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

I thought it could but it has been a while. I'll search it out and let you know if I have any trouble.
Thanks!

 

The moon texture is showing the dark side of the moon, not the side we see from earth. The dark spot - 'sea' at about ten o'clock on the moon's face is the Mare Moscoviense, which can't be seen from earth - it kinda spoils the immersion a bit particularly where I might want to scale up the moon for effect in game, as the familiar face of the 'man in the moon' is not there. I wonder if you could tweak the moon object so the texture is showing the familiar face we all see down here. Also, the shadowing around the edge of the moon disk seems a bit unrealistic - in real life this isn't really visible particularly when the moon is full. I've tried changing the tint intensity but if that is raised too high the surface features of the moon white out, too low and the moon disk isn't bright enough - don't know if there's anything you can do about that in a performant way.

 

Hello I´m having these errors, can't find any solution. The only clue I have is that it might be loading Weather Maker twice so it's creating this error, I removed everything and re-imported but bug remains. I'm not sure if it's weather maker itself or the scene, maybe you can help me. BTW I'm using version 5.0.0 can't upgrade because new weather maker will load out of the scene in the 'Don´t Destroy on load' section, two times.

 

Hi there! My guess is you have somehow added two prefabs. Does this error happen in the demo scene?

 

I'll look into it, I don't have the moon rotation set to properly face the earth all the time, but I will look into it. Do you care to share a reference screenshot of how you want it to look?

 

I am planning on making a particle version of the clouds, this is in the research phase. Then basically anything you can do with a particle system can be applied to clouds. No ETA on this.

 

Weather Maker 5.5.0 is now live with the following goodies:

5.5.0 (2019-04-13)
- Cloud gradients can now be edited in real-time.
- Reduce sky ambient for clouds that are closer.
- Add fog density gradient to fog profile to allow fog density multiplier based on time of day.
- Vary cloud density and curl noise based on cloud type.
- Add rolling storm performance profile and greatly improve look of rolling storm.
- Improve cloud shadow appearance.
- Improve fly-through cloud appearance.
- Add method to get cloud density at world position via script, see WeatherMakerCloudProbeScript.cs (requires compute shaders).
- Unity 2019 fixes.

 

This with dust storms, water spouts and meteor showers would be a natural disaster angle for your asset or new asset.

 

Fire and Spell Effects that i made already has meteor swarms - https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/particles/fire-explosions/fire-spell-effects-36825

 

The moon should look more like this, at least from where I am.

 

Thanks for the reference screenshot. Sending an update now. Please re-download in a few hours.

The moon material now has an edge fade parameter that you can set to 0 to disable edge fade. I've also defaulted the uv offset to 0.5 so that it shows the man in the moon part of the texture by default. But you can go to the weather maker moon material and tweak the uv offset to your liking.

You can also tweak the tint intensity on the weather maker celestial object script to reduce the brightness if you like.

Let me know how it goes...

 

Stormy weather ahead...

 

Playing around with the intensity of the sun rays to use in my game, instead of buying Aura 2, working it in with Weather Maker.
Thanks Jeff for pointing me in the right direction!

 

Incredible shots man, I'm glad it is working for you. Do you have any downloadable demo yet?

 

Nothing yet
Still in development

 

Hi jjxtra,
i was wondering if there is a relativly simple way to use ONLY the clouds of your asset (including the transition between cloud profiles), since i'm trying to trim all that is not needed within the scene of the game i am working on. Some of the things included in your asset i already have in place(rain, wind, lightning and the audio) and others are simply not needed (day/night).
Iam working on a VR title, which is why i'd prefer to keep things lean.

Best regards!

 

At a minimum you need the following active:

1] Root weather maker script and command buffer manager
2] Light manager script
3] Full screen cloud script
4] Day/night cycle script

You can set the day night cycle speed to 0 if you don't want it messing with the time of day, but the clouds must have the day night cycle in order to use ambient colors, sky colors, shadow intensities, etc.

You can deactivate every other component if it puts your mind at ease, but there should be little to no overhead by leaving them active.

The WeatherMakerFullScreenCloudsScript.Instance has a method to set a cloud profile in an animated way.

 

Weather Maker 5.5.1 is out with async gpu read back for cloud probes, cloud probe raycasting and bug fixes! Get it while it's hot!

 

Your store page states:

No other asset matches the performance, price and feature set of Weather Maker.

I have tried this asset and did not find the performance to be an improvement over any of the other competing products I have. Can you show us your benchmarks to verify that performance is actually better than the competitors? Otherwise, I think you are making claims that are unfounded.

 

Hi Magique, I have tested both fog and clouds. I will update the asset store page to be more specific. Also please be sure to do a desktop build on max quality settings when comparing assets.

I'd love to know which asset your compared against so I can run my own test.

 

Hi there, I tried, really hard to follow your videos, and create volumetric fly-through clouds in my scene. I probably can't use them in my mobile versions, but I at least wanted to create one spectacular video for ya!..I failed :-(

First, All seemed well, then I noticed 'slugglish' editor response..checked FPS..it was hovering around 9...so reduced resolution, turned off fog/reflections...that didn't help, so I gave up..

Deleted, Downloaded and upgraded today....all seemed well, until I started flying..St Elmos Fire!!

Spoiler: Just a little issue.

My custom shader-forge shader, might be the problem, it works with unity fog, but ??.,I can change the order, render que, to what?. any idea?

Spoiler: Sample Profile, before WeatherMaker Install...I was going to test.

Spoiler: And the Scene I want to put the clouds in...

any advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks
patrick

 

Your game looks cool! Let's figure this out over email / screen share - send me your email to support@digitalruby.com

 

Did you get this figured out? Didn't see an email from you so wasn't sure...

 

I've spent quite a bit of time the last couple days optimizing the volumetric clouds. You can expect up to 100% performance increases from the previous Weather Maker with volumetric clouds. For example, on my 1080 ti, I used to run the demo scene blank in fantastic quality and got an fps of around 240 with medium heavy scattered clouds, the most performance intensive clouds. With the next update going out Monday (4/22/2019), I am now getting over 400 fps with the fantastic quality setting and medium heavy scattered clouds in demo scene blank. Other types of clouds will render even faster, and switching to even the beautiful or good performance profile still produces some pretty nice clouds at over 500 to 600 fps in the demo scene blank with medium heavy scattered clouds. The simple profile, which is the lowest quality which allows volumetric clouds, has no impact on fps on my 1080 ti now, they stay at about 780 fps with volumetric clouds on or off. Your hardware will of course vary but I would expect the percentage gains to be similar.

 

@jjxtra Great news - thank you!

 

Hi,
This looks quite interesting.
Anyone working with this on Mac os? I'm running macOS 10.13.4 / high sierra.
any issues?
what version of unity is recommended?

thanks!

 

Should work on MAC fine if you use OpenGL. Metal has broken 3D texture reads and some tex2Dlod reads. They are aware of and working on the bug they say.

 

Thx jjxtra. How do i test if my mac, macOS 10.13.4, and the related unity version is using Opengl?

Who's fixing the bug, Apple or Unity?
thx.

 

It's almost certainly a Unity bug, I would be shocked if tex3D is broken on the metal layer. So it is up to Unity to fix.

To check if you are on opengl, go to player settings and uncheck automatic graphics api and make sure OpenGLCore is at the top.

 

Tx Jeff. I've set this project using opengl, as per what you said, and put Opengl at top.
It's unity 2018.3.12f.
I've been away from Unity for a while.
Is 2018.3.12f considered stable and usable, or do you recommend a different version?
I want to add other assets to this project. Always seems to be a fine balance between the unity version one uses, and having various assets play well together.

Will be buying Weather maker soon and do some exploring.

 

Unity 2018.3.12f is pretty stable, as far as Unity goes in general. I get crashes and odd rendering issues a few times a week, and almost always things are fixed by first trying to simply restart Unity and failing that, doing a re-import all or clean of the Library and Temp folders.

 

Next release (5.6.0) is almost ready, but I am testing a lot, I think I will push it to tomorrow just to be sure I have as solid and stable release as possible

 

Maybe a stupid question but I'll ask anyways. I am using the rectangular fog prefab but the fog enters the interiors of buildings. Is there a way to restrict fog from entering interiors?

 

Put a null zone in your building. Let me know if you have trouble finding the null zone prefab. If you want to build a null zone from scratch, you need a box trigger collider and then add the null zone script to a game object and assign the default null zone profile.

I have looked into just casting a ray up and building a height map of the scene, and considering anything that is a small depth 'inside' but this requires rendering a depth buffer from above potentially every frame, and falls apart around bridges, overhangs, etc. But I suppose it could be done once a second or something, or on demand if scene geometry changes. But the null zones are the least hassle I think.

 

Thanks for the answer! I'll give this a try.

 

Hi,

You mentioned LWRP support earlier, will 5.6.0 include this? Your clouds look gorgeous, and I'm after a fly-through solution in LWRP so this looks perfect for my needs.

Thanks!

 

Thanks, Jeff.

A bit concerned that you sometimes have to re-import everything when issues arise with 2018.3.12f.

Is there an older version, but not too old,... that is more stable?

Thx.

 

Weather Maker is fine, it's Unity that corrupts things and requires the re-import.

 

No, it will be 6.0.0 sometime around June depending on how my LWRP woes go

 

I should have been clearer, Jeff.

I am wondering what version of Unity is more stable than 2018.3.12f,... that will work well with the current version of Weather Maker.

Thx.

 

I still do most of my dev with 2017.4 it has been rock solid. 2019 has been quite crashy and buggy for me, especially in VR. 2018.3 less crashy, but if I was making a game today I would use 2017.4 or wait for 2018.4 LTS.

 

Tx for 2017.4 heads up.
Just purchased Weather Maker.
Took it for a very fast text drive with the existing demos in the download.

It's compelling.
I need to take some dives and deep dives with it over the next few weeks.

- I didn't tweak anything/adjust anything , just right out of the box.
(will make your recommended adjustments (via the read me text) another time.)

/

 

typo: 'test drive', not text drive.

 

Thank you. I always appreciate feedback. I have a hard time with making things simple and like to add a lot of dials and knobs so if you get lost in the scripts and profiles I totally get it Hopefully the readme.txt and tutorial videos help, but feel free to post questions or email me, etc. Discord too is at https://discord.gg/5KjfBjt.

 

Thanks, Jeff.
Much appreciated!

Lots of dials and knobs are needed,... as weather is complex, and people have different weather needs for their specific projects.

 

You are welcome. The 5.6.0 release is very close, but still fixing some last minute bugs I have found. Won't ship it out until I am happy with the quality.

 

In honor of the 5.6.0 release and new heavy and storm improved cloud profiles, I thought I would share some cloud screenshots! Enjoy, release coming very soon!

 

Currently getting a strange exception uploading to asset store, will keep trying...

 

After a day of asset store upload errors, Weather Maker 5.6.0 is finally live. Here are the release notes:

5.6.0 (2019-04-24)
- Volumetric cloud render performance improvements of 50-100%.
- Improved cloud shadow appearance.
- Added high detail cloud shadow texture to cloud shadow map material.
- Dither and blur cloud dir light rays, reduce banding.
- Improve appearance of volumetric heavy bright, heavy dark and storm cloud profiles.
- Improve fog sun and moon shafts. You may need to increase the brightness on your full screen fog profiles as a result of shader changes.
- Improve flat layer interactions with volumetric clouds.
- Cloud noise editor now scales to window height.
- Fix nested weather zones.
- Fix VR performance regression.
- Fix full screen fog.
- Fix underwater mode not triggering.
- Fix flat clouds not showing up when volumetric clouds are disabled.
- Fix flat cloud transitions.

 

Those clouds look good!

Will download the new version and take it for a spin.
Am using a Mac and unity 2018.3.