[RELEASED] UniStorm 4.3 - AAA Procedural Volumetric Clouds, Weather, Sky, Cloud Shadows, & More!

I only noticed that when I put the quality setting up to beautiful, so it must either be a bug or something with the settings being higher that causing the problem. What is quality setting set to?

 

the games quality is set to fantastic as i am trying to build my game to specific specifications. It has to do with the global fog script/shader i disabled it on the camera and the reflection stuff went away but so did the fog obviously lol

 

Okay, figured it out. Apparently you can't use anti-aliasing (which is what both the beautiful and fantastic settings use) and the global fog image effect. It has nothing to do with UniStorm that's just Unity, I tested it in a new blank scene to confirm this.

 

i wish there was a fake fog that i make work in flash lol unistorm looks naked without it. plus i had to change alot of the cloud shaders to mobile / particles / additive or alpha blend, or else the clouds would look almost black when the sun came up , http://realdefinition.net/zombieopsflash/

 

ok. thanks. when you wont update system?

P.S: Maby i rewrite system and made smooth weather by myself..
P.S.S: Your System the best weather pack for unity!

 

@tripknotix The reason some of the clouds were almost black is because you changed it from vertex lit. Vertex lit takes the color from the ambient lighting and the colors were set to black so when you switched the shader it kept the black color making them all dark. Just keep them at vertex lit it looks the best.

@Alcatraz We will be updating the system asap we're taking care of all the requests and we just need to polish them all off so they're perfect. Yes feel free to try to get the light transitions more smooth and if you figure it out let us know so we can add it to the system. And thank you, glad you think so it's been a lot of hard work to make it.

 

Here's a new "test" demo video of Unity's fog implemented with UniStorm, test meaning we need feedback if possible before we release the new version and full demo video. Two things need to be noted though, first if things are too dark or too bright it's because of the gamma differences on the monitors, everything can be adjusted to make it darker or brighter if needed. Second the demo we used is a project we're working on, we wanted to test UniStorm in a town setting which we feel is a better demo than before, it is still WIP. The demo was also pretty data heavy so the little bit of lag you see is because of all the models we have on screen. You guys know UniStorm, it doesn't affect performance

So here's the new demo of UniStorm v1.5, features are below:

UnStorm v1.5 Features, so far:

• Unity's fog is now supported (you can disable if you don't want to use it)

• User controls fog color for each time of day

• We have revamped the cloud system with new Hi Res textures

• Fixed Star system, Stars now look Hi Res and twinle

• Fixed darkness in distant clouds

• New fog allows for very realistic time of day and control over the weather system

• Clouds change color based off time of day and fog color allowing for greatly improved looking skies and clouds

• Added 18 Hi Res cloud materials, you can pick which ever you like for the 5 layers of clouds

• Users can choose any color for every component allowing for sci-fi or alien looking worlds thanks to the Unity fog support

• More to come!

 

This is amazing product, i am defenetly planning purchase somewhen later. I have one question, do you guys plan to add cloud shadowing like seen in some other weather system on Asset store? Basically clouds that are casting shadows on terrain and objects depending on the dirrectional light (or not).

 

@janpec Thank you, we have been working on something like that, but a cheap and efficient way to do so is to use light cookies. We are looking into a way to implement this into UniStorm. You basically get the same effect and it doesn't affect performance.

 

An example of an alien or sci-fi sky and atmosphere created with UniStorm simply by adjusting some of the colors which took minutes. We also swapped out the moon textures with a planet texture and added another terrestrial body to obit along the world axis. This shows how versatile UniStorm and shows that it can be pretty much be used for any game.

 

Actually im talking about when i did not change the shaders, and i left them what you had, those shaders do not work in flash properly. however if i change them to particles / additive/ or /alpha blend/, the clouds then work much better, as you can see in the link i posted. however, if i leave it the way you have it, in version 1.4 shaders for clouds, then it does not work in flash, its not your fault, they just did not finish making adjustments for those basic shaders in flash to match unity.

 

Oh ye ofcourse that makes more sense, cant wait for it.

 

Would be great if you had planet textures in the next version.
And the ability to have multiple objects in the sky at once.

e.g. earth moon rising, and mars rising at around the same time, on different trajectories, and be able to scale both separately.

Amazing tool, this is.

 

It looks pretty cool black, although i managed to fix the dark clouds on the horizon by changing the color of the layers of clouds because the materials were all set to black, i changed them all to around a very very light gray and it looked fine on the horizon just having issues with that global fog effect. One question about your fog fix, can we change the amount of fog and the type of fog because theres exp2 exponential and linear? i really like exponential because it adds like a fog of war effect

 

@shwa Yes, we can include some planet textures for you guys and you don't need to edit anything. All you have to do is add the planets to the world axis and UniStorm will take care if the rest. You can adjust it and have it come up at different times than the moon also.

@effraser2007 I know you could fix the darkness around the clouds by increasing the brightness but then the clouds are pretty bright during the night. The way the fog works is perfect because you are in control of the cloud shades, as well as at night. Exponential and ex2 are supported, but linear isn't because it's based off distance. We're working on a minimum and maximum user input amount so the user is in control of the densities.

We didn't get much feedback from the video, what did you guys think? Do you like the fog effect and support? Does it look better?

 

If you need a source for very nice Planet textures you will find them here http://planetpixelemporium.com/planets.html. He has them in different resolutions also.

 

The video looks amazing. You guys continue to outdo yourselves.

 

@BlackH : Great re planet textures, thanks.

 

The sunset / fog / nightsky video was excellent. I'd like to see a similar demo with fewer objects so the video doesn't have that lag (I'm buying anyway but it's just good salesmanship to post a good video and not blame the model).

 

Thanks guys.

@goat Well you can see from the other videos that the system performs extremely well. Others have said that they barely even notice UniStorm effecting their game or scene at all, but we will make another video with just the system itself and show you how well it performs. It only uses 30 draw calls. We weren't blaming anything, we were stating the reason of the lesser frame rate compared to the other videos. Glad you are interested though, I'm sure you will like UniStorm.

 

i think it looks awesome, i just wish flash would make the damn fog work, im half considering just building it in unity, and come back to the flash version at a later time.

 

Wow, only 30 drawcalls ? Thats awesome, i am really looking forward for snow.

 

@janpec Yea, only 30 draw calls. Snow will be coming soon, along with a bunch of other cool features.

 

This looks really cool! I may very well be buying this soon but I have one question. Is there a way to seperate the weather into reigons? What I mean by that is, you might have an area that is snowy while the rest of the world will rain. Or maybe an area where you can replace rain with flower petals or whatever for one area.

 

@suicune2001 Yes, this was discussed a page or two back and it should be very possible you would just need to have tags for each zone or area. It would require a couple tweaks to the script, but very simple tweaks.

 

I think the fog in the video looks great! I have a question; is this entirely done using Unity's global fog system? I wasn't able to use some of the advanced features in UniStorm because it relies on the Global Fog effect which is incompatible with some of the effects I'm using (notable the community ocean shader project; the global fog image effect seems to get applied over the ocean even if the object being obscured by fog is 'underneath' it).

I would still be very interested in weather region support built-in. While I managed to get something like that working with purely the particle systems, it'd be awesome if it was more of a plug and play solution that handled the changing of the skies in elegantly.

When do you expect version 1.5 to be out? Or is it to soon to tell?

 

Hey black, i got another request. Instead of just one sky color you should do something a bit different to give the sky a more dynamic look like this pic here where it has sort of a gradient(i understand your using just the solid color clear flags for the camera but you could maybe use a skybox or something along those lines).

Also when do you think the new update will be as im holding off on an AI Preview video for Rise of Guardian's so i can use fog haha





This looks good but its sort of bland haha:

 

I need to boost sunlight intensity, it's to little difference between sunside and shadow side of my objects. I have tried tweaking ambient colors for morning and day but that does not seem to do it. What values should I change?

I have dark clouds on the horizon as well, are 1.5 due anytime soon?

Best Regards,

Kristian

 

you have to go into the script and search for sun.intensity i beleive. it should be * 3 i changed it to * 2 because it was too bright for me. That would be a useful setting btw black is sun light intensity.

 

You don't have to have the global fog effect. You can simply turn it off in its editor and UniStorm will still work perfectly fine. The thing

We can see what we can do it would be a nice feature to have for our system.

For a time for UniStorm 1.5, I'd say no more than a week. We are trying to add all the requests and we're pretty close. We want to make sure that it's 100% polished before we release it, that is what takes a portion of the time.

We will try to add this feature by 1.5. If not, then for sure in a small update after that. We have a few ways we can make it happen, one is a transitioning skybox, which is probably how we will do it.

Yes, we will be adding this feature to 1.5.

 

I was just about to buy but I'm not sure what you mean by 'UniStorm Mobile' coming soon?

Is this support that is going to be added to Unistorm 1.5?

And Mobile is a big category of of diverse hardware, with is what threw me when you say Mobile Support is being added. It's not just Windows or osX HW that is typically somewhat new.

So what kind of Mobile is supported?

Android: arm6 with vfp and openGL ES 2.0
arm6 with vfp and openGL ES 1.1
arm7 (or greater) and openGL ES 2.0

iOS arm6 with openGL ES 1.1 (iPhone 3G, iPhone, iPodTouch 1st Gen)
arm7 (or greater) with openGL ES 2.0 (everything else I think)

Thanks.

 

By UniStorm Mobile we mean a different system, it will not be included with UniStorm 1.5 or any version after, it will be a separate system to purchase. What you stated is exactly why, there are so many devices it would be much too difficult to mix the desktop version with the mobile version. We will wait till UniStorm 1.5 is completed then start working with UniStorm mobile. As for devices we aren't sure yet, but we tested UniStorm (quickly converted UniStorm and not optimized) using a galaxy tab 7.7 and it worked excellent. So, I can confidently say that most devices are expected to work fine.

 

So, we have made good progress, here's what we have accomplished:

• First, sun light intensity control in the UniStorm editor (Most asked for feature)

• We have blended skies using skyboxes, meaning the horizon and sky color are more dynamic differing shades are you get closer to the horizon all changing for each time of day.

• The shade of the sky and horizon can be adjusted by the user for each time of day

• This allows for even more realistic and dynamic looking skies so the sky isn't all one color

• Skybox feature can be turned off if you do not wish to use it

 

Hey, I bought Unistorm a couple of days ago and am very pleased with it. My only issue is that when storm (3) happens or is initiated the colors of the sky always look inverted.

Every time I do this I have the same result, and I am using the default settings that were on the prefab. Every other weather condition is unaffected by this. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

Hmm, that's strange, I'm sure we can get it working though.

First thing, does the demo scene work okay? If it does, than this is a problem with the way you are setting up the prefab in your scene. I don't think anyone else has had this problem, so I don't think it's the prefab itself.

Another thing, did you change any of the shaders of the clouds? It looks like they might not be fading properly.

The cloud domes could be too close to the terrain, make sure they are all almost equal in size to the most outer layer of clouds. You can make them bigger by using Unity's scaling tool.

I'm sure one of these will fix your problem, but if your problems still persist we will figure out what's wrong and get it working.

 

Hmm, So i have been playing around with Unistorm off and on for a few weeks and running into a frame drop. I have a basic terrain (fairly large as in 32000 x 32000) and inside a simple character player. I run this at approx 80 fps, then when i add unistorm to the scene (adding the system prefab to the scene, the scripts to the player and all the appropiate references) my frame hate drops to 40 fps.

Is his expected? Would version 1.5 resolve this impact? Am i doing something wrong? Any suggested settings?

 

Btw one other thing that i have been spending hours on so far is trying to resize the weather system. E.g when one has a much larger terrain what are the steps to resize the prefab? Been trying to just scale the root object but not been able to align the horizon nicely etc?

Does someone on this thread had the same struggles and willing to share a simple steps to say scale the prefab of version 1.4 to a terrain of say 5000x5000?

Thanks

 

So I tried all of your above suggestions and nothing changed, however I did manage to figure out the problem. This only happens when my day length is set to 30 (so I can quickly preview the weather transitions). When I put the day length back to 1440 the issue was resolved.

 

any eta on the release of 1.5 im looking to release a beta of my mmo fps game soon on kong

 

Glad you got it working, that's weird though, the system shouldn't do that even running at a fast speed. That is why we say the system is optimized at a speed of 200 or more. The faster settings are mainly for testing the transition colors and settings.

Shouldn't be too much longer, the skyboxes took a while to make and look good. We are finished feature wise, we're polishing everything we've done at the moment, so we should be submitting it within a day or two.

 

New video showing off UniStorm 1.5, dynamic color changing skies as well as Unity's fog support all controlled by the user for each time of day. We've also added 18 Hi Res cloud materials, this is just 3 of them. Feedback would be appreciated and help with the release of 1.5.

 

looks very good, however i have been struggling with version 1.4.1 to make this work properly (a few posts back). I bought 1.4.1 a few weeks ago and generally like how it is designed and works but:
- I struggle with how to scale the prefab: I have a 3rd person game with a large terrain (5000x5000) and don't understand how to scale the prefab. I tried for hours to manually scale it out but never got a solid result
- I noticed a significant impact to my fps as in a drop of 20-30 fps when the unistorm is active. I suspect i am doing something wrong but not been able to see what it is.

Btw. I am doing a multiplayer and would like to have weather conditions / time-of-day in sync across the clients (doesnt have to be perfectly in sync but at least the generally the same weather and same time of day for people who are online in the same area).

Once the release is out I will update and provide more feedback but could you PLEASE let me know especially how to scale the weather system prefab.

 

Hmm that's odd I've never heard of a drop in frame rate. It must have to do with how you're setting up the clients, unfortunately we don't know much about this, but there's a hand full of people who have bought UniStorm and used it for mmos and with clients maybe they can help you out. Someone asked a few similar questions a few pages back and Efraser2007 explained how to do it. If you can't find it maybe he could help you get it working with clients because he did. I'll send him a message and see if he can help you out.

 

If you want to get unistorm to work with a multiplayer design all you have to do is allow the server to send out state syncs to all players in a zone or room and let the clients handle them. It is a pretty simple setup really:

1.) Take the calculations from unistorm and create a system server side to send out the current state.
2.) Modify the client to handle these state syncs instead of generating its own weather it would generate weather based on the current state of the system running on the server.

Just make sure your players each have their own unistorm system that will not be synced across the network to other players but only handled locally. Let me know if i was unclear about anything . And black it looks pretty good

 

Hey eFraser2007, thanks for the response. I am not too concerned about the sync of weather, already using a server client to handle AI etc.

I am struggling with scaling of the prefab, the visible terrain is quite large and I believe i need to scale the weather prefab but am having difficulties because of all the layered clouds etc. Is there any easy step list i can go through to make the unistorm look good on say an 5000x5000 terrain (if i just use the prefab as is it cuts the mountains).

On another note have you ever seen the framerate drops or anything in my setup i should review?

thanks

 

Nope no framerate drops, its most likely due to you trying to resize the weather system, there is no need to do so everything should be relevant to the player not the environment

 

Are you using the camera that is within the prefab? It is under the Player gameobject. I foundit easy to use when I used that

 

Ok, so i have tried these scenarios:
1) added the unistorm prefab to the scene, linked it to the player with the appropiate weather script references (so it doesn't follow the player)
2) add the unistorm prefab to my player (so it follows the player) and all the weather references set as well

I didn't mess with any of the settings, sizing, scaling etc.In both cases I get a significant framedrop e.g. from 120+ to 80/90. Also in both cases i am not able to get the look working properly. mainly clouds are inside the mountains, I just want them up high above the mountains (but when i move the entire system i get these ugly hard lines on the horizon).

the third problem i run into is my player can travel at high speeds but the rain system doesn't seem to keep up to speed, e.g. of my character moves at 300 the rain seriously lags behind.

The main problem for me is the visual and the framedrops, I can probably live with the high speed lag.

Any suggestions?

 

5000 x 5000 is a bit too large you probably set your max height on your terrain settings too high and the mountains are going through parts of the unistorm prefab. For the frame rate drops i doubt it is unistorm, having a large terrain like that would easily cause a framerate drop as your turning as it has to draw all of that. as far as the rain just uncheck simulate in world space on the rain and if you want the mist to work the same way just uncheck it on the mist particle system aswell.

 

any update on this? im in dire need of the fog fix.