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

@jjxtra is it possible to decouple the volumetric lighting / fog effects from the WeatherMaker (WM) prefab? I do not (currently) need the numerous other effects that are supported by the manager script.

 

It is possible with a bit of work. I may look at a volumetric fog script since this is such a popular thing people are using. Until then you may be able to get away with disabling everything on the prefab except the weather maker script, sun and light manager objects.

 

Right, yes, please do this (soon if possible); it seems like you were going in this direction with the volumetric fog cube. I am reserving my comments for now, but what I've seen so far looks extremely promising.

EDIT: To be sure, you could easily bundle these atmospheric / volumetric lighting effects and distribute them as a separate asset for $30-45 and do great. As far as I know, this is the only asset on the store that supports VR, single pass, is performant, and supports volumetric effects for point, spot, and directional lights(!)

 

@jjxtra

1. I spent some time studying the various scripts in the package, and I'm sorry to say that re-authoring the asset to meet the stripped down state that I've described is outside the range of my expertise. Is there any chance you can send me something like what I've described over the next week?
   
2. I am happy to report, however, that volumetric lighting / fog works with baked lighting out of the box (hooray!). Since WM is an image effect, as long as you tell the WeatherMakerLightManager script what lights to affect, WM will create the volumetric effect as desired. This is a huge benefit to performance and visual quality for scenes that use static lighting, but still want volumetric lighting effects.

 

@jjxtra Weather Maker atmospheric lighting does not appear to be working in VR (multipass or single pass) in Unity 2017.1.0 Beta 9 for the HTC Vive(?) (see attached).

 

This is fixed and I sent you a patch, and I've also sent it to the asset store.

 

The next update will allow you to disable (but not delete) most of the stuff under the prefab. You'll need to leave the root prefab object active, the sun and any moons you want, along with the fog and light manager on at a minimum.

 

Just wanted to post a couple screenshots of the volumetric fog. This is not my game, but a game by a Weather Maker user. As soon as I have a link for the game I will add it to this post. Keep in mind that the volumetric fog in Weather Maker does not support shadows.

Each spotlight is fully volumetric, and all the volumetric lights are done in a single pass in the fog shader.

 

Very nice! I love the look and mood and, yes, the atmosphere.

 

I have a question about the volumetric fog system in your asset.

Currently I am using an opensource volumetric light solution that works with raymarching, but for indoor scenes that has proven rather heavy in conjunction with many small point and spotlights because each light gets raymarched, and all of them have to be realtime lights.

Somebody pointed out that your weather maker asset would offer volumetric lighting that works with static lights. So do I understand that correct, a) your volumetric fog is a single pass shader for all the lights in the scene, and b) it also works with static lights with baked shadows?

Does it properly occlude the shadowed part from the volumetric light shapes even for baked shadows? Does it work well with the mixed baked/realtime shadows that are now possible again thanks to Unity 5.6?

 

Screenshot for a recent project. All objects are statically lit (with the exception of foliage, which uses light probes), fully baked GI. You can see perf counter in top left.

 

Looks nice.... how does the volumetric fog work when an object occludes part of the light cone? Does it get properly occluded, thus do the shadows propagate correctly to the shape of the lightcone as how it does with raymarched approaches?

 

You would need realtime lights to get any sort of dynamic shadows, or Shadowmask, which I have not formally tested with Weather Maker. You can see how the fog behaves here.

 

Well, my question is a different one. See, with raymarched solutions, if an object is inside the lightcone and is casting a shadow, that gives a nice ray effect in the lightcone. Some kind of "3d shadow" so to speak. Or what god rays are for cloud shadowing the suns lightrays in cloudy weather, just also for spot and point lights.

Now, I am pretty aware that this of course probably wouldn't work for mixed static and dynamic objects (unless the shader was clever enough to mix realtime shadows with the static lightmap... how cool would that be?), my question at the moment is simply for static objects shadowing static lights, baked shadows so to speak. Do they influence the lightcone of baked lights?


I mean, I don't EXPECT a solution that sound so obviously easier on performance to give me the same results as the most brute force method out there that is raymarching every single light on its own. I am just trying to gauge how similar a result I can expect from this solution to the expensive brute force approach I am currently using.

 

Oh I see, your talking about sun shafts
(God rays, crepuscular rays, etc.), Weather Maker doesn't really do that, to my knowledge. In fact, I don't know of any asset on the store that will do that for spot lights or point lights - that's also compatible with VR, SPSR, forward rendering, and MSAA. Lemme know if you find anything.

 

Well, I am not really intersted in VR, so I didn't really look into that.
On the other hand, I was under the impression the raymarched solutions would work in VR... more or less (as usual, tons of people complaining about small problems with stereoscopic rendering, but then, which asset does not have those initially?).... but I am not aware of any reason why it wouldn't work on a fundamental level in VR.
There are the opensource volumetric lights, and there is this asset: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/67665
For the first I assume that it works with VR, for the second the asset actually claims that it works with VR on the asset store page. Both render beautiful sun shafts, or the equivalent for spot and point lights, as part of their volumetric light / fog solution.

See image below, taken from the HX Volumetric light page:



Just so we are on the same page... I can confirm that these are no fake god rays, light cookies or flares. This is how well raymarched solutions can adapt the geometry of the volumetric light to the shadows of objects. I haven't used HX Volumetric lights yet, but was assured that it works pretty much the same as the opensourced volumetric light solution. And I am using this solution at the moment.
And yes, at least the opensource variant works for all types of lights pretty much the same. You get these nice "sun shafts" even for point lights in indoor scenes, which, combined with some pillars or other geometry, gives a ton of atmosphere to indoor scenes.

Now, I am aware that this is radically different tech (most probably) than what weather maker does, so I don't EXPECT weather maker to really do that... but if it would, I think I would switch to weather maker in an instant. The raymarched solution works great for a single light. But the cost starts to add quickly once you add the volumetric light script to multiple lights. And not working with bake lighting makes this even worse.

Oh, and Unreal Engine aparently has a volumetric fog solutions that isn't raymarching every light, and still able to create the sun shaft effect, so I guess there ARE ways to make different tech work similar to raymarched solutions (the Unreal engine tech seems to have its own limitations at the moment, but good to know there are multiple ways to achieve the same result)

 

Weather Maker should support light baking as long as your time of day is not changing. I have not even tried to support shadows and I don't think my single pass shader would ever work with shadows anyway, and the performance would suffer too much.

 

Fair enough, I Weather Maker already does quite a lot for its price as is. Not sure yet if I will REALLY keep using the full raymarched volumetric lighting given the performance drops with realtime shadows and multiple raymarch scripts, so I guess erring on the side of performance is not a bad choice given your volumetric fog already looks quite good.

Thanks for the response.

 

Yea, I thought a long time about how to do all the shadows in one pass, but so far haven't thought of a clever way. I'd even be happy with a rough estimate of shadows that wasn't perfect.

In other news, I'm adding sun shafts to a release very soon

 

Incredible +1

 

These aren't 100% perfect god rays, and they don't show looking away from the sun, but the performance is really good, even in 4K they aren't making a dent on my GTX 980M. These are already on the asset store with a pending update that adds a dithering option and tint option.

 

Are there plans to implement sun shafts that occur when the sun is not in the view frustum. I know Sunshine! does this.

 

Yes I want to do a fully volumetric sun at some point.

 

I'm super excited to let you all know that I have figured out how to do a fully volumetric sun from any angle using the Unity shadow map. This probably has another weeks worth of work of optimization, appearance cleanup and tuning, but now you will have sun shafts at any angle. And it looks amazing!

 

Weather Maker just got updated to support volumetric shadows in the fog for the sun. Please try it out and send any feedback here. I'll do my best to fix bugs and optimize where needed.

Get Weather Maker Here!

 

Hello, thank you for your great work. I've encountered one issue after the latest update. When setting the time to night, if I hit play, every light in my scene just become dark. If I drag to to day and then drag back to night, lights return to normal. Could you help me with this?

 

Will you be able to restore the cloud-only sky sphere rendering option? I was using this with fixed time of day to get realtime GI.

 

I'm working on full screen cloud effect, similar to fog. You can then just shut off the sky sphere entirely. Should be ready in a week or two.

 

Will investigate and fix ASAP.

 

Do you have fog enabled?

 

I don't think so. The only thing I've changed from the imported prefab was time.

 

I've fixed the bugs and sent an update. Look for version 2.6.1. I can also give you a patch earlier if you email me your invoice number (support@digitalruby.com).

 

Brilliant! Thank you.

 

The bugs have been fixed. The latest version just released also has null fog zones for the full screen fog, along with audio dampening zones (i.e. the player goes inside and the rain, wind and thunder sounds die down but not entirely). Up to 8 visible null fog zones are supported, except for DX9 which supports 2.

I encourage you to try out the new demo scene 'DemoSceneNullFogZonesAndSoundDamper' to see this in action.

 

Just a heads up there is a sale on Weather Maker right now, 40% off! If this sells well I may keep the price at this level for longer. It's a lot of work but worth it to see all of the amazing games you all are making.

 

Are there any simple tutorials for this ? Like an introduction or startup tutorial to run one through all the basics? Every video I have found so far seems advanced. This looks promising but might be too complex for an amateur.

 

Yes, there are several, and very detailed.

 

I've made quite a number of tutorials. Check the readme file in the asset or my YouTube channel for the full gamut. I'm always available to answer email or forum questions as well (support@digitalruby.com).

 

Is there one in particular that is recommended to start with that has a good broad basic overview? Like if I had to pic one to start with, which would it be? Thanks for the fast reply.

 

The developer may have a better answer for you, but I would say, 'it depends'. Weather Maker offers a huge number of features, and for the price, it is absolutely outstanding. You should review the ReadMe carefully and check whichever video tutorial suits your current objective.

 

Let me know what kind of game / project you are working on and I can suggest the right video or just help you directly.

 

Aaargh, I just bought this a couple of weeks ago. Still worth it at the original price, though.

 

I know there's been many assets I've bought that then go on sale. Part of the asset store I guess. Send me an email with any questions about the asset and I'll try to answer in great detail.

 

Just dropping by the say, thanks for releasing this amazing asset! I've had it for a couple of months now and finally got around to integrating into my project as a test last night.... needless to say, as soon as I saw the amount and quality of features, plus the amazing performance I've officially ditched my old solution and will be using yours going forward... really nice work man!

 

Thanks so much! Please send any other feedback, bug reports or feature requests my way. In the future you can look forward to a higher quality clouds option. The current clouds are the most performant on the asset store but not the most awesome looking so I want to add a second option for people who want to crank up the detail.

 

Just a note for everyone in the latest version the clouds are now a full screen command buffer. This lets them render separately from the sky sphere and allows easy downsampling, blur, etc. For those of you using the Unity sky box, set the render queue of the clouds script to after skybox.

 

The latest change log mentions Aquas integration. Do you have more information on this? I'm using the fog and clouds with the standard Unity skybox and would like to get Aquas water reflections working properly. At the moment the water reflections aren't right.

 

Double check the readme.txt for integrations, but you need to add a player setting by define AQUAS_WATER_PRESENT.

 

I have looked for the AQUAS info too. In the readme file, if you only look at the inspector window, it states to see 'integrations' at the bottom, but the file just ends with an etc. and never shows the integrations. If you open the readme in MonoDevelop you can see the full file that does go into all of the extra information. It had me stumped at first.

Any chance of a new video tutorial showing it off?
I haven't had the chance to try to make it work, so it would be great to see how it is supposed to look.

I am loving the updates! I am looking forward to being able to set up weather zones, so I can have a stormy forest in my world. I hope you can get to that soon.

Thanks,
David

 

Hi,
Thanks for this plugin, its working very well so far. Just a few questions:

• Is there any reason why shadows are disabled when using fog? I know it was stated that this didn't work but if I disable the sun/moon direction light and create my own with shadows it works fine, there is not any scattering effect but changing the shadow strength gets a nice result.
• Is there any way we can use volumetric lighting without having to use fog? Not a deal breaker as again I saw this as a limitation but just curious in case I am doing something wrong.

Thanks again! This is what I have so far with the night sky.