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

FANTASTIC!
That was exactly what I needed. Grass now gets wet (no puddles, but that can wait), and snow now works as well.
Now i just have to figure out how to get my snow capped mountains to stay, well, snow capped (it looks like Enviro is drying them out ).

Thankyou

 

For puddles check Relief Terrain component. You can adjust water settings for each layer.
And for your mountains, if you have a free layer you could just paint snow caps on your mountain as normal static texture layer.

 

Hi guys, @Vondox. Has anyone tried the new version of Enviro with the HTC Vive? I've been using it for my project (version 1.6) and it works fine (but the performance is indeed not that good), but I can't get the new version to render properly for VR. Any feedback on this? Maybe I'm doing something wrong or there are some new settings to change that I'm not aware of. All input will be appreciated. Thank you!

 

Hi,

sorry to hear that you have problems with 1.7 and your Vive. Please add me on skype (vondox@live.de) to find a solution. I currently have no VR Headset, make it hard to fix problems in VR.

Did you tried multi and single pass rendering? For now you could switch to "Legacy" mode in clouds rendering options to render clouds like 1.6. I will try to find a solution but need someone with Headset to test fixes and help investigating.

Greetings,
Hendrik

 

Here is complete changelog for 1.7.2. I hope that it will be online end of this week

Here is a screenshot to show performance on low cloud settings! I think that's really fast

(i5 3570k,AMD Radeon R9 285, 8GB Ram - no OC)

 

We're considering Enviro as a possible replacement for our day/night weather system. A few questions:

1. What's the process for setting up networking? We use Bolt.
2. Does going into a scene, and not making any changes, or going into play mode, modify the scene in any way? We've used assets that have done that and it doesn't work for version control. Leads to lots of conflicts with a decent sized team.
3. Can we control the brightness at night? We want it to be able to be almost pitch black at night.
4. Is there support for setting how long a day lasts in minutes? Like setting it to 30 minutes, or 60 minutes, etc.
5. Is there support for changing the day to night ratio, while still keeping the amount of minutes in the day the same from question 4?
6. Is there automatic changing of weather, or does it have to be manually set? 7. Does it support mesh based terrains, or only Unity terrains?

Thanks!

 

Loving the updates Vondox, keep it up.

 

Hello,

1. I don't use Bolt but there is a sample scene and components for UNet included and still maybe helpful. What it does:
- It deativate time progress and automatic weather changing on clients.
- Server listen on weather change events for all weather zones in scene to send new weather for this zone to clients.
- Clients can send command to server to get current weather and season, for example for login.
- Server send current time to clients. Clients smooth and apply new time.
2. No all setting will be the same. You have to change settings by yourself when not into play mode to save these.
3. Of course! You can control ambient and direct light intensity and color with a graph or gradient based on current time of day directly in editor.
4. Yes you can define the "gametime" day lenght in "realworld" minutes.
5. That isn't possible at the moment, sorry. But I may add this later.
6. Yea you define the interval of trying to change weather for each zone.
7. Of course you don't need to have a terrain in scene to use enviro

I hope that help you with your decision. Feel freet to contact me if you have more questions!

 

Trailer looks amazing but i just have one question before i commit to buy. In the trailer there is a control that FPS is using to adjust the sun and the weather. I need that exact asset for my FPS. Does it come included into the asset? Please tell me it does. lol I got my hand on the buy button im ready to buy.

 

Thanks

Do you mean the UI to change weather and time? That is included of course.

 

amazing TAKE MY MONEY

 

Hi Vondox, thanks for all the answers! We came up with a few more once we started digging deeper into it.

1) Is Enviro compatible with PlayWay?

2) Can we shut off/strip out the vegetation growth system? We have our own system for this.

3) Do you have plans for volumetric clouds? If so, do you have an ETA?

 

No problem

1.) It's looking great with PlayWay but there is no included integration for weather at the moment.
2.) Of course, the growth feature is optional with own component.
3.) Haven't planned to add real volumetric cloud rendering (where you can fly through) at the moment. Current implementation will look volumetric from grounds, have a lot settings to tweak and is faster to render.

 

im getting super heavy lag when i insert it inot my scene is there way i can decreasee this.

 

This should not happen. Have you disabled your old directional light? Please send me a mail with some screenshots from your scene setup, profiler and envirosky component to have more information to help you.

 

i diasabled all direction lights not sure why have so much lag

 

How about making it where we could do a drop-in replacement of volumetric cloud assets with something like 3D Cloud System? (https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/29303)

 

Developer is great. Worked with me to solve all the problems i had. Highly recommend this asset to anyone looking for drag and drop weather system. Quality is amazing as well. No complaints.

 

I haven't planned a drop-in integration for other cloud solutions at the moment. But would not be hard to integrate you own or 3rd party cloud systems with enviro. You can disable enviro clouds and write a little script listening to OnWeatherChanged event to apply settings for each weather.

Thanks! Was interesting to see enviro used in a non-game szenario.
Wish you great success with your presentation!

 

still having problems with the photon intergration script, anyone know how to fix that?

 

Contact me on my mail please. I will take a look on photon integration later and send you a fix if needed.

 

Is there a way to set which weather id is active before AssignAndStart is called? It seems that EnviroSky.instance.Weather.WeatherTemplates is empty until the frame after AssignAndStart is called. This is a bit of an issue for me since the player object doesn't get created until they are finished loading, and then when they come into the scene they see the weather changing from the default to the current from the server. I'd rather be able to assign the active weather before the player gets created, when I initialize the rest of the scene so that by the time their loading screen goes away the weather isn't still transitioning.

Is there a way to get the rain effect to not pass through colliders? If the player is underneath a roof or a cliff overhang, etc I don't want the rain to go through it.

How do you change the volume at runtime? Setting these values seem to have no effect
EnviroSky.instance.Audio.ambientSFXVolume
EnviroSky.instance.Audio.weatherSFXVolume

If I go into playmode in Unity, the following 3 files get modified
Assets\Enviro - Dynamic Enviroment\Materials\Effects\EnviroFog.mat
Assets\Enviro - Dynamic Enviroment\Materials\EnviroSky.mat
Assets\Enviro - Dynamic Enviroment\Materials\Moon.mat
Can you fix that, please? It's going to cause conflicts in version control otherwise.

 

Hi,
I am currently not at home. Will create a fix for materials later for you and send you updated version.

About weather transition, you maybe could assign a temporary player object to start enviro before real player is loaded get weather from server and switch to real player with ChangeFocus(). You also can use SetWeatherOverwrite() to instantly change weather with no transition.

For rain collision you have to check the collision category of particle system and add your layers to collide with.

I will take a closer look later at home, we will find a solution

Greetings,
Hendrik

 

We just updated Enviro, and now our sky has a multi layered ring around it in day and night cycles. We cannot seem to get it to stop; perhaps you could point us in the right direction. We are using linear lighting.

 

Hi,
hard to tell, haven't seen this issue before. Have you upgraded from 1.7.1 to latest store version? Do you have the same issue in demo scene? Have you tried to replace the EnviroSky prefab with default one?
We maybe should meet in a teamviewer session to find the issue in your project. You could add me on skype (vondox@live.de Hendrik Haupt) too.

 

We loaded up the demo scene, and it runs perfectly in there with the supplied controller; however, if we disable the controller, and put in our character and 3rd person controller, everything goes strange. The weather systems don't work, the rain doesn't render, but the "splashes" do. No clouds or fog, just a clear sky.
Also, for some reason, the weather sounds are playing non stop, even in editor mode.
We will continue to try and figure this out, and write back with any updates.
Thanks

 

Okay, sounds for me that you have assigned wrong player and/or camera in EnviroSky prefab. Make sure that you really assign the player object in your scene and not a prefab in your project.

 

Heya Vondox,

We've decided to go with Enviro over another very popular asset and so far things are looking great. However, we've noticed a few things I'm hoping we can get your thoughts on.

1) The moon is very pixelated at its edges. We have antialias running but it doesn't seem to have an impact. Any thoughts on why it would be so pixelated?

2) Our trees are not obeying the lighting set by Enviro. They are SpeedTree trees and obeyed the lighting in the last weather/time of day asset we were using so not really sure what's going on there. Have you ran into this before?

3) The rain is very hard to see and we'd like to make it much more prominent. Any tips on how to do that?

Thanks!

 

Great News! Maybe add me on skype (vondox@live.de) for better communication?

1.) I planned to rewrite whole moon simulation and shader in 1.8. However I may add a fix for that "pixelated" issue in 1.7.3 already. (1.7.3 will include rewritten/improved cloud lighting and a few fixes.) For now you would have to rise the "clouds render quality".

2.) I often use SpeedTree in my scenes and never seen this before. Maybe check Unity "Lighting" setup and recreate precomputed GI.

3.) Rain effects are unity particle systems. You can find these attached to the weather prefabs. Play around with start size and render settings.

 

If Lightning changes do not work and you see some white contours around your leafs / trees specially in the night, than check also your post effects like SSAA or Antialising if you are using something like that. You often see this prolems if SSAA / AA is used as last Post Effect in the player settings etc. Play a little bit with Post Effect Camera positions put SSAA / AA before Enviro Camera Effects etc.

Cheers
Ronny

 

What's the opposite of AssignAndStart? I need to shutdown Enviro when switching players/logging out, but the scene doesn't get changed just yet.

Edit:
I fixed it by just assigning it to another object when the player is destroyed that is still active in the scene. What would cause rain effects to no longer show for that though? It was working before I did that I'm pretty sure. All other weather effects still show, including snow.

 

Okay yea that should work, but it's a good idea to include pause and resume functions. I will add this

Does the rain only stop to show after you have destroyed your player?
Maybe check the scene while playing and take a look on rain particle system. "Enviro Effects" -> "VFX" -> "WeatherName"-> "Rain".

 

Nope, it doesn't show before that either. I checked and confirmed that my player and camera are assigned to the fields on the inspector. What would I be looking for on the rain particle effect? I'm not that familiar with particle systems.

The only change I did was in Awake on one object I do AssignAndStart, and then when my player object gets created I call ChangeFocus. The change focus is for a different game object, but same camera object.

Actually, after further testing I changed it back to how I was doing it before, and the rain still isn't working. Turns out it's my anti-aliasing causing it. What's the recommended order for the camera components? And can they be added to the prefab, or does Enviro require them being added at runtime?

 

The image effects will be added with AssignAndStart when not already on your camera. So easiest way would be to assgin a temporary object in your scene and your camera and enable/disable EnviroSky component to refresh. You now got the image effects added to your camera and can change the order. I really depends on your list of effects you are using on your camera. Just try

 

It seems that this issue is caused from the Enviro LightShafts.cs and Enviro Fog.cd scripts being added to the camera dynamically after the Post Processing effects. I am going to try to play around with script execution order to see if I can fix this, unless you have a better suggestion?

All that I have on the camera is the post processing effects behavior, and then once you hit play and the enviro scripts are added then it causes the banding issue, if I pause and then move the Post Processing Effects under the enviro scripts, all works great.

 

I'm having some pretty serious performance issues. If I disable Enviro then my performance is great. The weird thing is that this only happens in a build, if I run it in Unity then my performance is fine. Any thoughts on what it could be?

 

You can change the order of image effects in editor. Enviro will not change them once the effects are on your camera.

 

Biggest impact on performance have cloud rendering quality and cloud layer quality.
You maybe need to lower one of these settings , depending on your gpu.

 

I could try lowering those. I have a GTX 970 though, is that not good enough?

 

Your graphic card is better than mine!
You really can tweak system to run on older cards very fast.
I think you get different results in editor and build because you using a low resolution to render in editor but high in build. Try to set resolution in editor window to have more realistic results.

First try to set clouds rendering quality to low or medium. This will decrase the resolution to render clouds. To gain even more performance you could can lower clouds layer quality. (You also can do this in runtime and for example add a quality menu for your players.)

If you still see performance issues, we may have to check your scene to find solution.

 

For the resolution in the editor, are you referring to Unity's quality level setting or something else? If quality level I have it running at fantastic in both the editor and build.

My quality settings are at the defaults: cloud layer 0 is 75, and layer 1 is 7. Clouds rendering quality is medium.

 

You can create resolutions with the +

 

Ah, the screen resolution, okay. In a build with bad performance I did 1366x768. In the Editor at 1080p my performance is fine.

 

Really, okay that is strange. Have you enabled debugging features and profiler? What Unity version? I will run some tests later with the enviro version I gave you.

 

Enabled them for the builds? Yes, I have. That's no different than what I had before Enviro though. I'm on version 5.5.3f1.

 

Hm sorry I can't replicate this on my side. I tested demo scene and a Ultimate Survival scene with Enviro, a Terrain generated with Gaia full of SpeedTree and grass, MegaSplat, PostProcessing Stack some random objects and a few AI NPC and get near the same fps it shows me in the editor. (Default Enviro Settings - Fantastic default unity settings with V-Sync disabled.)

Maybe send me a few screenshots of your profiler window (in editor and in build) to have more information to my e-mail (vondox@live.de).

 

Well this is bizarre... I can no longer reproduce the performance issue. Perhaps my computer was just running slow at the time? Weird that it didn't also happen in Unity though. I don't know. If it happens again I'll try to get more info on what's going on.

 

Yea maybe some background process was slowing down your pc at the moment you tested.

 

Are things like Sky colors and Cloud colors configurable (for alien worlds)?

 

Yea you can use enviro for alien worlds. But only supports one sun!

You can control the sky scattering, cloud colors, lighting and fog settings.
It's also easy to create or modify weather effects.