Space Graphics Toolkit & Planets

I will update my assets when I feel like it, which is usually correlated to how well they are selling (flow usually sells 0 compared to SGT and Paint in 3D). Flow did sell better than expected during the recent flash sale though, so I will paying it some attention soon

 

@Darkcoder the latest SGT version screwed up my orbits (I think some calculations are wrong). I'm talking about SgtFloatingOrbit and SgtFloatingOrbitVisual. I have reverted these 2 scripts back to the previous versions and everything is back to normal.

By screwed up I mean that the orbits do not follow the OrbitVisual path.

 

Could you modify the orbit visual example scene in a way that doesn't work with the new version and upload or send me this to test?

 

Hello sir, i was wondering is we could have nested spawner in the shape of spiral and elíptical starfields/galaxies in a future update, so we could have full functional galaxies.

if such function is already here could You guide me about it? Please and thanks

 

There's no feature like this. The problem is that to spawn stars that look like a galaxy, you need to spawn thousands of them like with the starfield components. The current implementation of the Universe feature spawns one prefab per star/planet/etc, so with thousands of active GameObjects it will probably run very slow.

A better solution is to just spawn one galaxy starfield with thousands of stars, then have some kind of special spawner that only spawns stars from that when you go near them. I want to experiment with something like this in the future, but it's low priority right now.

 

@Darkcoder

The SGTNebula component doesn't appear in the Monobehaviour Add Component list, and when I just tried to add it to an empty scene object by dragging the script, I got the following error:

"Can't add script component 'SgtNebula' because the script class cannot be found. Make sure that there are no compile errors and that the file name and class name match."

I also tried loading up the example scene for this component, and the inspector for SGTNebula is blank. On play it gives the warning "The referenced script (Unknown) on this Behaviour is missing!" for the Nebula object, even though the example seems to work initially.

Let me know if there's a quick fix, or if I need to wait for a patch. Thanks!

Edit: This is on 2022.3 LTS Windows Standard renderer

 

I'm not at my PC right now but it's possible the nebula feature requires the Mathematics package to be installed for the scripts to compile, so please check that. The second paragraph in the documentation explains how to install the Burst package which includes Mathematics, so it's basically the same process.

 

Hi. I have bought the CW Orbit - Modular Backgrounds and I want to make them work with multiple cameras. Do you have any idea how to make it work ?
I have tried modifying the CwBackground script but I dont know how to acces it from other scripts and how to make public variables in this script appear in the inspector.

Thanks for the help.

 

I just updated a old project to unity 2023.2.15f and SGT 4.2.2, and all my additive shaders incl. those in example are all white.. no errors.. If I change color directly on the shader it works, but not from the sprite as I would expect

 

Without modifying anything you can make one set of backgrounds for each camera, use different layers, change the camera's Culling Mask to only render its backgrounds, and then change CwBackground's Follow to TargetTransform and drag and drop each camera in.

The CwBackground component is in the CW.Backgrounds namespace which is in the CW.SpaceBackgrounds asmdef. You may have to make your own asmdef and reference this to access it.

At the bottom of each component is the inspector code, you can add Draw("yourVariableName"); to draw additional settings.

I just made a new project in Unity 2023.2.15f1 with SGT 4.2.2 and in BiRP at least this demo scene renders as expected, and changing the SpriteRenderer color changes the star color.

 

Thanaks, I made it work.
I have a small problem however. Can I change somehow the brightness of the albedo of the texture that you use for the planets ? Because my asteroids, since they are illuminated by directional light, are much brighter than the planet from the side where the light direction is. I need to increase the brightness of the albedo but your shader does not support it. (what a shame that the planet does not react to the light source the way that your space graphics toolkit planets react to the light).

 

Yep, that did it, thanks! Totally missed that requirement.

 

Okay thanks for testing.. must be something locally then.. Have tried to clear all cache and such.. hell could even be a drivers issue.. I'll have to dig deeper..

On a note, it happens after I press play the first time (and running URP)

 

Oops, I forgot to add the Brightness and Opacity settings to the planet, thanks for pointing this out. The other shaders have it. I've send you a patch via private message.

There is some code in CwBackgroundPlanet to auto rotate it with the light, but in some scenarios it didn't work for some reason so I commented it out for now. Brightness is trickier because it behaves differently in each pipeline, and also in real life the brightness contrast between say the Earth and Moon surface is vastly different.

I didn't test URP, so it could be that. But yeah let me know if you find it, I don't have time right now to test every possible scenario.

 

I can confirm that it works as intended in BiRP. In URP I also notices that main tex on the shader is none, if I do a reset on the sprite renderer and set it to use the billboard material, it shows as working in the editor, until I press play and the error appears again... it does however only seem to affect the Additive shader.. I get same issue if trying to do it in HDRP.. Have tried to reinstall GFX drivers also without luck..

 

I'm having a bit of a trouble trying to set up custom heightmaps for TerrainPlanet.
I'm trying to use a simple grayscale RGB heightmap texture I created in an external software, but even after setting the texture to Read/Write in import settings, the planet stays spherical.

Could you give some hints how you set up and generate the texture in the example scene for that?

Also, I have been going back the forum posts and came across this guy . I understand his screenshots are from a custom terrain shader (I assume), but I have also saw your own teaser images with very good quality mesh and textures. I am having trouble trying to get to that quality (or I just don't fully understand how to use detail features and LOD?), do you maybe have some pointers?

Thanks!

 

hey just checking - it seems there is only the lunar eclipse? where is the solar eclipse example

 

did u ever get solar eclipse to work

 

I apologize if this has been asked for already.
The forum search isn't yielding any results for me.

I need to create a Galaxy Map that the player can fly through, select a star, and enter the solar system.
This needs to include Star/System names, planet names, etc.

The Galaxies and Starfields this asset generates look amazing, but would it be possible to achieve what I need with this?

There's another asset on the store, "Persistent Galaxy Generator with Solar Systems and Planets", that I'm looking at purchasing alongside this asset.
But if I can achieve what I need with only this asset then I don't need to purchase the other one as well and force the two to work together.

 

I just tested in Unity 2022.3.17f1 URP, and the star billboard sprites work as expected. Are you sure you're using URP and not the URP 2D renderer? As far as I know the shader backend I use doesn't support URP 2D. It's also possible specific versions of URP don't work, but I don't have time to test every version.

The example heightmaps store data in the alpha channel, and the SgTerrainHeightmap component's Channel setting is set to Alpha. If your height data is in RGB, then make sure you select one of those. Also, you must set your texture's Compression to None.

I recommend you study the "Earth Sized Planet" and "Obsidian Planet" demo scenes. These are both Earth sized planets with very different material and detail texture setups. In general it's pretty difficult to configure the planet material because Earth is just so massive and requires multiple layers of detail textures to render, so you're best off experimenting with different settings and textures.

In any case, I'm currently working on a replacement for the terrain system that is much simpler to configure, and gives results similar to what joshua_42 was able to achieve with his custom shader.

I never got around to making a demo scene for it. You can open the "Terrestrial Planet" demo scene, duplicate the planet, add the SgtShadowSphere component to it, adjust the RadiusMax to match the planet, and then move the planet between the sun and original planet. This will give you a shadow that casts on the atmosphere of the original planet.

If you want the shadow to cast on the terrain surface you can add the SgtShadowLayer and SgtTerrainShadowLayer components to it, set the Radius, and drag and drop the Shadow Layer into the SgtTerrainShadowLayer component's ShadowLayer setting.

No, the (galaxy) starfields in SGT are designed to render as fast as possible so it's just a runtime generated static mesh. Being able to select or fly to stars within this requires a lot more data to be stored for each star and additional code to find them when you select/move/etc.

 

Thanks, I managed to convert and import my textures to use the alpha channel succesfully.
I have a few more questions regarding the overall workflow and I'd like some insight on it.

• What method is recommended for the "equirectangular projection" requirement? My textures currently are 1024x1024 and I see the expected bad projection around the poles of the planet. This projection is supposed to fix that, right? Or as a quick fix I should just try stretching the image to a semi 2:1 ratio?
  
• I tried adjusting my Levels for the alpha values, but the Displacement setting in the heightmap script always raises the base radius of the planet as well. My ideal solution would keep the dark pixels in the heightmap texture and only modify the vertices that are higher than the 0 values. Is this possible, or am I missing anything here?
  I'm assuming this should be happening as I see in the code the Job samples the texture and multiplies with displacement. Are my levels wrong?

 

1 - If I have a square piece of paper/cloth, how can I wrap it around a ball? The answer is you can't directly, because as you wrap it in any way you get distortions that cause overlaps or wrinkles. There are many techniques to work around this and produce viable textures, but they all work by cutting bits off and/or blending multiple projections together.

For example, if I get 6 pieces of paper/cloth and form a cube shape, then that covers my ball (i.e. a cube map). However, even with a seamless texture I will have 3 edge seams on the north and south poles, so I would have to do some kind of blending or painting to eliminate those. Making this kind of texture is difficult and likely requires writing custom code.

The planet textures that come with SGT and SGP were made using Grand Designer on Steam, which generates textures using 3D noise functions. This means it samples the 3D noise for every point on the equirectangular texture and thus you get no seams as the polar distortion is automatically accounted for.

2 - If your heightmap pixel is 0 brightness, then it shouldn't receive any displacement. Perhaps your pixels are almost 0 but not quite?

 

Hi

Love the asset and am coming back to it after a long time so am not sure what specifically changed or if there is some new tweak.

My issue is a lot of the Examples don't look visually as they are supposed to on comparison to Standard Pipeline.
The main issue is lighting.

To Reproduce:
1. Start a new project with HDRP Template using 2023.2.17f1
2. Import Space Graphics Toolkit 4.2.2

All the scenes in Universe -> examples are either black or too dark and colorless.
There are similar issues elsewhere too so I have attached a few examples with left one being Standard Pipeline

Could you please confirm this is the case.
Maybe it is the Volume settings but I can't be sure and before I go through each of them and trying to debug and fix them, I thought I should ask you.

 

Thanks for pointing this out, it looks like the lighting is broken for some reason. I'll see if I can fix it.

[Edit] Unity 2023.2.X versions aren't LTS, so they aren't supported by the shader back-end I use (Better Shaders). Please use one of the versions Unity recommends like 2022.3.23f1 LTS, which should work fine.

 

Ah! Thanks.

 

Hey everyone,

Here's another sneak peek at the new planetary terrain system on an Earth sized planet:

This is actually a complete rewrite and totally different system than what was shown in the previous video. This new-new-new system runs even faster, blends biomes with the 'base' planet texture, supports different terrain topologies (e.g. flat, cylindrical), and uses data structures that maybe in the future allow for caves.

I still need to fix the lighting, improve texturing, and implement 2 major optimizations. But so far, this looks like by far the best system I've implemented and I don't think any other idea I come up with will be any better overall so I'll stick with optimizing and finalizing this.

Here is this system applied to a 'flat' terrain.


Here it is applied to an Earth sized planet

 

I love these teasers, great work! You said you are still working on it, but since I'm not good with these techniques, what would be a general approach to make terrain blending from a distance less blurred?

Would there be a way to control texture and vertex LOD details separately? Eg. in your video at around 29 sec mark and your last picture, where the textures are much sharper?

Edit:
Regarding the "cave", I so far achieved it by creating renderpasses that hides anything behind it (the terrain) and using a trigger to change collider settings. Would your system be purely based on vertex positions, so these tricks would not be needed?

 

The planet's base texture is 8k x 4k, which sounds like a lot, but across Earth that means each texel is at most 5km x 5km. As you get closer, this base texture is augmented with the biome textures which are 4k. There is a massive texel density difference between the base texture and the biome textures, so it appears 'blurred' as you go between them. The same phenomenon occurs as you get even closer to reveal the splat map detail textures.

To fix this you really more layers of detail between these, so the transition in texel density is less abrupt. You could also use a higher resolution planet base texture and biome texture, but then you might have to implement some kind of virtual texturing which makes the code complexity skyrocket and makes authoring the textures difficult. The first video in this new terrain series used different resolution textures for each LOD level, and this looked fairly nice to keep consistent detail with no abrupt changes, but it also means there's no persistence in the terrain texturing so it looks slightly bizarre as you fly toward something that keeps changing visually. It also makes the shader complex as you have to smoothly transition between LODs and therefore double the shader complexity.

Regarding caves: yes, I should be able to add caves directly as the mesh is being generated without the need for holes or similar workarounds.

Getting the lighting and texturing looking good is the main priority though

 

Hello @Darkcoder

I encountered a visual bug with TerrainPlanet Oceans and Unity Skybox reflections on builds (not in Editor)

It seems the skybox will be reflected on the ocean / or shines through the atmosphere without beeing scattered?
Encountered this behaviour on Android and Windows Builds

Unity 2021.3.36f1

- Terrain Planets with Atmosphere, Clouds & Terrain Ocean (Shader Smoothness 1, Metallic 0, Render Queue 2996)
- Unity Skybox on camera (Render Queue 1000)

 

Hello, very interesting asset, thinking of buying, I have a few questions:
1) Is there a tutorial on how to generate the texture for the planet and the biomes? I assume blender is used. (the documentation on the planet module is scarce, a tutorial would be very beneficial regarding the preparation of the already generated texture for unity and SGT system)
2) Is there any way to randomly generate different albedo, normal, heightmap runtime in unity for the planet/biome texture? This will enable randomly generated planets in-game.
3) Is there a generator that can spawn gameobjects (trees,rocks,structures) dependant on the texture map or other set of rules?

 

Running into a bit of a snag here and could use some help. So, I'm planning to use Amplify Imposters for rendering distant objects in my project to optimize the project. But I'm having trouble getting the Atmosphere Inner Fog shader to play nice with the imposters.

Seems like no matter what I try, the imposters just do their own thing, applying itself to the bottom hexagon but not the tree. Has anyone dealt with this before? Any tricks or tips to make the Atmosphere Inner Fog shader apply properly to the imposters?

Appreciate any insights you can share!

 

Could you prepare a minimal demo scene and send it to me via email or private message so I can test it out?

1 - The planet textures were made with the Grand Designer software on Steam. The planets are based on an Albedo + Normal + Height texture which this software can export, but I don't have any plans to make tutorials for it. I assume Grand Designer already has some?

2 - You would have to write your own custom system to do this.

3 - The SgtTerrainPrefabSpawner component can be added to your planets, and this will spawn the specified prefabs in the areas specified by your planet's splat map. This splat map can be based on the albedo texture, or any other texture you make for your planet.

The atmosphere shader renders the meshes in the renderers you specify with the atmosphere fog effect. It doesn't have any knowledge of what shaders are applied to these meshes, and how those shaders might be modifying it. For example, if they perform any kind of vertex or opacity modification they won't render as expected.

This won't work with impostors because they're transparent, and also since they use a custom shader that performs magic to make them appear 3D it won't work at all. As you can see, there is some kind of fog being applied to a cube like shape, this is the impostor's actual mesh geometry which the fog is being rendered with, which as you can see is considerably different to the final result when using the impostor shader.

If there is some kind of setting to override the final color of the impostor to apply a kind of fog, then it would be possible to calculate the fog color and opacity at the impostor position, and then apply it. There would be no easy or obvious way to make them compatible though.

 

Hey everyone,

For the new terrain system I rewrote the surface rendering yet again to make it look nice on a flat terrain:



I then ported that code to wrap around a whole planet:



The results are better than I expected, and once I implement biomes it should look even better. If everything goes well then it shouldn't be too long until I can send out test builds to anyone that's interested.

 

There is an override color I've been wanting to use. Where do you suggest I start if I want to dive into calculating the color based on position? Any particular tips you can share to get me going?

 

Interested!

 

Am interested too !!!

 

I have had SGT for a long time, never used.. I got very excited when I saw that Game Kit Controller .. can be integrated with this asset. I know some of the asset dev's just by mail .. but yes they work hard and simply can not make integrations with every asset ..

That said .. GKC is another dev that works most every day on his asset .. I did a review for him Years ago .. and what I said was coming then.... is in GKC now .. The asset only has on-line and Vr to go ( as far as I know ) The only reason I am bring this up is.. IF you had to pick one asset to try and integrate I would pick that. The dev I am sure will keep working on it for years yet.

Once I saw the new system you are implementing the new terrain system looks freaking awesome !!! So, these two assets could do a lot together.. ( this is not a plug for either ) .. just saying this... Devs that have been around in Unity for a long time.. are easier to trust.. ESP codded assets .. like these two.. GCK has the floating point system as well .. and is set up to have player \ ai in any vehicle ( 1st or 3 rd person ) .. I am hobby guy only, probably never will make\publish a game.. but what makes hobbies fun is.. in part .. as little hassle as possible . If I was to use this I would probably try to follow the tuts on how to hook up GCK with this.. Since GCK has a no gravity and floating system ( afaik ) it might be a good choice for " non - coders " like me ....

 

Hi @Darkcoder,
I'd like to be able to change the scale of the Universe at runtime, using transitions to show the scale change.

Is there a way to lerp the SgtPosition of an SgtFloatingObject ?

Thanks in advance!

 

Is there really no way to fix this? Maybe changing something in SGT Terrain Shared Material? I am using Shader Graph Vertex Offset.

 

Is there a tutorial available on how to make planets, or solar systems in Unity?

 

Same issue in 6000f, but if you disable SRP Batcher it works in 6000f.. Also seems like Better Shaders are starting support for 2023.3, but try to disable SRP Batcher

 

Hi. New comer to this component. (Unity 2022.3.26f1)

I'm using an openXR rig inside a ship cockpit, and SGT camera is attached to main camera.

I have 2 backdrops with clouds (different colors) with a scale of 2 in all axis, however they do not follow the camera. They are static and I can leave them behind.

I thought they would "follow" me, and give a similar effect as a skybox.

In the documentation it says "The Backdrop feature allows you to make background stars, clouds, and other visuals. This is achieved using static billboards that face and always follow the camera.".

What am I missing ? Help would be appreciated.

 

Very excited to see the updates coming to the terrain system!

Another issue I'm struggling with at the moment with SGT Backdrop. I am able to change the "Brightness" setting at run time in the editor... but it no longer works in builds. I've also tried changing the alpha chanel in the color setting but that also only works in the editor, not the build. Any ideas?

 

The color should be set every frame before the camera renders, so I'm not sure. You can try calling SyncMaterial before you change the settings.

 

I need too something like that. I don't need every fake star to be clickable, I just need the nearest ones to be a gameobject. I still haven't carefully looked at the starfield code, so how hard or slow can the code be? Because I might just make my own implementation