[RELEASED] trueSKY Alpha for Unity Pro - Volumetric Skies, Clouds, and Time-of-Day

@rvkennedy Are there any examples on how to do the networking? I wasn't able to find anything on it in the documentation.

 

I thought it was time based deterministic, so just sync the time.

 

@hippocoder Okay thanks. I'll give that a try when we get this asset.

 

From what I can tell, you have to manually build how you want the weather to be. There's no automatic random weather, is that correct?

 

Semi correct, you can manually whack in a cloud keyframe that's heavy cloud + raining at say, 9am, then one that isn't raining at 12, then add another at 2pm where the cloud coverage is 0, etc.

I believe you can also code that stuff in, so if you wanted 'random weather' you'd figure out what the chances of certain weather appearing would be for the day, and your code would add those keyframes in. I've never done this but pretty sure that's right (I'm just a ts fan / user).

 

My extended invoice number isnt working, help?

 

Please email contact@simul.co for help with licence issues.

 

Apologies all for the delay in communication. I was on holiday and upon my return the Unity forum was being buggy, showing no new posts in this thread and sending me no email alerts!

I tidied up the ones relating to the setup wizard.

Unfortunately the scene Manager warning has to stay for now as doing it the recommended way causes problems with some Unity versions. I can look into that a bit more but obviously it's a much lower priority issue than some of the things on the backlog at the moment.

 

I downloaded the evaluation of this, but when I put it in my scene the sky is black. I followed the tutorial on your website. What am I doing wrong?

Nevermind, think I figured it out. Had to turn on the render in edit mode, which is weird since it doesn't show up in a standalone build either without that checked. Can we not use the sequencer in the evaluation? It asks for a license and does not let me edit anything without it.

I'm not sure if this is because the sequencer is disabled or not, but I am not seeing any clouds either.

A couple other issues I am having is that there are shadows placed on the terrain that move around when the camera moves. Maybe from clouds I can't see? Is that intentional? It feels really weird to have shadows moving around when the camera moves.

Also, as the camera rotates up and down the water in my scene changes color. Not sure why that would be, maybe something is getting occluded? I'm using PlayWay Water if that matters.

 

You need a license key to edit the keyframes. I would assume you're not seeing clouds because the sequence loaded doesn't have any cloud keyframes, and without a license key you cannot add said keyframes.

However you still get a license key with an evaluation, you just need to enter this in the sequencer and it should be fine. If you sign up to the website here: https://simul.co/register then go to: simul.co/account, you should see it.

The cloud shadows shouldn't be moving along with the camera. This was an issue we had a while ago IIRC, but it was fixed, so this is disconcerting! What version of the plugin are you using? I'll take a look into this.

 

I'm not seeing anything on that page, but I did receive an email from you with a evaluation key, just had troubles trying to use it. I'll try turning off my firewall this evening to see if that's the cause of it. I downloaded the package labeled trueSKYAlpha-Unity5.3-4.0.83-Win32_x64.unitypackage, and I am using Unity 5.3.4.

 

What troubles do you mean sorry? Is it working now?

That version definitely shouldn't have that problem so I'll see what I can do and see why that's happening.

 

I put the key into the sequencer license field, but it says it's invalid. Could this be because I do not see a license key on the accounts page? This is a key I received in an email from you.

If you think there are no clouds in the scene because there's no clouds in the sequencer that gets generated automatically, shouldn't that also mean there's no cloud shadows in the scene? Is there something else in this asset that casts shadows?

 

The best thing to do here is just get your license working and then seeing if you have any problems then.

If you'd like to PM me your email (or just email me at callum@simul.co) I can check your license key and try and get this fixed

 

Okay I have emailed you.

 

@callum_simul, Belive I found an error in the documentation - I've been trying to read out some values from the sequencer with no luck. Kept getting errors.
Then by chance I got it working (Not a coder so took lots of trial and error to get it working.

Anyway the docs show the following:

Code (CSharp):

1. private trueSKY tS;
2.  
3. void Start ()
4. {
5.     tS = trueSKY.GetTrueSky();
6.     uint uid = tS.GetInterpolatedCloudKeyframe (1);
7.     tS.GetKeyframeValue (uid, "cloudiness");
8. }

which won't work as float has to be cast?
And the code that does work.

Code (CSharp):

1. private trueSKY tS;
2.  
3. void Start ()
4. {
5.     tS = trueSKY.GetTrueSky();
6.     uint uid = tS.GetInterpolatedCloudKeyframe(0); //0 = 3D Clouds, 1 = 2D Clouds
7.     cloudiness = (float)tS.GetKeyframeValue(uid, "cloudiness");
8. }

Also in the docs it has CloudKeyframe (1) where value 1 is 3d clouds, but I've found this to be CloudKeyframe (0)
That took an age to figure out as the cloud value was just reading as zero when using CloudKeyframe (1) value.
Just by chance set CloudKeyframe (0) and then got readings out.

So 0 = 3D Clouds and 1 = 2D Clouds.

 

@callum_simul Thanks! The evaluation copy is functional now, I added some clouds to the sequencer and they are showing up, and the shadow problem seems to no longer exist.

The water changing colors is still an issue though. It almost seems like it just gets much brighter for some reason. The third screenshot is of the sun, it's rectangular. Here's some screenshots if that'll help. The only difference between the water screenshots is the angle of the camera, they were taken a couple seconds apart.

Is there a setting for how far away the clouds will be? At the moment they are very high in the sky. I'd like them to be lower to allow players to fly through them.

Does this asset handle wind zones? I haven't seen anything about it, and there's no wind on my trees currently with this.

 

I think that code was just to illustrate how you'd get a value, rather than how you'd do anything with it. I'll take a look and try and make this a bit more useful. I don't recall ever having to cast though, but again I'll check this out.

0 = Sky, 1 = clouds, 2 = 2D clouds. If this isn't the case for anything then that is erroneous so I'll test all the functions out and see. We did have a problem with the unreal side recently which has only just been fixed, which may have also fixed this actually (they use the same base code functions in this case) so I'll do some testing and fix if necessary.

Thanks for pointing these things out.

What asset are you using for water effects?

The cloudbase setting is probably what you're looking for.

And you can add wind by setting the wind speed for a cloud keyframe, though this won't make trees automatically react. If you wanted trees to animate in the wind you'd need to animate whatever tree system you were using yourself. You can get the current wind speed via scripting.

 

Thanks @callum_simul, also what would I need to change to offset the camera matrix?
I am simulating a ww2 rangefinder system that had an image cut in half, where the top half moved horizontal to the bottom half.
I've this working using two cameras that are using a scissors rect to have cameras one above the other.



This is working but with one issue, the cameras are rendering a complete Truesky matrix to each half.


First Edit:

What I would like is to only capture the top half of Truesky matrix, is this possible?

This is the camera script I'm using:

Code (CSharp):

1. using UnityEngine;
2. using System.Collections;
3.  
4. public class StereoCam : MonoBehaviour
5. {
6.     public Rect scissorRect = new Rect (0,0,1,1);
7.  
8.     public static void SetScissorRect( Camera cam, Rect r )
9.     {    
10.         if ( r.x < 0 )
11.         {
12.             r.width += r.x;
13.             r.x = 0;
14.         }
15.      
16.         if ( r.y < 0 )
17.         {
18.             r.height += r.y;
19.             r.y = 0;
20.         }
21.      
22.         r.width = Mathf.Min( 1 - r.x, r.width );
23.         r.height = Mathf.Min( 1 - r.y, r.height );        
24.      
25.         cam.rect = new Rect (0,0,1,1);
26.         cam.ResetProjectionMatrix ();
27.         Matrix4x4 m = cam.projectionMatrix;
28.  
29.         cam.rect = r;
30.  
31.         Matrix4x4 m1 = Matrix4x4.TRS( new Vector3( r.x, r.y, 0 ), Quaternion.identity, new Vector3( r.width, r.height, 1 ) );
32.         Matrix4x4 m2 = Matrix4x4.TRS (new Vector3 ( ( 1/r.width - 1), ( 1/r.height - 1 ), 0), Quaternion.identity, new Vector3 (1/r.width, 1/r.height, 1));
33.         Matrix4x4 m3 = Matrix4x4.TRS( new Vector3( -r.x  * 2 / r.width, -r.y * 2 / r.height, 0 ), Quaternion.identity, Vector3.one );
34.  
35.         cam.projectionMatrix = m3 * m2 * m;      
36.     }
37.  
38.     // Update is called once per frame
39.     void OnPreRender ()
40.     {
41.         SetScissorRect( GetComponent<Camera>(), scissorRect );
42.     }
43. }

And my Camera Setup

both camera are showing the skybox as 2 seperate squashed versions of the above/below horizon. Where itI would like it to be one skybox between both rects.

In game


And rotating camera up the problem is shown


Would like to edit the Truesky camera script to have a bool selector, that when enabled allows the camera matrix to use only top half of truesky if possible.
Any help on how I would need to edit The camera matrix so it only accounts for top halve of screen? Any help here would be appreciated or is there a better method to acheive this?

Second Edit:

Got it working, looks like a deferred issue, switched to forward and it works.
Is this something that can be fixed for Deferred cameras in Truesky???

 

@callum_simul Alright, should be easy enough to handle setting the windzone up manually.

We are using PlayWay Water.

 

I am hoping this gets running on OS X soon. I'd very much like to use it (am using the discontinued Silver Lining cloud system for now).

tone

 

Bump for OSX

 

I will take a look into this and get back to you. That's quite an interesting issue!

As for the other issues, I've amended the docs. There was no need to cast with the code I put originally but that code didn't do anything (the implication was that the user would know what to do with the code to use it, but I should really have been more explicit). But I've edited it now to show the variable actually being assigned and when that's being done, then a cast is needed.

For the layer parameter, it does seem that 0 = 3D, 1 = 2D. However I've amended the docs and I think it's best to leave it like this, as any changes could cause nasty problems for anyone using this code who updates. It seems the only function that actually takes a layer parameter is the Interp one (I sometimes get a bit mixed up with UE4 and Unity, and the former has more functions which take all layers as a parameter). Best way to think about it is the layers go in this order: Sky -> 3D Clouds -> 2D Clouds (as in the sequencer). If it's a cloud function then the first layer is going to be 3D clouds, so it will be layer 0. If it's a function for all layers then the first layer is the sky layer, so 3D clouds will be 1.

 

Thanks @callum_simul, will be beneficial to a amature coders like myself which took me ages to figure out it needed to be cast. But it was a good learning process for myself.

Regarding the camera issue the author of Ceto said the following if this is if any help:

 

Hi all,
We are looking for some high quality screenshots of TrueSky. Anybody who has any images that show
TrueSky's potential, please show us here and we may put them on the website!

 

Also: if anyone would like to review trueSKY on the Asset Store it would be much appreciated. The latest review has a few factual errors, so if you do appreciate the product please show your support.
As for OSX, we're bringing in a developer next week to pull our OpenGL code together for the Mac version. We're so close, but I'll keep you posted.

 

Wow, this looks very awesome and just like what we need for the air levels in Holodance.

[EDIT: Meanwhile, I have received the evaluation and wow does this look awesome ;-) ... I made a few edits based on my first tests inline]

A few questions:

Does this work without any issues in VR? A few other cloud packages that I have tried used particles for rendering, and that was a nightmare in VR due to particles rotating with the headset. Obviously, your approach is different but still, VR sometimes can be tricky. I've seen you started VR support earlier in the forum, so I guess it should work - but just to confirm. Also ... does it work with Single-Pass Stereo Rendering, or if not, will it (soon ;-) )? [EDIT: I have seen the VR Headset flag in TrueSkyCamera but that actually destroys VR support (I'm using native VR / SteamVR in Unity 5.4). Without that activated, it seems to work okay but looking through the clouds at the terrain gives me a weird effect, so something does seem to be off there.]

Do you support PlayStation 4, or, if not, will you support it by September? I've seen some PS4 games in your Games Customers list, just not sure whether or not those used Unity.

Does this work well with pre-rendered Skyboxes? [EDIT: Apparently not, I've just tried] For our game, we have the greater part of the skies rendered into Vue skyboxes. We don't need changing time of the day and as our players can only move within a 4x4m area, at larger distances Skyboxes are most efficient without sacrificing 3d perception. Ideally, we'd only render about 1000 meters with trueSky and the rest with the Skybox. One reason being that for VR, you need to be able to render very close (near clipping plane 0.1m or less), and we've seen quite some trouble when having the far clipping plane farther than 2000m.

So far, this not working seems to be the greatest issue I'm running into. Can you give us some advice on how we could solve this for our use case?

Finally: Is the system deterministic enough that we could have some very dense clouds around the player but no clouds interfering directly around the player (in an area of approximately 30m radius around the player)? If this needs a bit of tweaking to find the right setup and spot, that's not a problem. We might add a bit of movement for the clouds to make this more dynamic but little enough to not break this area. [EDIT: I think the evaluation answers this with a loud and clear "YEAH!" ;-) ]

If I hadn't already wasted a lot of money on other cloud system, this would be an insta-buy ... but given the price and my experience with other cloud systems, I'd rather have these questions answered before hitting that button ;-)

[EDIT: Deleted part about having requested an evaluation ... all is good with that, I'm already evaluating and very tempted to buy without waiting for an answer ;-) ]

 

Oh no: I've just done some performance testing and this doesn't look good: This is on my high-end dev machine (980 Ti) and with settings that look decent, the system adds about 9ms per frame. In the profiler it "only" shows about 4ms but I guess that's without rendering for left/right eye. At a frame budget of about 10ms per frame (11ms

With Single Pass Stereo Rendering enabled, this does go down significantly (literally half the GPU time as far as I can tell) ... but SPSR apparently isn't really supported, yet, because when I enable it, all I get is a black background. It still does react to changing the settings (cloud steps and downscale factor seem to be the ones with the most significant effect on performance), so apparently, a significant part of the rendering still does happen ... it just doesn't show it on either the VR-HMD (Vive in my case) or the companion Window.

I'd still have to test this on a 970 but really, without SPSR, unless I missed some important optimizations settings, there's no way this could be used in VR with decent quality at the now standard 90 FPS.

 

Hi Jashan,

On a 980, you should be seeing about 2ms per frame (i.e. per view), not 4. First of all, adjust the downscale factor in the controls of the trueSKY object. Higher values are lower-resolution. Try also the Amortization settings.
But I think we'll need to support a single pass if we are to work with 90fps VR. Leave it with me a few days.

In answer to your previous questions, the system is entirely deterministic. I think it should support external skyboxes out of the box also. But the sky may be obscuring them, so we might need to add a couple of options for that. I'll post an update here when we've implemented single-pass, then we can go through your other issues.

 

OS X soon then? Please let me know if you need additional tester(s). I purchased for Windows and need for both platforms. Thanks.

 

Hi Roderick,

that sounds great, will buy in a minute (or two ;-) )! I had tried the downscale factor and with that it's easy to get decent performance - but I also quickly ended up with a rather blurry pixel-mess. Right now, I'm using downscale 2 and cloud steps 60 in one level, which is okay. The other level, which has really dense clouds, really only looks okay with downscale 1 and cloud steps 200+.

When we can use our own skyboxes, we can dedicate almost all the frametime to trueSky, so I believe that with single-pass and that we should be able to make it work

One other thing that I have noticed: It might because I'm using a 4K-monitor and have everything scaled to 150% ... but ... it's very hard to use the Sky Sequencer because it doesn't respond to most mouse-clicks. Like, selecting a keyframe is fairly hard, moving the keyframe very hard. Changing the time works maybe one out of 10 times, using the sliders almost never works. I also haven't quite figured out how the buttons on the left are used (maybe the don't anything even if they should).

Sunny regards,
Jashan

 

I think those issues are certainly to do with the 4K monitor, unfortunately. We have had other users report similar problems. Once we have a 4K monitor in house to test on, we'll get to fixing that.

And which buttons on the left are you referring to?

Thanks

 

Based on my investigations of the last couple of days, it looks like single-pass stereo is not quite ready. It's failing to write the depth buffer that we need to do the trueSKY blending. I've mailed Unity, as they previously mentioned adding a feature to access the depth directly, and this would save a lot of time. Will keep you posted on this.

 

I kind of suspected that. I'll try without scaling or running at 1920x1080. Unity's color picker also doesn't work on 4K when scaling is active.

Sorry, I was very imprecise ... those are the Preset-Buttons.

EDIT: And I've just tested it: When I remove the scaling (this is on Windows 10), everything, including the preset-buttons, works as expected. When I previously clicked the buttons, while getting "button-click feedback", instead of overriding my settings, the buttons simply didn't do anything at all.

By the way, you can probably reproduce this simply by using the Windows 10 scale feature. I'm pretty sure it does not really have anything to do with 4K but just that when using a 4K monitor, one usually uses scaling. And that currently seems to be a little buggy (IIRC; Unity had a blog posting or something like that about this a while back - but I didn't find it, might also have been on the beta group).

 

Glad to hear you have a workaround at least. Thanks for the heads up, we'll look into it

EDIT: I tried the various scaling settings and it all seems to work fine on this monitor. I'll try some other monitors as I think a high PPI is the problem, not strictly speaking, it being 4K (though naturally 4K -> high PPI).

 

Interesting that the scaling doesn't break it. Are you on Windows 10? It seems like Windows 10 has "smart" and "dumb" settings ("smart" settings being the old ones with all features, "dumb" the new ones which look very half-baked). I used the "dumb" scaling (right-click on desktop, "Display Settings", and there it's the first line, "Change the size of text, apps, and other items"). But yeah, maybe it only breaks when you have a monitor that has 150% as "recommended".

Unfortunately, I have just found another, pretty severe issue: I noticed that our standalone builds were crashing both when closing and doing an "internal restart" (we basically reload our main level). As I had applied several other changes as well (e.g. updating the SteamVR Unity Plugin), I wasn't sure if it was trueSky or not ... but after completely removing trueSky (which was a bit of a challenge because it re-installed itself a few times), the crashes disappeared.

That was the version downloaded from the Website a few days ago, I think: 4.0.93 (but it actually says that 4.0.3.387 should be the last version, so I'm not perfectly sure).

EDIT: I guess I should add this is on Unity 5.4f3.

 

I would recommend a cheap mac then. Because they're 5k (and able to use 4k resolutions).

 

Hi jashan,

Yeah that's what I was doing on Windows 10. I'll keep you informed when we manage to fix such issues.

I will take a look into this bug also. Obviously it shouldn't be causing crashes; certainly not on a stable release branch. Any crash logs you have would be useful also.

Thanks,
Callum

 

Hi Callum,

I've just looked for crash logs but unfortunately, it did not produce any. When I have put trueSky back I'll do a build with debug settings and hopefully this will give us some more information. For now, all I can say is that it crashes when closing the game, and when reloading the startup level, and those crashes happened all the time.

But ... I'm trying to save a crash dump from Visual Studio (the crash triggers the debugger, so that may help).

Also, I'll include one build with trueSky that crashes, and another one I created where the only change is that I physically removed trueSky (the crash occurs without actually entering a scene that uses trueSky but I'm using the same camera all along, so that camera does have a TrueskyCamera attached - but it is disabled until a scene with clouds is loaded).

I'll send you the download link via PM once this is zipped and uploaded.

Sunny regards,
Jashan

 

@rvkennedy
Good to hear your latest osx update. looking forward to checking it out when it's ready.

 

Just a note to say that version 4.1 of the plugin is now available. This is the new stable branch, replacing 4.0.
You should see improved environmental lighting and rain/snow/lightning in this build, so do let us know how you get on!

 

Is anyone else having reflection probe issues or is it just me? I only get one of the 6 cube faces rendering in reflection probes (sky otherwise looks fine). https://www.dropbox.com/s/6zbrlo78s42730j/1of6Faces.JPG?dl=0

 

Hi,

Just tested this and I can confirm it seems to be a problem in 4.1.

We will look into it


EDIT: This should be fixed now

 

I just tested the latest version and still having the same issue (only 1 cube face in probes). Also not getting any rain particles or storm/lightning effects.

 

Same as above. lightning was working in .125 but not with .126

 

Just grabbed the latest one again (129), now getting this error:

EntryPointNotFoundException: StaticLightingQuery
simul.trueSKY.StaticLightingQuery (Int32 id, Vector3 pos) (at Assets/Simul/trueSKY.cs:300)
simul.trueSKY.getSunColour (Vector3 pos, Int32 id) (at Assets/Simul/trueSKY.cs:1482)
simul.SimulSun.Update () (at Assets/Simul/SimulSun.cs:24)

Unity seemed to have trouble updating with this version too, had to revert to default UI

When closing Unity I got this error:
Fatal Error in GC:
GetThreadContextFailed

and
Fatal Error!
GetManagerFromContext: pointer to object of manager 'MonoManager' is NULL (table index 5)

Had to ctrl alt del out.

Rain particles still not visible.

 

This should be fixed in the latest version (130)

Still working on the rain etc, apologies.

 

Getting a lot of unable to overwrite errors with the dll files when updating these days using win10.
Any ideas on what I need to alter with the security settings of the project folder to allow simul package to copy from temp into the simul directory of package.

 

Just tried 134, getting some odd vertical/horizontal line artifacts.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/sqggpre2kkjybvh/verticalhorizlines.JPG?dl=0

 

That's quite odd.

All I could suggest is perhaps deleting said dlls and aiming for a clean install? Or running the installer as an admin (right click, run as admin).

Apologies for the late response. I thought I had responded to this last week!

Is this the 4.1 binary?