[RELEASED] Enviro - Sky and Weather (Dynamic Sky and Weather System)

Suggestion:
As the next version is coming up, the options grow and the realism gets more complex, maybe you could create a second thread, which only aims at showcasing and sharing profiles for enviro. You could link to the thread in the documentation and/or gui, so more people have an easier time getting started, getting inspired and sharing their work.

Besides: This would demonstrate the expressiveness of the product (more sales). I don't think the thread would be too empty: Realistic weather in a city, over saturated fantasy forests, artsy art or dusty Mars landscapes, etc. etc.

 

Could anyone point me to a tutorial or documentation for adding satellites to the scene and getting them to move with the flow of time? Its unclear what I am supposed to do -- adding a planet prefab to the satellites GO doesn't seem to do anything.

 

Hmm that is pretty straightforward. Create a prefab from your planet with a spherical mesh. After that increase the prefab scale and add it to the satellites GO field and give it a name. Raise the orbit distance and tweak the XRot and YRot values. Just tested and it is working for me.

Maybe your satellite is to small?? Does the satellite get created when going in play mode?

 

When I make a prefab of the planet and then drag it into Satallites to make it a child, then press Play, the child (my planet) gets deleted at runtime and then its deleted back in Editor as if I never made it a child - Satallites is just its own thing again...

Is there something I need to with the script components? Like in the Satallite transform?
maybe i am missing where the Satellite GO field is...

 

Yea, sorry that it wasn't clear! You have to take a look in "Edit Profile" category and choose the "Satellite" category to add your satellites.

 

Aha! Awesome!! You should copy that screenshot right into the documentation. Thank you. Love this asset. Excited to do some cool stuff with it.

 

can i use enviro with segi?
is compatible?

 

SEGI is just a global illumination system so I don't see why not.

Even with Enviro you still have to use a lighting setup, whether fully realtime, realtimeGI with Enlighten baking, or baked.

 

Hello

On the mobile edition on my sony xperia I notice a very big fps cost about 15/20 fps if I enable or disable the "sun" component. Other components (cloud, atmosphere...) are not a big deal on framerate and seems to run fast and smooth.

Do you think it's something normal ? Any tip to have the sunlight but not at this fps cost ?

 

I just purchased Enviro 1.9.1. The demo scenes play perfectly but when I add Enviro to a scene that I created, I get a black screen in the game window. I can hear the foot steps but I cannot see anything. I know I am missing something quite simple but I really need help solving this issue. I am on a windows 7 machine running Unity 5.6.1f1.

 

Hey I recently purchased enviro I am just trying to make it pitch black at night so we have a more realistic day night cycle and the players are dependent on other light sources.

I would greatly appreciate any help I could get configuring this asset to go pitch black at night.

Right now the sun sets and the sky goes dark however when the moon comes up it looks like there is a spotlight behind it. How can I basically disable or set the moonlight to an absolute minimum? Are there are other settings I should check if I am trying to achieve a totally dark scene at night.


thank you for this amazing plugin and your time reading my response!

Rob

 

Remove enviro from the scene,
remove all enviro effects from the main camera (maybe remove and re-add the camera),
re-add enviro to the scene,
add player and camera references to the enviro gameobject,
hit apply,
???,
profit.

 

Do you have already disabled the "old" directional light in your scene?

 

Sounds like that you haven't assigned your camera. Please check the "player & camera setup" category and make sure that your player and world camera is correctly assigned.

 

Hi, I just purchased Enviro and added it to my scene. I'm using Ultimate Survival and added the Player and Camera according to the instructions in Messy Coders tutorial. Everything looks fine except Rain isn't showing, none in the sky and none on the ground either. I added the Puddleholder prefab too. Any ideas why?

 

Enviro update the Indirect light from the Realtime GI (Pre-computed)?

Seems like he get lighting information on Start and then doesn't update the light bounces.

Am i missing something here? Thanks in advance

 

I'm kinda curious about Enviro and Enlighten baking as well. Is there a proper way we should be doing it?
I sometimes get buildings that have a dark shading because of it.

 

Sounds like that you haven't assigned the correct Player. Please check the "Player & Camera Setup" section in EnviroSky Inspector. Maybe test and try to assign the worldcamera as player too.

 

Hm, just tested in 5.5 (the version I am developing enviro) and unity updates the light bounces of the sun/moon perfectly fine by default. I will do another test in 2017 later and check if something changed.

For now maybe check out the component attached and add it to one of your gameobject in your scene. This will enable the synchronousMode if it is disabled and you also can set a threshold value for updates.

 

In 2017.2, I added it to one of my objects in the scene but didn't see the debug log in the console the script is supposed to print after I started baking.

 

Do you have a private members area for the latest update?

I'm hoping to see some improvements in UpdateAmbientLight as it currently takes 5ms to run each frame.

 

Wow thank you for the Quick fix! After many tests i can say was not Enviro fault. I have added some shaders on my project who stoped the GI from updating but now is working fine.

I really appreciate your help, thank you again!

 

Yea, I fixed that issue with skybox ambient mode in 2.0. Please use the flat or trilight mode for now and performance will be normal again.

I also will upload a beta version for wide range tests soon.

 

Then the synchronousMode is active and should update light bounces quite fine.

 

Hello,

I had a couple questions to help me decide whether this asset is right for me:

1. Is weather simulated across an entire given area on the scene, or only where the camera is pointed towards?
2. Are there actual particles falling from the sky for rain, snow, etc?
   1. Just to be clear here, can I add code to detect collision between said particles, and objects I have on the ground, for example?
3. Does this work for non first person games where the camera isn't focused around a single character.

I'm trying to make a tycoon style game, with a terrain the size of 500x500 unity units. There is no single player on the terrain, but rather, the user manages multiple objects on scene. As a result, I would like the weather to work across the whole terrain, regardless of where camera is zoomed in on. Would this asset meet my needs?

 

Hello,

first enviro isn't really designed for these genre, but maybe could working for you.

1.) The system is player/camera based and simulates weather around that point on your whole scene. So when it rains it will rain in whole scene. You currently cannot have parts that is raining and part with other weather at the same time. (Those feature maybe could be coming in a future update with the new weather map feature in 2.0.)

2.) The rain and snow effects using unity particle systems. At default they are emitting in a circle around your camera. But you are free to change them or use your own particle systems to cover your whole terrain.

3.) Yea, it will work in other game genres as long as you using a perspective camera. In your case the camera is your "player".

Another thing worth mentioned: Clouds currently cannot be seen from above and does not support flythroughs. (Again maybe changing in a future update with new cloud system.) But you could disable the clouds and use your own solution or fog volume 3 if you need some kind of clouds effect when you zoomed out.

 

Thank you for the detailed reply. Is there any way to decouple the system from having to be attached to an object with the camera? That way I could attach it to some invisible object in the center of the terrain I mentioned before, and make sure the radius encompasses the entire terrain.

 

I'm interested in trying this asset, but I'm not sure whether to get Desktop version or Mobile version. I want high performance for Wii U development, but the Mobile version only has a few plain looking screenshots on the asset store and it's hard to tell what it'll look like. Are there not any videos showing off the mobile version's features? Also, is there an upgrade price if you go from mobile to desktop?

 

If you want a really good looking environment get the full version. If you want something simple get the mobile one.
There are some optimizations you can do in the desktop version and im using it for VR projects, but cant vouch for how it would run on the wii. There is a new version coming out soon that does clouds in multiple different ways. One of those ways should improve the performance. I can wholeheartedly recommend enviro, and even if you dont end up using it in production, its a nice asset to play around with if you like to create test environments.

 

Here is a dusty Mars-like I did using Enviro... it's mostly fog and sky color - hard to see the clouds in the middle of the dust storm.. https://twitter.com/twitter/statuses/923290854332272652

 

Assigning a placeholder object as player in middle of your terrain to center the weather effects should work.

 

Is it possible to replace the built-in weather systems with something else? I own PA Particle Field and it has the highest performing snow and rain available. The rain shading is not so good, but that can be tweaked. Anyway, I'd like to be able to have Enviro controlling the weather, but when it needs to snow or rain I'd like the actual effects to be from PA Particle Field if possible. I'd still want Enviro to control thunder, lightning, etc.

 

I don't own this particle system asset, but shouldn't be hard to implement with enviro.

1. Remove the particle systems in your enviro weather presets.
2. Create your rain and snow effects with PA Particle Field.
3. Create a simple script to control them:

- let the effects follow your player position
- control the emission rates by checking the current wetness and snow strength in enviro

Code (CSharp):

1. //Player position
2. EnviroSky.instance.Player.transform.position
3. //Current Rain and Snow Intensity,smoothed over time, range 0f - 1f could be used to multiply with PA Particle Field emission rates
4. EnviroSky.instance.Weather.wetness
5. EnviroSky.instance.Weather.snowStrength
6.  

After that you could control the rain and snow intensity for each weather preset over enviro.

 

Awesome. Sounds great. Thanks for the detailed info on how it might work.

 

Does Enviro already have the WorldManagerAPI built in?

 

Still work in progress but will be included in next update.

 

OK, thanks.

 

Tip - Enviro and UFPS use the same layer #31. You need to edit UFPS's vp_layer.cs script and change the Weapon layer to something else if you want the Weapon camera to function properly (so you can see your gun/arms etc.)

 

Sweet! Looking forward to the integration. Actually - the zone based system I was talking about the page before would probably be best in WAPI. I wonder if Adam accepts pull requests?

 

Little Offtopic while I see some WAPI posts:
I never quite understood what WAPI is for or why my project should benefit from it while using Enviro with supported Assets.
I mean Enviro already handles my RTP / UBER integration by updating weather / textures / prefabs / shaders using the Enviro Time. As I understood WAPI defines a timeline which can handle all assets used in the project and reacting by defining timeline events? This would make sense if I don't use the Enviro time and use WAPI for handling time.

 

WAPI is good for making it rain during a cutscene for example. It's just API to let all environment assets talk to each other, a "bridge".

 

It does seem that Enviro offers many of the features WAPI with its numerous integrations. However, this is a sub-optimal way of handling things. Instead of digging around in code of other assets and always having to keep track of whether there have been any breaking changes, having a central framework is a lot more elegant. Some quirks such as depth sorting issues aside, 'supports WAPI' would mean that an asset will play nicely with all others that also do.

EDIT: To clarify the main benefit: Right now, asset authors waste time by writing integrations for just about any remotely related asset (somebody will ask for it.) This is especially true for terrain and weather assets (but also controllers, see e. g. Malber's Horse Animset Pro), where many competing but still closely related products exist. Having just one central system to which an asset needs to be compatible allows asset devs to spend their time what we'd all want them to be doing the most: work on actual features of their product.

 

Hm, the new version is a free upgrade to current customers right?

I hate it when assets suddenly start charging you for version changes, plus I bought Enviro cause it wasn't charging for every version, I avoid assets which do that.


Upcoming release looks really amazing btw. Keep up the good work.

 

I'm seeing an issue where Enviro seems to be accentuating the lines between objects placed perfectly next to each other. For example, two pieces of wall. The lines seem to flicker when you are zoomed far away, and I think it flickers as I am setting enviro time every frame, thereby moving the sun.

The issue seems to go away once I zoom closer to the wall. What's interesting, is that as you zoom in, you can see the lines disappearing in a way that would suggested there is a sphere around the camera that fixes it, once the sphere overlaps with the walls.

This was not happening beforehand, when just using a directional light and skybox on the scene, for lighting.If it helps, I am using Enviro with Progress Time set to none, and I set time every Update manually.

 

I noticed this too and sent a PM to @Vondox with some questions on how we should be using Enviro with baking.

 

Thanks! Yes, 2.0 will be free for existing customers.

Hmm okay, I need some more information. Do you have baked your lighting for precomputed gi or do you use realtime gi?
Have you already checked if those black lines are not from realtime shadows? If that is the case please try to set a higher "Min Clipping Plane" in your camera. Also try to change the shadow settings in "Direct Light" object that is on your EnviroSky prefab. Maybe that can solve your issue with bad/wrong/flickering shadows.

 

Are you planning to add Temperature and detect if the player is wet like Unistorm does?

 

When using the system, it seems changing the size of the prefab top anything larger than the terrain size is impossible? Because of this the enviro prefab seems to cull anything beyond the size of the terrain. i.e. The water plane which extends way out beyond the distance of the terrain. Is this intentional is or there something I'm missing?

 

Hello,
I use it in HTC, but I found the direct light always shake. Then the shadow will shake. How to fix it.

 

Sounds like that fog ist overring your water because of no depth.

Please check the WaterFog Support component, or if you are you using AQUAS the AQUAS Integration component.

Both can be added over the "Components" -> "Enviro" menu. Once added you maybe also need to assign your water mesh when using the WaterFog component.