[released] Overcloud - Volumetric Sky And Lighting

Hello @Fewes,

I need to add jet flame effect to my project. But most of the particle effects I tried not shown as intended since they generally contain transparency (which cause incompatibility with overcloud).

Is it possible for you to recommend a quick & easy method ?

Thanks

 

Hi there! I added code to the compatibility page for adding shadows to Crest as well. It is untested but should work, let me know if it doesn't.

Hi! What sort of compatibility issues are you seeing? Lack of fog/scattering or do they just not appear at all? Here's a simple transparent shader (with everything commented) that shows how to add OverCloud support which can be extended to other uses as well. I just realized this is not included with the asset itself, so I will add it to the next patch.

 

It is better to explain it by a screenshot.. The red dots are in fact part of a flame/fire .. This example is not a jet flame, but an ordinary flame (the red points). They seem a bit blurry, and smokes displayed almost transparent

Thank you very much for yout quick response and for the shader.. I will work on it

 

Very nice asset, i'm developing a VR project and I see some strange artifacts with fog.

First, the stereo split seems to be off when I have thick fog (probably happens with any fog, just most noticable when thick)

Second, the fog isn't stationary, depending on the orientation of my headset I can make the fog move around.

I uploaded examples here:
https://imgur.com/a/Nx5pVxy

And yes, this is exactly how it looks in the headset as well.

 

Hi, can you try switching your stereo rendering mode to single-pass? Some versions of Unity seem to have difficulties with multi-pass rendering.

 

Yes I'm on single pass

 

Single-Pass, or Single-Pass (Instanced)?

 

Hmm, I'm thinking it's the Oculus SDK that's the culprit. I've only been able to test it with OpenVR personally but I know it has worked for Oculus in the past. Can you try unchecking "Shared Depth Buffer" and see if that fixes it? What version of Unity are you running?

 

2019.2.13f

https://imgur.com/a/Nx5pVxy

check the link, produced a 3rd clip, this time I disable overcloud halfway into it.. you can see how it's splicing and sliding the view at the split

And yeah, disabled the depth buffer and no luck

 

It is definitely related to the depth buffer somehow. I'll do some digging and see if I can find a solution. If you're pressed for time on your project and would rather try something else, you can contact me via PM to discuss a refund.

Just as a last test, I can see in the images there are no volumetric clouds. Have you tried cranking the camera far clip plane up to 10 000+?

 

So, I have my Far Clip at only 400 because I'm trying to severly limit vert counts and keep my FPS up in VR. But changing Far Clip to 10,000 makes the issue go away...interesting

 

Hi. I tested the crest cloud shadow integration and
i cannot see an difference with values from 0 to 500.

 

Hi, I bought Overcloud to use it in VR, as it seems to be working fine in VR. But I can't find anywhere infos about VR use (camera parameters, best settings, optimization...) A tutorial would be great, or at least some guidelines !

 

Awesome asset. I don't know much about graphics, so can you point me toward a solution, here? My Unity Terrain appears to be receiving illumination regardless of the ambient light settings, while other objects of mine are not (you can ignore the aircraft - I know why that is lit).

 

what are your plans regarding the SRPs?
sorry read thread backwards. I guess still no plans

 

ehm ... the manual is short. in the presets i can see fog adjustments but where do i adjust the fog actually? i want very dense ground fog (with noise as well?!) very close to the ground? like in aura asset? if this is not possible can i use those two volumetric systems ? just clouds from overcloud and volumetric fog from aura? do you think height map based height is possible in the future? ... like here

min 11:50

 

I'm checking this out and it seems the shadow float might not actually be used for the shadows. I'll get back to you with a solution.

Generally, using it for VR does not differ much from regular use. The manual contains some tips on optimization, but in general you want to keep it as basic as possible (turning off effects). The volumetric scattering mask in particular can be taxing in VR.

This could be because of the ambient lighting mode under the lighting settings window, make sure it is set to Gradient, and not Skybox (as this is what OverCloud can update).

The fog in OverCloud is a "classic" analytic solution, meaning it is based on the distance to the viewing surface. As such, it does not support 3D noise or the effects like you see in the video. The fog parameters are all present under the preset rollout. If you would like to have noisy fog, it is possible to approximate this by lowering the volumetric cloud plane into the ground, and lowering the opacity of the clouds.
While I can't guarantee it won't work, I really would not recommend using multiple volumetric systems at the same time for a number of reasons, the most important ones being performance and blending issues.

 

thanks for the answer in the demo the cloud plane is fixed,i cant adjust the height (by a script i guess). anyway even if lowering the cloud plane would be a solution it would mean i do not have clouds anymore or is it possible to have to cloud planes at once? i know what you mean about the classic solution but even for the cloud layer combined with height based information you could get pretty neat effects. clouds crawling over mountains etc.. i guess you are not very far away from such an effect. adjusting the presets slider does change the preset but not my current settings. and it is difficult because those sliders in the presets do not reflect the adjustments sliders in the actual settings. you have simpler naming conventions here doing multiple things at once?

the asset is producing very high quality visuals/ clouds so thanks for that. the artistic control as far as i can tell is a bit sparse.

 

Hey,

This is a theoretical question for Felix and possibly a bug:

- I've noticed that in the generated material "OverCloudSkybox" the lower half of the sky is producing the moire "pixel noise" that was reported in an earlier post (can't seem to find it though) when the camera is exactly at Z0(?), not in world but when previewed. (I am assuming because the preview cam sits exaclty at 0,0,0)

- I'm looking to render my ground/terrain mesh into a skybox - seeing as your skybox is already being rendered at some point, would there be any idea in looking at generating a skybox that includes select world geometry? (let's say I tagged it and provided a capture/camera height or an offset from 0,0,0)

- similarly, the overcloud reflection probe generated amazing results , but I'd love for it to include my geometry as well. (This may already be a feature that I haven't figured out)

As always, thanks for the awesome work and support!

 

Is there RAM support yet pretty popular asset still waiting... Or did I miss something on the compatibility page and not checking correctly.

 

Hello!
This Asset is my favorite! I want to use this in URP. But this is not supported.
So I tried to apply in URP. But this Asset's source code is difficult for me.
In my case I want to use only 2D clouds and Atmosphere in URP.
So would you divide the function?
This is my selfish. I'm sorry.

 

Hi, thanks for your answer, but It seems I can't make it working in an Oculus Quest app... Any idea ?

 

The cloud plane altitude is a prefab parameter you can change. If you lower the cloud plane to use it as fog, you will indeed lose out on the volumetric clouds. I considered adding multiple cloud planes but ultimately the idea was scrapped due to performance reasons. If the preset you are changing is the active one, the changes should apply. Is this not the case for you?

- Is this only in the preview window for the material itself? It is probably related to the same bug mentioned earlier in the thread, which I am looking into.

- When you say including select world geometry, do you mean rendering it into a static cubemap, or realtime? Both are possible, but at runtime, OverCloud uses a dynamic skybox (which does not use a camera but rather math to generate the result). If you wish, you can use an OverCloudReflectionProbe to render a full scene cubemap, including the clouds, and use it as a static cubemap.

- This should be possible, you just need to set the layer mask on the reflection probe accordingly (the airplane demo has a dynamic reflection probe which reflects the terrain).

Sorry this keeps getting put on the backburner. I hereby vow to have it out next week, or so help me none of my future shaders will compile.

It is not possible to run OverCloud in any SRP without significant changes to the asset (if it was easy, I would support it already ). If you feel you bought the asset in error, you can PM me to discuss a refund.

What sort of issue are you seeing? Compile errors/glitches/lack of effects?

 

Thanks for looking into.
I got some nice reults so far....
Unity 2019.2.15f1
Crest 8.0.0
Overcloud 1.0.7







only the moonlight needs some special because dir light is not taken into account.

 

reflections.)
For test, cloud layer is under the ocean surface here.



To reproduce in a 5min setup ,i only attached an oecean renderer in 829m height.
Your ocean and terrain is hidden.



and little gerster waving to your standard scene for testing.



Then i added an Ocean Planar Reflection Script to the camera.
Moved the plane and the trees to Layer Tree to allow additional reflections of them..

 

Probably you have some tips or motivation to create more cloud control and presets like this....
Read Dead Redemption 2 PC has some great inpspirational shots.

But damn. Your are already pretty close with Overcloud.

 

Ya that would be great to have more cloud presets and also a Seed Value so clouds can look different at start at different positions.

 

compression.)

 

okay i do get results now. the UI is not very intuitive. that i have to adjust the presets i currently have applied is not matching the expectation that i change something above and save it as a preset below. to do the actual adjustments in the preset is "new". the upper part of the UI is rendering specific and the lower part is adjustment of the condition i would say. anyway. i have very nice results now but i do fall back to 2D clouds in game view and have perfect 3d clouds in scene view. why is this happening? i think over cloud can exceed rdr2 (visually at performance cost obviously). i really would love to have more control for the atmosphere effects / height fog (start/end/height etc.) not just "density".

 

The volumetric clouds are affected by the camera clip planes, which differ from the scene/game view. If you are seeing no clouds in-game, that is usually an indication that you need to increase the far clip plane of the camera (to some few km). Let me know if this works!

 

test it when back home. thanks. what also would be really helpful is a map composed on the coverage map to have exclude areas etc where clouds never happen to have a "light spot" to stage a castle for example. cant wait for the terrain shadows

 

works! did not read it in the manual (!?) everyone starting a scene should encounter this problem since default clipping plane settings is to low?

 

Hi Fewes,

Can you please add a warning if Unity > Lighting > Ambient Mode is Realtime and OverCloud > Time of Day > Play Speed is a high value (even the provided 5000)? I was wondering why my Advanced Frame Timing was showing my hardware (8700K + 2080 Ti) spiking, and spent a bit of time tracking it down to this. See attached

 

Is there some kind of seed value to be able to change the clouds around in each weather preset or just in general. I don't need moving skies but I do need the static clouds to randomly change around by a seed value. Is this possible or maybe hidden in code somewhere? If you move them around by the wind speeds on Play they snap back to the original area which is fine but if there was a seed value then it could be changed OR maybe even X and Y value offsets to manually slide the clouds around as needed per look desired.

 

Hi Felix, first of all: Thank you for creating the best cloud system I have tried, yet, and and sharing it with the community via the Asset Store! I have tried a few, and it looks like finally, I've got what I need.

I have two (big) questions (I'm using OverCloud 1.07, on Unity 2019.1.15f1):

1. What's going on with the lightning? EDIT: Never mind. The lightning only works when there's something that the lightning can strike but in my scene, the ground is actually just in a Skybox because the player's up 1200 meters in the sky. I changed that in the code, problem solved (that would probably be a useful setting in lighting; I'm happy to share the changed code, it's a trivial change).

2. How to best give players performance / quality options? I read the FAQ, of course. My goal is to expose those settings to players that have the most significant effect on performance, ideally without letting players "break things" (they can completely disable clouds for low end systems). With my "default settings", performance on a 2080 Ti and Vive Pro was way below 90 FPS (frametimes around 22ms, with only a tiny little bit of geometry, postprocessing and OverCloud; disabling OverCloud gets me to 4ms, disabling post-processing gets me to 2ms).

I have Override Skybox Material (in Over Cloud / Atmosphere) switched off. The OverCloudCamera also has "Render Atmosphere" - this makes a huge difference in frame time (about 7ms on the 2080 Ti), with no visible effect. Is it correct that "Render Atmosphere" only has a visible effect when "Override Skybox Material" is active?

It also seems that Render Volumetric Clouds and Render 2D Fallback should be mutually exclusive. I do get a bit of extra performance when disabling 2D Fallback (2-3 ms), without a noticeable visual difference. Using the 2D fallback instead of Volumetric Clouds would give me about 4ms, so that would be nice ... but it kind of breaks the effect (I'd probably have to move the player above the clouds in the case; or move the volumetric clouds below the player).

On the 2080 Ti, changing compositor resolution seems to almost have no performance impact 256x256 vs. 2048x2048. On which GPUs would that have a more significant effect? I also have a 980 and 1080 as well as R9 Fury to test this on but I'm not even sure I should expose this to players.

Also, switching High Quality Clouds on/off seems to have very little effect on performance (but does decrease visual fidelity noticeably).

Finally, we do have a "3rd person spectator camera". Is there a way to optimize with multiple cameras? Like, e.g. rendering the scattering masks only once?

 

This is most likely caused by the Unity environment lighting updating which is a heavy process (it forces a GPU/CPU sync) and will actually happen regardless of if OverCloud is present or not, but you are right that a warning would be good. I have included this in the upcoming patch. Thanks!

It's a little tricky to decouple the X/Y movement from the code, but what I've done is expose the global wind time as a public variable for you (OverCloud.weather.windTime). This value controls the cloud positions in a linear fashion, so you can set it to random values to get a pseudo-seed type behaviour. Once the patch drops, let me know if you decide to try this!

Hi!
Render resolution is the biggest performance hog in VR. I am able to reach 90 fps with a GTX1070 set to 100% render resolution, but with OC settings cranked down. For VR, I recommend setting the down sampling to half or quarter, and disabling the scattering mask, plus using the lowest settings possible for the cloud lighting/sample count.
"Render Atmosphere" enables the atmospheric scattering/fog post-effect. It should have an effect even without the skybox material, but you might not see it if there are no scene objects present at far distances.
The 2D fallback clouds go behind the volumetric clouds, and show up if your cloud distance/far clip plane is too low to show the clouds at some point. The idea is that you can use both or just one of them, depending on your scene needs. If you don't have to render clouds at huge distances (for example if you have a cluttered skyline), I recommend disabling the fallback clouds.
The compositor resolution really only affects lower end GPUs. It is really only there if you are really strapped for resources, otherwise I would recommend leaving it at 1k.
Unfortunately, there is no way to optimize for multiple cameras, since all effects are rendered on a per-screen basis. If your spectator view is very small however, you can probably turn the down sampling super low since it will be harder to tell the difference.
Also, single-pass stereo is slightly faster than multi-pass, so I recommend using that if possible.


Also, an update on RAM integration. I tried to add support to their shaders, but they use surface shaders which won't accept the conventions needed to add OverCloud support.
It is possible, but requires you to use the compiled surface shaders and thus it is a very messy solution. As such, I have decided to not add it to the compatibility page. If you really, really want RAM support, get in touch with me and I will help you out.

 

Great to hear on the seed value for clouds def wanna try that out when the patch drops. Really wanted RAM to work with overcloud if you think theyll never integrate correctly then theres no point in a hack that has that hacky look. Could maybe fake it by having the unity standard fog blend between ram and overcloud maybe. Thanks for trying tho.

 

Thank you for the information - that's very useful. I'm replying on that below. But one thing I forgot in my previous message: In our setup, the camera is persistent and we load different environments, some with OverCloud, most without it. One issue I ran into was that when I just remove the environment before loading another one, and therefore also the OverCloud prefab instance in the old environment, and then switch off the OverCloudCamera component on my VR camera a little later, when the new environment has been fully loaded, the last cloud state got "stuck" on the camera and overlaid on the rendering permanently.

Also, when I then loaded another scene that also has clouds, things broke really badly.

I could work around this by first disabling OverCloudCamera, then disabling the OverCloud component (on the prefab) a frame later, and then destroying the old environment (which also destroys the OverCloud component that is now disabled), so it's not a pressing issue for me ... but something to maybe have a look at (tbh, I haven't even tried doing it all without waiting for a frame, which would have simplified things quite a bit but I realized that just now ;-) ).

Ok, that's very cool because I already have a per scene (i.e. "environment") super sampling override, with defaults. Usually, this is at 1.0 but I could set this e.g. to 0.8 or even 0.7 for the scenes that have clouds, and players can persistently override that setting.

Yeah, cloud lighting and sample count, I have set to Low, and I think I won't expose those to players because I'm not really noticing much difference in quality with those.

Down sampling, I'll probably expose fully. Currently, when I go to Full, even my 2080 Ti chokes on it but that's also with a Vive Pro at the default super-sampling (with is 150%). Some people may want lower super-sampling (or have a lower-res HMD) but maximum fidelity on the clouds. Or in the future, they may have more powerful GPUs ;-)

Disabling the scattering mask does give me a nice performance boost - but also removes a really nice effect. But I guess that's one more thing I should expose.

Cool, that makes sense. There are airplanes that might be in the distance - but usually they are hidden by the clouds when they are distant. Other than those airplanes, the scene is really just a skybox, so no distant objects.

Sounds good. In one of my scenes, the 2D clouds (without volumetric clouds) are a decent performance optimization, in the other not so much. I believe in my situation, rendering both never has much benefit because the player is in the middle of fairly dense clouds, so the 2D won't ever be visible.

I'll try that on my 980.

That makes sense. I might add an option to switch off the clouds for the VR view but keep them for the spectator view. The main use case for the spectator view is for people streaming the game - so what the spectators see is more important than what the player sees in that case.

Single-pass, always ;-) ... I can't use single-pass instanced, yet, but multi-pass actually breaks things in my game, besides the performance hit. I believe multi-pass wasn't supported on Android until recently but I believe it now is. Fortunately, I don't have to support Android with this game.

 

Hey hello guys
hope you all are having a wonderful holiday
just getting started with overclouds .. amazing

looking to find compatibly into ocean shaders made in ASE amplify editor
from the pics posted by others looks like I still need to work out the cloud shadows

 

Maybe I should also try this on my 970 ;-) ... on the 980, it makes no noticeable difference. Interestingly, High Quality never seemed to make a noticeable difference in performance, except on my 2080 Ti where it made the difference between dropping frames and not dropping frames. So I will probably remove compositor resolution as a setting for players but keep High Quality (and probably set it to off by default, always because the visual difference in my cases is actually fairly small).

But it's really tricky because SteamVR sets the super-sampling based on GPU, so depending on the content, it could be that a higher end GPU has worse framerate because the increased resolution has more impact than what the higher performance of the GPU can compensate for.

This puts me into the interesting situation where I will reduce the in-game supersampling more the better the GPU is, because lower-end GPUs already have a fairly low default, where reducing it even more would make text very hard to read. On high-end GPUs, on the other hand, reducing super-sampling a little has almost no noticeable visual effect at all (but major impact on the performance).

Another fun fact I have just discovered: Anti-aliasing has very severe impact on performance but anything above 2x makes no noticeable difference on a Vive Pro with a 2080 Ti (= 150% super-sampling default). Again, this depends every much on the actual super-sampling values because in principle, Anti-aliasing and super-sampling do the same thing (except it's not exactly the same, due to different algorithms being used).

 

@Fewes, Hello, I've got an issue with clouds lighting. I opened the demo scene and create PointLight with a "OverCloudLight"script. I have dark circles around this. It looks like a inverted normals.

https://imgur.com/wea8rZi

I have no idea how to fix it. Light radius larger than 150 meters.

upd: Bug reproduced both on Forward and Deferred.

 

Is there an updated procedure to have overcloud work with Crest ocean system, I tried following this procedure, however, the "Crest/Crest/Shaders/Ocean.shader" file doesn't exist which was step one.

 

What's the latest unity version overcloud works in?

 

Managed to fix this issue, however, I am only experiencing volumetric clouds in editor view and not in runtime, what would cause this?

Here is a side by side comparison

 

I tried to add shadows from objects to the clouds. I sampling the shadow cascades in OverCloudSunAtten function called by vertex shader

o.incomingLight.w = OverCloudSunAtten(worldPos);

. And apply this in fragment shader

_OC_LightColor * i.incomingLight.y * i.incomingLight.w

. Result looks awesome.

https://imgur.com/Fpx95G7
https://imgur.com/bNASubR

But I'm not sure about performance. How many vertices have to be processed for different cloud quality settings? Are there any pitfalls when sampling the cascades in vertex shader on different GPUs?

 

@Fewes Hello again. if I add a ParticleSystem in Deferred render, then

CameraEvent.AfterForwardOpaque

will start to work, which would mean that atmosphere will overlap the opaque geometry twice.

If the ParticleSystem is not rendered at the moment (bound out of view frustum), then everything is fine. I can also remove the command buffer event from the MainCamera and thereby solve the problem.

I use Unity 2019.2.17f1

 

@Fewes
Hi. Firstly, fantastic cloud system!
I'm considering using it for a VR project where the player is in an airplane cockpit. Obviously, I'd want to be able to see clouds through the window of the cockpit, but not have clouds *inside* the cockpit. Is it possible to achieve this, maybe via a collider set to a specific layer to cut a hole in the cloud volume?

 

@Fewes

Your asset is great! My issues is that when I add OverCloud to Lux Water everything above the surface looks great. As soon as I dive, there is a seam. Any thoughts on what could be causing that? It looks fine if OverCloud isn't in the scene. The brown part is the terrain, and the green is Lux and your cloud asset.

Thanks,
Adam