think he has other stuff to refactor too before releasing a fixed version but it certainly looks like this problem will not exist for much longer

 

Yay! Great news!!!

But I am throwing out all that gritty architecture and dystopian gloominess, and going in a carebears and unicorns direction now…. Did I mention there are RAINBOWS???!!!! lol

 

Well, 3.1.4 is available for the petit comité from my website. Extended package and documentation are also up to day.
We will have to start now testing more hardware, but in theory:
In this new version, Depth will be correctly generated on every platform even on those weak iMacs ^_^
There are limitations, if we activate too many features on small machines it will explode at some point Because of that I unplugged Pointlights if shader level detected is 3. Pointlights use many large arrays, that's the problem.

 

-Does this work with an infinite world setup (including coordinate reset to prevent floating point errors on big position offset)?

-It would be great if this works correctly with atmospheric scattering. It is really hard to make separate packages to work which provide sky color, haze (mie, rayleigh scattering), and fog (not the same thing), all work together correctly.

 

Yes. Refer to the "Fast Clouds" scene as example of extremely far horizon

Absolutely, but not yet.
I wanted to be clear about this. As explained in the documentation, Fog Volume IS NOT a sky/atmospheric simulator or TOD system. It is not even a cloud renderer
It makes fog, some noise and it attempts to illuminate all of that mess in a proper way.

That said, I don't discard your request. It sounds like a natural evolution of this product. My immediate plan is to focus ONLY on hardware compatibility and bug fixing during a long period of time. I won't add more features until the current product gets fully polished.

 

the joy of noise.


I guess primitives are cubes-only, even if you use a sphere? Otherwise it might make a cool planet cloud layer.

 

Seriously, this is absolutely amazing. You will have to teach me how to do that
Would you like to share the preset with us?

ps. Box only, yes (for now)

 

um…. I've probably over-written it 1000x…. but I am narrowing down how to tweak the noise patterns (it's like my one useful OCD superpower, lol)…. What do I do, just share the scene file?

btw, does anyone know how to turn off Unity's autosave on play? That is suddenly the most annoying thing. :/

 

I have an awesome idea. What if we make that cloud a living painting for the Showroom?
Don't forget to make backups! I have lost a few awesome experiments for not saving when I should
Yes, rar the scene and share it here if you want.

Unity autosave on play? First time I hear about such thing

 

ok will do….

The scene saving must have something to do with this error…. I thought it wasn't normal.

(D'oh, nevermind. It was a specific asset autosaving the scene, even though I'm not using it in the scene. )

 

How many primitives are you using? I see an error related with that. I forgot to limit the array size ^_^ Dont exceed 32. Also, you should update to the latest from my web

 

I just tried the one primitive to see if it could be a planet layer… I emailed you to join the petit comité.

 

I have a few scenes to share… Sorry for bombing this thread guys, I'll try to keep it useful from here on.

Dry Ice – the trick here is that I am only using 10 slices and I've stretched the Z depth to exaggerate the separation of the layers. I'm not sure if it would be possible to use in a scene, but the wisps were so cool…. I posted a video too.

The zip contains a scene with Fog Volume 3 and no post-fx. Looks exactly as you see here.

 

Thanks! You put some effort on this
Don't you have the version from yesterday? I LOVED that one

 

Wait… I'm building up to it.

Similar to the last one, but a bit more "presence".

Ectoplasm

 

Here is the one from yesterday (evolved slightly). The blue is just Unity's background color.

Cloudlayer

 

Superb! Thanks

 

3.1.5 Is available from my site
If you experienced the collision issue, this should fix it.

 

I think it's been a few days since I mentioned how amazing this plugin is….

 

Space blood
Don't forget to activate Dark matter gravity

 

Also comes in blueberry flavored…..

 

woah, fantastic. Real nebulae probably are not that saturated, but cool anyway.

 

Heya, one more update. Wetcircuit reported errors on volume creation. This version should fix that problem.
Another user emailed me regarding a need he had. FV is limited to use a camera tagged as MainCamera, and that was not possible for him. So there are changes in this field.
Refer to these slides to learn about the new additions:

• Camera Selector
• New in 3.1.6

Product page​

 

Does this run in VR for the vive and rift? If so anything special that needs to be done for it to work.

 

Are you really both charging Unity Asset Store customers $5 more for the initial product (compared to what's on your web site), and then charging a $5 surcharge to asset store customers for access to current version updates (the documentation and current page 1 post in this thread are specific to a newer version that's available in the asset store).

I realized that you were selling this directly on your site, certainly understandable considering that really long wait for release. After purchasing today, I noticed that the documentation was for a newer version, and so I visited the site to find out how I could submit my Unity invoice to gain access to updates. I discovered that you're not only charging $5 more on the asset store, but you're charging asset store customers $5 for access to the current version updates. Am I misunderstanding something?

 

You understood it correctly. But I'm not sure if this is the correct place to talk about free market economy.... In any case, you are free to decide where to buy. But of course, you should know your options (read the documentation) before you buy.
And about my web service. I've been offering access to the updates for free until today. I announced that from april 1 the access would cost 5$. Why? Because I have to manually manage dozens of discount coupons weekly and pay a webmaster + ftp to run the service. There are expenses, time and money.

 

I went through the documentation at least twice and I wasn't aware of this. Learning about it today sounds like an April Fools kind of thing really. You should ditch the concept, it'll hurt you more than you gain, IMHO. If it really costs you extra $5 on top of $50 then it should be included in the asset's cost (which, interestingly, makes the price on the site the same as on the asset store and everything fits together perfectly - economy ftw).

I waited for Asset Store release since it's THE place to buy assets. I bought Fog Volume 3 instantly as a gesture of support - I'm not even using it yet. I was one of the first people to buy Fog Volume 3 from the asset store, might've even been the #1. Right now I feel cheated.

 

Thanks for the support. I offer an extra which simply consists on giving you earlier access. That requires some infrastructure and I have to pay to run that. If you don't want it don't buy it, but there is no cheating on offering you this option.

 

btw, yes, of course it is included. If you get it from the web you will have lifetime access to the updates

 

Unfortunately the main problem is the speed of updating of the asset store. Because of the problems with it, developers are forced to try to solve problems with publication in one way or another and because of the limited financial capabilities of developers this creates additional problems for customers. I hope that Unity developers will find an opportunity to speed up the updating of their store.

 

The nebula look amazing. Now can cloud volumes emit light?
reading the doc I see that the volumetric shape is defined by cubes, do cube mesh emitted by particle emitter also work?
Also with that exponential resolution thing you're doing, can volumes close up be high enough resolution that one can use a red cube as volume definer to simulate a laser?

 

Thanks. Do you mean to affect lightmapping?

Humm, Im not sure. Can we add components to the emitted meshes? Fog Volume primitives require: scale, position and rotation. I don't know if we have that data in a spawned particle. If so, then it should be possible. Probably with some tweaks in the script or a new version of the primitive script to work on particles.

Lasers are too thin... but yeah, I think so. I have not tested such situation, but it should be possible.

 

Thanks for the replis David,

One extra question: does SSR show the fog volumes? Like are fog volumes a post effect and how do they interact with reflection probes also?

You can't add a script to the individual meshes as they're spawned using instancing or batched but they do have transform info. This would be mega powerful.

Can an mesh produce light that gets scattered in the fog volume? If so then the laser itself can be an emissive mesh and the volume does the light diffusion and glow at low voxel res.

No I meant can a cloud volume emit light that then affect the rest of the fog, as in, one of the property of a fog box is that it emits light.

 

This is a very very good question. I've never digged into SSR technique, but I bet it requires depth and probably normals from GBuffer to do the job. Maybe this is the reason why transparencies are not reflected.
I tested Postprocess stack and candela. First one doesn't reflect transparencies. Candela V3 seems to reflect the volume correctly when we don't use the camera script (FogVolumeRenderer.cs).
Candela V3:


Reflection probes:



These will render the original volume, not the downsampled one (done in camera script).
We have to set "Render in Scene View" in the camera script to true so the probes can see them. This is a new option recently added.


I will document all of this for the next update.

About light. There is no light interaction. All we can do is to fake light bounces with point-lights, as seen here:


Thanks for your questions!

 

I'm surprised reflection probes reflect the volumes - that's very nice - the angle is correct? Editor only or it works during runtime reflection baking?

I wasn't expecting clouds to affect geometry only wondering if cloud volumes can emit light that affect other cloud volumes. Point light affect the cloud volume?

I see in the demo that the fps drops a lot in the insane quality pilar of destiny, what causes such slowdown? voxel density? cost of noise? Is this made of cube volumes with a few octaves of perlin and a date to boundaries?

 

Hi there. It looks fantastic.
Is it efficient enough for a VR use(not mobile vr, but pc vr with gtx 1070+)?
Thanks

 

Looks great! Do you have a PC demo I can try?

 

https://docs.google.com/presentatio...RUcxpALkvUpo/present#slide=id.g20c2999ca1_0_0

https://docs.google.com/presentatio...RJCRUcxpALkvUpo/edit#slide=id.g1d174f2c90_2_0

I used 2 reflection probes in this box, in real time. Killing performance

Volumes don't emit light, they only receive. https://docs.google.com/presentatio...JCRUcxpALkvUpo/edit#slide=id.g1baa14f098_0_44

https://docs.google.com/presentatio...RJCRUcxpALkvUpo/edit#slide=id.g1cd63f034b_1_0
Fog Volume can be used as an offline renderer to go extreme like this:


Thanks!

 

So increasing the sample distance will increase fps?

 

Dude, you edit the message and then my reply has no sense xD

Yes, you increase distance and then you need fewer iterations, so its cheaper

 

Anyone tested Oculus?. My client says that its working but I don't believe him

 

I am testing it in Oculus now and it seems to be working. I'm weirdly having some performance issues in headset where the image gets laggy even though I have a decent framerate according to the stats window. Also, multipass rendering doesnt seem to be working the same in 3.1.6 vs 3.1.5 if that makes any sense. It has some weird left and right eye disparity going on. It seems like the changes to the matrices in the CommonInputs.cginc and Surrogate.shader might have messed it up somehow because reverting it back to the 3.1.5 version seems to fix the issue.

I'm using Unity 5.5.3 if that helps.

Thanks for the help.

 

@renardmf Thanks for the info!
Im blind now, I can't test stereo because my vive cable is lost somewhere in the atlantic ocean. Waiting for replacement since some weeks now.
There are too many different combinations of devices and rendering options that makes compatibility the most painful part of dev. A waste of time and a source of frustration for us when what we want is to provide more features...

I will check multipass as soon as I get my cable. 3.1.7 is ready for release, but I want to test the stereo pain first.

Thanks.