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

Any chance you can email me a repro project? support@digitalruby.com. I will get right on it, but I've been trying with trees and primitives with no luck so far.

 

well the demo's webgl so that's what it loaded lol

 

That is a very old version, I will take down that link until I get it fixed.

 

cool

 

I'd like to test your project on my computer. The description looks very cool. Can you post a demo of the latest version? Preferably, not a web player, but a standalone Windows demo.

 

Yes I will do that now. Will post back with a link.

 

Windows Demo is here: http://demo.digitalruby.com/weathermaker/download/WeatherMakerDemoWindows.zip

 

Wow, you are very fast!

There are shadows from the clouds! How long have I been looking for cloud shadows! The clouds themselves look voluminous, very beautiful! On my current PC Intel Pentium 4 3 GHz and the GeForce GT 730 demo will issue about 16-20 FPS, which is probably acceptable given the outdated PC components. I know that this is very outdated equipment. Later I will test the demo on a powerful computer.
I have a couple of questions:

1) Is source code included in the asset?

2) Are there any restrictions on the range of drawing objects? For example, a landscape (custom mesh-terrain, distant LOD) of 20x20 kilometers, which is visible entirely from anywhere in the world. Can any artifacts arise? How well does a skybox combine with a very large distance of visibility and objects at a great distance (tens of kilometers) from the camera?

3) The distance of drawing shadows from clouds is regulated separately from the distance of drawing shadows of other objects? Or to see the shadows of clouds at long distances, you need to have shadows drawn at this distance for all other objects?

I would appreciate answers!

 

Hello! HDRP support? Is this THE fastest on the store?

 

LWRP will come first, then HDRP. Q1-Q2 timetable.

 

1] All shader and script code provided
2] Large distances should be fine
3] You need to hack an internal Unity shader file to get cloud shadows over large distances, instructions are in the readme.txt file

For your computer specs, I would suggest to lower the quality setting which will improve performance. Tutorial here:

 

Fine! I am really impressed.

I see that the snow is not displayed inside the buildings if Null zones are used. As seen in the video lesson, if remove the Null zone, the snow will appear instantly. It will also disappear instantly if turn on the Null zone. I would like to be able to smooth the appearance and the disappearance of snow after activating / deactivating the Null zone. For example, a house in which there is no snow and the player will break the roof in it, after which the snow will gradually appear on the surfaces inside the building. In my game, a dynamic destructible environment is used and this feature would be very useful. What do you think about this? Such an opportunity may appear in the near future?

 

I really like what you've done with the clouds. It looks very natural, and I'm impressed!

But as games often deal with the supernatural, I wonder if there's an easy way to make a specific area, like the area above the camera location, quickly grow darker and more cloud filled, as opposed to changing the whole sky? I guess what I'd be looking for is a way to add to cloud density by using a mask that is panned to the correct location? Or something like that.

 

Should be as easy as adding a strength slider to the null zone. Will do for an update. Will have an animation function on the script.

 

Wow! That would be really very helpful! I will look forward to adding this feature!

 

Jeff,

I wanted to follow up on the shadow effect around my player issue.
I did some further testing and found the cause of the circular shadow surrounding my player.
It happens when there is fog set.
By turning down the "Fog Shadow Strength Factor" the shadow faded.

The default setting is .005

Adjusted setting to .0007


This fixed the issue.
Thanks,
David

 

Does changing the max ray length on the fog shadow properties help if you revert the fog shadow strength?

 

I've got this coded up, just testing it now. I've also added null zone culling, so zones outside the camera frustum will not incur overhead. I'll try to release it out tomorrow.

 

I'm not sure yet. I just found this to fix the problem, but don't know what other problems it may cause.
I'll give it a try and let you know.

 

I reset the strength and the shadow is back.
It states that Fog Shadows setting is sun only and requires EnableFogLights, but I'm not using any lights except the sun and moving the sliders has no effect.

It does it only with fog, clouds don't make a difference on or off. If I remove fog and set to none or default, then shadow is gone. Any other fog setting adds a bid shadow circle around the player that moves with the player.
Edit: the strength of the shadow does change with different fog setting, such as "sandstorm", "heavy" etc, require a much more reduction of strength to make the shadow not so pronounced.

 

Is there any chance you can send your project? Something else seems to be going on, I would love to take a look at what you have. If it is too big or confidential, would you be able to send a bare bones project with the problem?

 

Should not be a problem.
This is a test bed only so it is minimal.

 

I refreshed the 5.0.1 update and it has the null zone strength property, along with an animation method on the null zone script. Let me know if you have questions.

 

Jeff,

sent email to support with the link.

 

If it works the way I think (the slider allows you to smoothly create and clean snow in the Null Zone), then I have no questions. Your responsiveness is fantastic. I am amazed that I wrote a question and you realized the idea in a couple of days. You do not leave me a chance, it seems I will have to use your asset in my game. When will the update appear in Asset Store?

 

Should be there now. If you have time to write a review on the asset store it is always appreciated. Let me know if you run into any issues.

 

The fog shadow strength parameter should not be darkening things, I think it is a bug. I will look into it.

 

I posted another refresh to 5.0.1 that does not darken the fog with the fog shadow strength property, I think it looks better but let me know what you think.

 

Thanks Jeff!!
I’ll check it out. I know you hear this a lot, but we REALLY DO APPRECIATE EVERYTHING YOU DO!

I’ll let you know how it works. Great service as always.

 

You're welcome, I hope it works. If not we can keep plugging away!

 

I’m downloading now and will give it a quick run through. I’ll let you know one way or the other.

 

Well... if the new WM is up then it did not remove the shadow.
Here is what I did to make it as clean an install as possible. I downloaded the latest version of Unity 2017.4.18f1 and deleted WM and re-downloaded and I still have the shadow circle around the player. I did a quick test with light fog and the shadow is still there. I'm sorry I'm so much trouble.
Let me know if you need me to try something else.

Thanks!

 

Did you make the changes to UnityShadowLibrary.cginc?

Find UnityShadowLibrary.cginc in the Unity install directory (UnityInstallDirectory/Editor/Data/CGIncludes folder). Find this method and change it, then restart Unity.
half UnityComputeShadowFade(float fadeDist)
{
return 0.0;
//return saturate(fadeDist * _LightShadowData.z + _LightShadowData.w);
}

 

I have not made any changes. I didn't even know about the UnityShadowLibrary.cginc until this message from you. lol. Must have missed that detail.

Thanks for giving me something to try.
I'll make the changes today and let you know how it works.

 

Oh *Facepalm* You need to read the manual carefully before using any asset. Hope your problem disappears.

 

Ha
Yeah haven’t read the entire readme. Oh well, that’s easily remedied.

 

Jeff,

I finally got the chance to get back on this and made the changes. Now the shadow covers everything as it should and gets stronger or weaker depending on clouds or fog. Thanks for the solution! Will continue testing to see how all the shadows are working now.

 

Great news, looking forward to playing your game!

 

Hi Jeff, how can I add a moving detail mask to the water? (Trying to make the water "murky" with patches of moving dirt on top).

 

You can use the main texture or the foam texture slots. Let me know how it goes.

 

Looking to purchase this. Couple questions.

I'm creating 5k 360 videos and I don't need the clouds to move and need them as high resolution as the system can allow being they'll be baked into a video. Is there an easy way to to make this happen in the system or the cloud system was not designed for this to go as high resolution wise as possible not worrying about frame rates and not move once I get the look I'm after for the clouds. I'm currently using Enviro which has been awesome but your clouds seem to take it to the level I'm after for the videos im creating. I'm also using unity 2018.3.

 

Should be no problem, memory usage does not increase with resolution. I would suggest to turn off the animation properties of the clouds.

On the cloud profile (the one that lists all the layers) make sure coverage and type velocity are 0.
On the volumetric cloud profile, ensure that shape and detail velocity are all 0.

You should also set cloud temporal reprojection from 4x4 to none as well in the quality profile on the root of the prefab. This will lower your frame rate about 10-12x.

Let me know if you have trouble finding these settings.

If you are able, please post your result video here, would love to see it.

 

Hi There,

I have a question, if one would like to make a spherical null zone, how would go about it? I have a Dome city in the middle of a snow storm, where i make good use of the snow storm effect on the camera when leaving the dome to intensify the surrounding particle shower. This is an RTS camera so you can leave the dome in any direction, the cubical null zone however causes weird nullified areas at the corner outside of the dome which is very annoying, naturally the entire inside of the dome should have no on camera snow effect but outside. A spherical null zone should do the trick but i noticed that the null zone only works with the box collider.

Any chance it could be done? Any advise on how to go about it would be appreciated.

 

In theory I could just support null zone spheres, they wouldn't have to deal with rotation in the shader so they should be a simple sphere intersect. I will look into it.

 

Hi, since I updated WM, the time of day always says 11:56 AM no matter where I position the slider. This is happening in 2018.2.20f1 and 2018.3.3f1. It was working fine before, so I am kind of baffled why it does this. Any ideas?

 

I'm testing the demo scenes and the slider works fine, does it work in the demo scenes for you? This is Unity 2017.4. Not sure why 2018.X would be different but I will try those to be sure as well.

 

I've sent an update to the asset store, it should be live within the hour with null zone spheres. Just remove the box collider and change to sphere collider.

By the way I really want to play your game, it looks awesome! Please post a link when it is up for sale!

 

I tried the Demo in both 2018.2 and 2018.3 and although the sliders do what they're supposed to do, the time showing remains 11:56. I'll try removing WM and then re-importing it later. It's not a deal breaker for me now, but later I would like to be able to set exactly the date and time for each scenario.

 

Null zone spheres are live on the asset store in version 5.0.2!

 

Worked well! How can I go go about decoupling water from the rest of the weather system? I don't wish to use the day/night cycle, celestial objects (sun + moon), fog, etc.