Fog Volume 3

We've been having the exact same problem for several versions - I've spent a lot of time looking into it; @JonDadley - that fix looks like what we need, but it absolutely has to be a clone of the later loaded volume?

 

Thinking: if it does need to be a clone of the later loaded volume, this sounds to me like shader variants & stripping being over-aggressive. I believe we did include via Graphics Settings the FV shaders already, but I don't know if there is others it depends on. @DavidMiranda may know?

 

@AFrisby I can't say definitively that it *has* to be a clone but this is what lead me to think that's the case:

I have 2 fogs in my main game scene. One has just a gradient, the other has noise and a gradient. I copied one into my hacky first-loaded scene and *that* fog would appear in the build but the second would not. It was only by cloning both fogs that they would both appear in build. It could be that you could make a new fog with the exact same settings and that would work but at that point you may as well clone them.

Yes I suspected it could over-aggressive shader varient stripping too. I added the main FV shader to my "always includes" but it put the build time up to a crazy unacceptable level so I abandoned that.

Either way it'd be useful to get a proper solution as this hack isn't really practical for any kind of released project that uses FV3 extensively.

 

About to find out if stripping is the issue - I'm compiling all of the shaders into our graphics settings embed (turns out there's more than one shader here...), I'll update in 6 hours when this build finishes.

 

Well, the build has been running for 15 hours so far, and counting (43gb of shader variants ... so far) - I'm guessing FV is using keywords to enable/disable features, while there are obvious performance impacts, it'd be nice to get a 'ubershader' variant of the FV core shaders; which still computed and discarded features which are disabled to avoid this problem.

 

Well, we're currently 44 hours into the build (good thing I don't need that machine for anything right now...) I'm probably going to assume this isn't going to run when it does finish compiling, currently up to 63.8gb of shader variants.

I do have a possible solution for David (and well, us too.) - the issue we have is that the fog volumes are packaged outside the main build (with shaders stored in bundles), while the camera lives inside the main build. In our case, this is somewhat non-negotiable.

I think it may be possible to include just the variants needed in the bundles by actually compiling the shader's SetKeywords into one flat shader with a unique name (i.e. removing the #pragma multi_compiles, and just enabling or disabling those blocks). A couple of other packages on the asset store presently do this (presumably to get around issues with SetKeywords bloating builds since 5.4).

I did however, add a Unity feedback post for Unity reverting this nonsense with precompiled variants. Or at least supporting non-variant compiled shaders. You can read that & vote for that here: https://feedback.unity3d.com/suggestions/please-revert-shader-variant-precompilation

 

Thanks for the hack! I was loading all the Fog Volumes into my bootstrap scene and then dynamically enabling them depending on which scene the user was in but that seemed even more hacky than your solution. I'll give that a shot! Is he more responsive via his email, then?

 

Yes, David was pretty quick to reply to emails. I'm not sure he's getting alerts for this thread or currently has much time to check it.

 

Hi David, will it work on Linux (OpenGL) ? I'm trying to make a build, but it's just keep crashing on launch, trying to understand what could be the reason, is it because of Fog Volume or something else.

 

Hi David!
Sorry for my english. I'm trying to use VolumetricFog3 with Unity Line Renderer.
Standard LinerRenderer is drawn ONLY in the Loсal Alignment mode when FogVolumeRenderer is working on the camera. If I turn off FogVolumeRenderer, the LineRenderer's mode is (as configured in the settings) View.
Version of Unity: 2017.2.0p4
How to fix it?

 

Assets/FogVolume/Scripts/FogVolumePrimitive.cs(3,7): error CS0246: The type or namespace name `UnityEditor' could not be found. Are you missing an assembly reference?

When im try to build my game on newst update

 

Hey David, have you managed to test a simple scrolling fog volume (noise and gradient enabled) on mobile?
Could you suggest a few settings to tweak to optimized it? I build a sample scene and its only running at 9 ~ 10FPS on most mobile devices that I have tested.

 

I also tried to disable gradient, but for some reason now the fog is not being rendered at all.

 

Anyone having trouble building this for live remove the "using UnityEditor" in FogVolumePrimitive.cs and it will fix your compilation errors. It's not used in that file anyway.

 

I can't help but notice that David hasn't posted here since mid-October - is there a different forum I'm not aware of? I asked a question quite awhile ago and have yet to receive an answer.

 

Probably best to send an email to his support email address. He may not be getting notifications of posts on this thread.

 

this product is misleading. Everything that is build is TINY in scale. in a normally proportioned screen the clouds look like S*** because in order to get them not to repeat you have to set the scale of the noise very low after that the detail layer is just not enough to get a decent look.
if i apply all the settings in the tutorial i get small puffy repeating clouds. and i cannot scale that with normal transform.

or im missing something.

@Unityaware thats a unity zoom factor issue it often goes away if you "scroll out" with your mouse wheel.

edit: Ok i figured it out but the sliders leave too much space for completely going into the wrong direction.

 

anyone has any idea how i can solve the issue in the first picture.... i have a downscale of 2 and use depth because if i dont the clouds get cut off in a visually weird way (as if they were only one layer of bilboard (like in the second picture)
the only option i found was to use no downscale which is just too expensive for VR

 

In the latest version you will find subtractive primitives. The subtractive mode is what you need to open a whole in the middle of the cloud.

World distance is not what determine performance. The GPU doesn't know about distance, only about operations per pixel.
Skydome? Do you mean the skydome material? No issues with that.

 

1. That was explained in the documentation
2. I never said that Fog Volume is a Time of day, sky thing.
3. Okay, I stop here, I totally lost the motivation to continue with this

 

Hey David, are you're going to stop the development? Personally, the asset is great for what its purpose. Its probably one of the best, if not the best volumetric fog solution on the store right now

 

Thanks, mate.
No, I won't stop the development. I just had to stop replying that message, and the others. I will be replying them in the next days.

I have tested it, yes, but with the same results than you. As noted here , uniform fog is the only type that can run smoothly on mobile.

 

That's a bit problematic. If I package everything together, the package will be too big. If I were a customer, I would like to import only the base one. And the smaller, the better. Also,my upload speed is really bad, around 20kb. So dropbox is the most comfortable platform.

That's 100% possible. I can add that to the planning.

Fog Volume works fine with prefabs. It will try to find what it needs to work, which are: one camera and one directional light:

The GPU power required depends on the settings you use. If you use uniform fog, it will be super light. For now, webgl is not supported.

 

Not being shown in builds should be fixed now with the latest version.
About timings, it takes a long time sometimes. The problem comes from the crazy amount of shader variants. The only trick I know is to comment those that you won't use. This also makes me to rethink when to add one more option. Because of that, Im using more ifs lately. Dirty but we have no choice.

Hi,
That was motivated mainly for the bad management of the store with comments and ratings. Comments from version 1 were shown as if they belongs to the current version. Pretty bad. If you want, I can make you a discount to purchase from my webpage. Mail me your FV2 invoice.

Heya. Well, writing a custom attenuation function... yes, ofc. I just need the math to do that

 

Yes! We had to introduce some limitations with the amount of lights and primitives allowed, but yeah

This is fantastic. I vote to include your scenes in the package. What do you think?

Yes, that's it, the camera has to be children of another. That's how it works.

Brilliant! wetcircuit has officialy got her master degree on FV3

That effect is already implemented as you can see here. It has nothing to do with light, it is just a postprocess based on fog density. VR compatible, yes, at least it was months ago

Is that fixed in p4?

 

Okay, I have introduced some improvements to that part. It will be possible to move that object to another place. Thanks.

 

Hi David!

For a project I work on, I want to make a flight in clouds, but have encountered a problem:
If I have a camera in the cloud volume I could see a rectangular hole. I think it happens because the far clipping is too small. But I can`t change clipping in this project and need clouds without a serious limitation by distance.


I have two ideas for fixing it:
a) Have a "fix cloud position mode" with float box. Then I can link volume by x and z-axis to my camera and fly unlimited. For example, move a small volume like a mask:
- link to a video
b) Or have an offset parameter(like the scroll but without time) and set it myself through code.


Best,
Viktor

 

I had the same problem with fog volumes not showing up in build, Will update and try again.

Now regarding fog volumes, I got a question that I can't find a clear answer for in the documentation.

I am using simple uniform fog volumes, around 5 of them. When I'm inside of them, it causes my particles to be almost invisible, as if they blend with the fog.

What would be the best way of seeing my particles like I should, dear FV3 users / David ?

Thanks.

 

I updated Fog Volume to the latest version.

Turns out it is still acting weird once built. I have a uniform greyish fog, and not only they appear only when visibility is significantly lower, but they also appear uniformly white. Not at all like I am seeing it in editor play mode. here's some screenshots.

 

Hey David -

Could you consider editing the .shader from within a .cs script directly? (literally writing the variants to disk as separate .shaders) - this'd get it to work with assetbundles (which it doesn't behave right now due to variants) - it's a bit messy, but it does mean you could go crazy with the options without worrying about variant messes.

 

Hi all, could anyone explain please the way gradients textures are applied to Fog Volume? (specifically, one without Volume Fog). I understand the way alpha channel is processed (pretty straight forward), but the blending mode of the texture itself, affecting hue, saturation and value (to a smaller degree) remains mysterious to me. Also, using a smaller, tileable texture creates a different effect than using a larger texture that simply tiles said texture (this may have to do with the dimensions of the fog volume being asymmetrical to those of the texture).

 

Hey everyone, mine is probably the simplest question so if anyone can answer it kindly, I'll be thankful.
I have imported the fog volume asset into my unity project but I can't see any option in the editor to create fog volume.
I don't see any prefab within the fog volume asset folder either, that I can drag and drop into the scene..
Maybe I'm missing something very simple but I have tried downloading the asset and restarting unity but nothing works.

 

Have you looked in the GameObject->Create Other menu?

 

I checked under GameObject but no menu called "create other" exists, or any menu containing fog volume.

As a side note: I used to have fog volume working randomly one time before in my last project.. But in my current project I can't get it to work/install..

 

If it is installed, you should be able to Control-click in the hierarchy and the create Game Object will appear. Under "Create Other" is where you should see Fog Volume.

 

Hello, crazy fact for those who have problem showing Fog in builds :

Sometime (not work all the time) disabling "fog volume renderer" component on camera before lauching building process solve the problem. Note the building process automaticaly enable this component so you have to disable it each time you build.

You can also set the "Downscale" of the "fog volume renderer" to 1. This trick work all the time but is very bad for performences.

Note : I am using fog vol v3.2.1p4

Hoping this problem find a definitive solution...

 

One more tips for same problem : restart unity before building can help

 

Thank-you liven999 !!!
I just was getting crazy with this problem!

 

That did not work but I deleted the whole folder and reimported and this time it worked
I had tried reimporting before which didn't work. The only thing different this time was that I removed some error giving scripts from my project, cleared the log and then reimported fog volume. And this time it's working, I can see the create Fog volume button now

 

Can you maybe tell more about this setup? and the ocean that is used?
Want to make a long sunset scene with an ocean. The sun does not move.

 

Hey everyone -

I shot David an email about this, but there is a relatively simple fix to this issue I discovered.

In FogVolume.cs CreateMaterial() there is a line which sets HideFlags to DoNotSave - removing this line, and forcing FV to recreate the materials (restarting Unity'll do) will cause it to behave correctly when exporting/building.

 

Thank you!

 

Can I change the color of noise? Seems that setting FogMainColor sets color of the "uniform" part only, not the noisy one.

 

I tried that , Still getting all-white fog volumes.

 

I just downloaded and imported this asset into a 2017.3.0f3 project. Is this asset not yet updated to run on the latest version of Unity? Do I have to downgrade this project to use this asset?

 

I also tried disabling the fog volume renderer before building, as well as rebooting unity before doing the build. Not working. I guess I'll have to find another solution...

 

Hi, I've seen your Asset on the store and it looks amazing but before actually buying it, i'd have a couple of questions:
1) Can i use it on an openworld as only a cloud system without losing too much performance?
2) Can it be rendered from multiple cameras?
3) Is it compatible with Unity 2017.3?
Thank you in advance.

 

1).... The short answer is "yes, but it takes a little effort…" – essentially losing features that give the fog shadows and colors, as well as smooth slices. That doesn't mean it looks bad. It is a simplified version of the fog system (and the interface hides entire sections when they are toggled off). You still need to be cutthroat with the volumetric settings to get the frame rate, and then build up the noise (and there are a LOT of settings) until you get it looking whispy and natural again. Just my opinion: the clouds that give you great frame rates somehow aren't just a matter of turning off bells and whistles, you'll need to rethink the aesthetics and build clouds that look good within the limits and with fewer depth layers…. This is a completely procedural system, so adjusting the scale in one setting is a rabbit hole of adjusting other settings to balance. It's not as if you can just click some buttons and get the "lite" version of the presets.

 

Hmmm, for me it was fine (did my H++ project on Unity 2017.3.0) - no errors on import.

 

So... support for FV3 is dead?