TENKOKU - Dynamic Sky

@daschatten Send me an email please at konnichiwa[at]tanukidigital.com... I have a code edit that I think will fix the mac build issue for you.

 

@chingwa

I got the latest package, performance is a lot better but still a few issues..

Firstly it looks like the the Hulk's massive brother sneezed on the terrain, have you been messing around with the colour gradients? Actually on the colour gradients bit they are all a little far out, it should never be green neither should it be straight red for extended periods.. Also the transitional lighting between day / night if you adjust ambient lighting does a sharp jump between each other.

Also just to note, unless using legacy clouds they intersect with the terrain..



Here's what a TOD gradient should look like:

Then there's the fog, are you using some sort screen space opacity mask? I've not had a look at your code but it shouldn't look like this:

 

@ShadowK You got some crazy screenshots man! I'm not really sure what's going on with the fog in your second shot... It seems like some of the tree models aren't writing to depth, and thus the fog is overlaying them. Can you tell on your end if it only happens on certain trees?

I have an alternate version of the fog which I think might combine better in your scene. Send me an email if you'd like to test it out.

The new clouds really should not be doing this, at least on the tests I've done here. Are you using a custom terrain shader? Also can you tell me what the farclip on your scene camera is?

As for the colors, I did make some small color gradient adjustments, but nothing drastically different than before. The sun lighting progresses from red through orange and yellow during morning/evening hours. It's probably the yellow combining with your scene to tint everything too green. I can send you an adjusted version without the yellow to see if that will help?
(the video you posted is gorgeous, I'll take a closer look at that).

 

I've just upgraded to 5.5.0b10 (sorry I want all the latest gadgets) in 5.3.41f it did it on the terrain.. This isn't my terrain, it's a demo scene that came with Map Magic.. But I checked out the shaders etc. and it's all Unity standard..

I checked the colour spaces on directionals at various times, between 8 and 10:30 (on default settings) and it's way too much.. The terrain is either bright orange, bright yellow or bright green .. 8 is : (hex colour) FC9704FF 9AM is FFD517FF 10AM is FFE049FF.

When I did a TOD for UE the directional light barely changed, because it's supposed to be the IBL that set's the mood / colour of the scene. Then you just slightly nudge the directional (I mean SLIGHTLY) at different points, it should never be far from white..

I could whip you up a quick demo in Unity if you'd like, it's certainly not the first TOD I've ever done.

Also I'll send you a PM for the fog thing.

 

Ah, I see. This is likely the source of the cloud clip issue as the 5.5 beta changed how depth is being handled... possibly the reason for the trees too. I'll be taking a closer look at the beta in order to address these issues soon.

I don't agree with this, from an artistic perspective. Real world cast light does indeed change dramatically the lower the sun gets in the sky (and to a lesser degree, the moon light as well). IBL light of course I agree with, and this should be picked up from the rest of the skybox. You can quickly adjust the light color in Tenkoku by setting the "light saturation" setting under sun rendering all the way to 0, which will turn the sunlight color into a neutral hue.

Of course I'm willing to be proven wrong... if you're willing to put together a demo I'd love to take a look at it.

 

Just a note to let everyone know that version 1.1.2 is now finally available on the asset store! Whew!
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/34435

 

Sure, well here's my first attempt.. Spent around 10 hours on it, just does basics like rotate light / merge IBL's / update reflection captures based on time and modify's some of the post stack on the fly. Hardest bit was trying to get the atmospheric scattering to work right from the BS demo..!

Anywho, I never changed the directional light from white.. I let the IBL do all the duties.! Day / Sunset / Night..

 

@ShadowK Ah those look great! So just to clarify, you're keeping the light white and just adjusting the intensity? Are you then updating a reflection probe to pick up updated color just from the skybox?

 

Yep light is white in these screenies, the parameters that are adjusted on the fly is ambient lighting intensity, reflection intensity and on the directional it's light intensity, bounce intensity and shadow intensity (clamped between 0.85 - 1).

The reflection probes are picking up everything, I didn't use a tag layer to seperate out the skybox if that's what you mean?

I will admit on deeper colour scenes, it does look slightly better to nudge the DL from white for highlights between shadows but again it's never far from white. You don't want the DL influencing a scene too much, IBL is a boat load of varied pixel lights where's as a DL is one solid colour. I studied a lot of arch viz in UE and it's primarily based around HDRI for natural lighting.

 

I'm having a bit of a weird issue. When the camera moves backwards there's a flashing blue rectangle on the screen. This only happens at night. This has started to happen after I changed the cameras near clip plane from 0.5 to 0.01. I'm pretty sure it's related to tenkoku because if I turn off tenkoku then it goes away.



Any thoughts?

 

@emrys90 it's possible it's a part of the star texture.... though I'm not sure why it would be showing up like that just by having a low clip plane value. hmmm. Are you using the latest 1.1.2 version?

 

No, I was on an older version. I just upgraded though and the problem seems to be fixed, can't reproduce it anymore.

In your release notes, I see you said that you changed .material access to .sharedMaterial, any particular reason you did that? I change all .sharedMaterial to .material, otherwise when you run the game inside Unity it always modifies the material files, resulting in bogus changes. That becomes a little annoying when you work in a team, using version control.

 

I did it for version control since I had been getting complaints about constant material updates. Using .sharedMaterial should instantiate a temporary material at runtime instead of making constant changes to the actual material being shared across a team. Are you seeing the opposite on your end?

 

Yes, that's not how it works. sharedMaterial is the original material, so modifying that will modify the material on disk. .material creates a copy and modifies that copy. The other option is to assign the material to the renderer like this, .material = new Material(originalMaterial)

 

<-----goes off to re-read the Unity docs.
doh! Yeah, you're right of course. Still there were a few materials that were being altered and causing version control issues. I guess this is happening either way. I'll have to take another look at this.

 

When I don't have a camera in the scene (which is how the game is run for the server), I get this error occasionally for lightning.

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
at Tenkoku.Core.TenkokuLightningFX.ThunderHandler () [0x0008a] in C:\Users\Jesse\Documents\repos\Unity\exile\client\Assets\TENKOKU - DYNAMIC SKY\SCRIPTS\TenkokuLightningFX.cs:338
at Tenkoku.Core.TenkokuLightningFX.LateUpdate () [0x004ab] in C:\Users\Jesse\Documents\repos\Unity\exile\client\Assets\TENKOKU - DYNAMIC SKY\SCRIPTS\TenkokuLightningFX.cs:204

 

Hello All,

I'm happy to announce that Tenkoku version 1.1.3 is now ready for download...

Download Here: http://www.tanukidigital.com/download

This is a maintenance update to address a number of bugs and errors that I felt were serious enough to address immediately, instead of waiting for a more substantial improvements. Of note are issues affecting linear color banding showing up in the sky, as well as some compositing issues with the new cloud system, and overly yellowing of lit scene objects. Also note that this version should be compatible with the latest Unity 5.5 beta 11.

Unity Version Update:
Please note that this is the first version that now requires Unity 5.3.4 or greater. If you are using a lower version of Unity, then you can download an older version of Tenkoku (1.1.2 and below) from the Tanuki Digital website.

As always, let me know if you have problems/questions/feedback etc, either by email or on the forums!

All the best,
Justin Kellis
Tanuki Digital


-------------------------------
RELEASE NOTES - Version 1.1.3
-------------------------------

WHAT'S NEW
- Added 'Mie Amount' slider to control mie scattering around sun.
- Added 'Mie Amount' slider to control mie scattering around moon.
- Added subtle eye ocular flare when looking directly at sun.

CHANGES
- Reduced color gradient of sun to fix over-yellowed lighting.
- Changed Fog function to ignore transparent objects by default.
- Apply distant scattering directly to cloud objects (rather than relying on camera overlay).
- Fixed fade distance to be static distance range (previously depended on camera distance).

BUG FIXES
- Fixed issue with color banding in linear mode.
- Fixed overcast cloud ccolor clipping in linear mode.
- Removed sky shader clamping function, was preventing full sky smoothing in linear mode.
- Fixed bug where disabling fog was mistakenly not removing fog tinting.
- Fixed issue with cloud shader failing when attempting mac build.
- Fixed issue with sun lighting being enabled when moon is out (when allow multi-lighting is on).
- Fixed issue with Moon light not rendering shadows (when allow multi-lighting is off).
- fixed cloud and star compositing in Unity 5.5 beta.

 

@emrys90 Ah sorry about that. I have a fix for this, I'll PM it to you.

 

Thanks! Does the new version include the fixes for modifying material files?

 

No not yet. This latest version was already locked down and being uploaded/distributed before I realized this was an issue. It's on the slate for the next release for sure though.

 

On 1.1.3, there is a period of time during morning and evening where both of the directional lights are off. This is with Multi-Lighting enabled or disabled (makes no difference).

Here is the evening time for me:
3/3/2015, 18:49 to 19:32
Lat 10, Lng 0, Time Zone 0
Orientation 296

EDIT: Also, just my opinion, but I think that the lighting looked a little better in 1.1.1.

 

@jdraper3 Thanks for the exact time data. I checked this on my end and indeed the light is completely turning off. I'll take a closer look at this and see if I can get a bugfix in soon!

 

Hi !!
I use weather_setting automatic(Random),It seem never work
and always sunny day , this is bug ??

 

Hi zmaxz, While the current random weather patterns are a bit lackluster they should definitely be changing every so often. Your weather lifetime at 1 means each weather pattern should last for 1 minute, and the transition speed of 0.3 means each pattern will take approximately 18 seconds to change.

You can also click the 'next random pattern' button to force the next pattern to initialize... do you see any changes after trying this a few times?

Also note that a more robust weather generator is coming soon.

 

In addition to the above response, you can also call the random function once your scene has started.

Code (CSharp):

1. Tenkoku.Core.TenkokuModule tenkoku = FindObjectOfType<Tenkoku.Core.TenkokuModule>();          
2. tenkoku.weatherTypeIndex = 1;
3. tenkoku.weather_autoForecastTime = 120f;
4. tenkoku.weather_TransitionTime = 0.1f;
5. tenkoku.weather_forceUpdate = true;

 

Getting back to Tenkoko after brief evaluation last winter...and the milky way (tex_starmapTycho) seems much blurrier than I recall. Did it change? Looks like that texture itself is blurred (and I do have Mipmaps disabled to be sure). Compare to another image of the Tycho image: http://sci.esa.int/science-e-media/img/97/Hipparcos_all-sky-map.jpg

Did it change, or am I misremembering it?

 

@gecko Yes it was blurred on purpose, as an artistic choice. If you would rather like to use the original un-blurred texture, you can download it here: http://tanukidigital.com/tenkoku/misc_files/tex_starmapTycho.zip

 

I am also having a problem with the skybox tint - it never changes from blue. It's like there is no morning/evening anymore. I'm not getting any errors, and not sure where to look to start debugging.

Here are a few screens to illustrate the issue (5pm, 6pm, 7pm and 8pm):

 

Ah, that's the Tycho starmap I want--thanks!

 

@jdraper3 you can try raising the "horizon height" setting and possibly the "horizon density". These will give a thicker and longer horizon atmosphere which should react with more colors during dawn/dusk hours. Both of these are located under 'Atmospherics'.

 

Hi, just tried the 1.1.3 demo and I have some issues with it, here are some screenshots:

Is this how the Altostartus are suposed to look like now? I personally dont like how it blends, the edges are too hard / defined.


Also looks unrealistic when blending with some cirrus.


Same thing here, I think I prefered the cirrus from the previous versions.


The cumulus look great but there is something grainy and very hard to miss going on near the edges, is that normal? I like better how they look now but Its really taking away from the realism when the grain is animated.




And last but not least, the lightning strikes on an overcast scene seem to be causing weird lighting behaviors (maybe its just me)

Here is the scene with no lightning srikes, the light is even and it looks good. Btw can the fog be even further than in the demo? In the previous demo I tried it went further than that.


And here is some strange shadow... why are lightning strikes removing light?


That extra light is a bit extreme to me, is it customisable without digging into the script?


Here is another example of areas getting darker with lightning strikes, also notice the fog and maybe some lighting effect dissapears which makes the scene and colors look meh compared to the other screenshots.


-Is there any plans to dynamicly cover the ground with snow when its snowing?

-Is there any "God ray" type of lightning option available or planned?

-How about downpours? I have seen this in the Unistorm demo and although they overuse it i would be a great addition. (by downpour I'm talking about that cloud like cluster of rain drops dropping all at once, trying the unistorm demo at the highest rain setting would be easier than describing it)

I think Tenkoku is one of the best systems out there but I am not sure about what I am seeing in the lastess demo, maybe they are bugs idk. Some screenshots on here definitly look way better.

I wanted to get this asset for a while and with the sale this is my chance but I would like to get some info on what is going on in those screenshots first. Thank you!

 

@ShadowK man those scenes are amazing, could you share some details on what you are using to acheive this besides Tenkoku? The rocks and trees (including the dead one on the ground) look really great are they from the asset store?

There is also some great looking bloom going on, SE natural bloom maybe? And that night scene... the lighting is incredible, the light is just right. I have been strugling with that.

BTW what are you using for the water and grass?

 

Hi @tcz8 thanks for your interest in Tenkoku. I'll answer as many questions as I can below....

Yes this is the way they are supposed to look, though I agree the previous versions were softer and possibly closer to reality. I can look into this for a future update. Do note that the previous cloud system is still included, and you can switch to it by using the 'use legacy clouds' option. It isn't available in the online demo though.

Yes this is a known artifact of the new clouds. I'm looking into ways of reducing this issue, possibly with temporal sampling. These artifacts can also be reduced quite nicely using a low level depth of field effect in your scene, but I didn't want to do this for the demo. Hopefully I'll have some more news about the sampling update soon.

Interesting. This is definitely a bug, and seems to only occur on the built demo. It definitely does not happen in the Editor. I'll investigate and have this light/dark issue fixed for the next patch. Thanks for showing this to me!

Fog can be customized by giving it a start distance and an end distance... so is completely customizable to your needs. There is also a "fade falloff" that can be tweaked based on camera distance. I have a pretty basic control in the demo just for simplicity sake.

Currently, no, you would have to dig into the shader. I can add a lightning color or intensity scale though. Seems like a good idea.

Not directly. I feel people should be able to customize this themselves, based on what scene shaders they are using. I've looked into doing this in "screen-space", but feel it's better done directly on the object. I could revisit this in the future perhaps.

You mean Lighting? If so then yes, you can customize god ray type sun effects directly in Tenkoku. If you actually mean lightning then I'm not sure what you mean, please elaborate

The rain is as you see it mostly, though you can separately customize rain amount and an addition "rain fog" type effect which helps add to the rainy atmosphere. Still, I do see what you mean after looking at the Unistorm demo. While basic, it does add a nice mood to the rain visuals. I certainly would like to greatly improve on this rain effect in the future, also with possibly doing a refractive rain shader as well

 

FYI he isn't using Tenkoku in those screens, but instead his own custom lighting setup. He was trying to school me on what's what, and perhaps he had an impact, though I will not admit so publicly

 

Hahaha, dont we hate it when that happens

Thank you taking the time answer all my quetions, I am buying your asset with confidence now.

And yes, I was talking about lighting and not lightning sorry for the confusion.

Cheers!

EDIT: Done... that sale just cost me over 400$.... good thing its just once a year

 

EDIT: Nevermind that, I just saw that you were using the demo, not the asset package.

@tcz8 - Concerning the lightning bug, check and make sure that multi-lighting is enabled. I remember having that issue before - it would disable the other directional lights while the lightning strike was active. Not sure if it's a bug, or intended behavior though.

 

I just bought it so thanks for the heads up, I will keep it in mind.

 

I'd love to say it's all custom like I had it in Unity 3.X / 4.X, but truth is bog standard Unity has come a long way. Although even with the new post effect stack I still use Scion for DOF, Bloom, Exposure etc. the new Unity (combined post, not cinematic) AO and Temporal AA is the best I've seen available for Unity. It requires one of the newer Beta's, but they are relatively stable so I've not an issue with that.

In regards to rocks / tree's, I've been testing out megascans and how it fits into game pipelines. The rest is SpeedTree and the grass is just bog standard Unity grass plane's (alpha cutout grass piccie's). The water shader is just a modified version of water4, although for this demo I didn't do an awful lot too it.

I of course use reflection probes, HDRI IBL images for the skybox.. Most of it's a matter of tweaking lighting conditions and messing around with the post stack to get a good look.

@chingwa

Don't feel bad, I was developing games when boost buttons existed on 80286 DX machines.. The button that I'm still convinced to this day was purely psychological.! (Was fun to press though).. Anyway, if I didn't get "it" by now there would be no hope..

As I'm working on a new project in Unity, here to help if needed.

 

@chingwa
I'm interested in Tenkoku for a sci-fi game but saw on the first page originally that altering aspects like seasons, the moon or day length isn't really supported. Is this still the case?

 

@Wavinator you have some control over day length... i.e. you can set a specific speed multiplier and also set a curve multiplier (useful for different day/night speeds). All celestial movements are based on earth values though, moon/sun/stars etc. While you can't add additional moon objects through the interface, you can duplicate and parent a new moon object and give it a custom texture size and offset.... this can work fairly well as long as you don't specific accuracy for time and movements. Adding additional suns is more problematic and would require delving into the code and shaders for sure.

 

@chingwa

Just some updates, tried out tonight.. Looks much better and fog seems to work correctly, although the ambient GI seems busted. Using 5.5.0 RC1, not getting any (or enough) GI at any point and between 6PM - 8PM terrain is completely dark.

Tried with a standard skybox and all is fine, tried to slightly reverse engineer your code and offset the unity renderer for ambient GI that didn't do much (well it did first time then zilch)..

Also night transition in any release jumps from dark to light.. Just forgot to mention it ..

 

Hey guys - this is a little off topic, but also related.

It is a tutorial on speed level design using Gena & Gaia, and then shows off how to add Tenkoku, and the latest Unity Post Processing effects to really dial the visuals up to 11!

 

Hi. I have a weird Tenkoku problem. When I add the prefab to the scene, the thing works fine and continues to work for as long as I close the Unity editor. When I reopen the editor and reload the scene, the Sun stops working, giving no light. The moon still works normally.

Looking at more precisely, the Sun, the LIGHT_World is constantly at 0.001 light no matter how I tweak it. The moon light works and rotates but the sun doesn't give light. It's transform and rotation still work and move so it hasn't lost the reference to that object... But the Light component in there remains unchecked and I can't manually activate it.

Copy the settings, delete the whole GameObject from scene and add the prefab again, paste the settings, boom it works with those exact settings - for as long as I close and reopen again. Very annoying. Zero errors in console.

Would you happen to know what could be causing this?

 

@rainisto Hmm, I'm not sure. I don't think I've come across this issue before. Is it possible the Tenkoku time settings are set to night time by mistake? Or perhaps another scene object is interacting with Tenkoku (either with the time settings or the light directly)?

 

No... I run through a 24 hour shift. The moon comes up and goes down and its light comes, and the settings for moon light affect its intensity correctly etc. so I doubt that's the case. I have nothing also acting with the Tenkoku or the light directly.

My hunch would be there that you have some Find script there which dynamically tries to find the light object - or some other object - and fails to do so, but I doubt that it's not finding the sun, it's still moving and rotating. Not sure what condition is causing the 0.001 intensity for it. Why doesn't it turn on. I do have other lights in the scene but I have the allow multi-lighting on. And why it works when deleting the gameobject and re-adding the prefab - it's weird.

Anyway, it's not a showstopper, just need to delete the object and add the prefab again every time. Perhaps the problem is between the keyboard and the chair.

 

I had the same issue and its pretty annoying to be plunged into darkness every time you exit play mode as you can not see anything - and consequently can not work on your scene.

You need to manually re-enable the Light on your Light_World object (Tenkoku DynamicSky -> SkySphere -> LIGHT_World).

I managed to fix it by hacking the scripts from an early @chingwa release - but can't remember what I did.

 

Q1 : Why do I remove these parts in Tenkoku_FX_Fog.shader and it is OK?
sampler from cube&depth seems doing nothing, should I remove these for performance?
or compiler will remove the unuse part in build time...
sorry for my unfamilier on shader

Q2 : I must use the antiAliasing(MSAA) and TENKOKU fog is good, but antiAliasing will turn off by following code :
//TURN OFF ANTI ALIASING
if (enableFog) QualitySettings.antiAliasing = 0;
How is the best way to use MSAA while enableFog?(remove it)

 

@Nearo1 You can comment out the antialiasing line if you like... it may not cause any issue for you, but in some setups using MSAA was causing unpredictable fog artifacts. I could never figure out exactly why it happened sometimes and not othertimes. If you don't have any trouble with MSAA on then go ahead and keep this commented out.

As for the normal map/cubemap code, yes remove it for performance. It isn't doing anything currently... I was investigating some screen space effects to include with the fog (such as a screen-space snow shader and rain puddles), but these are not currently included so you should be able to comment out this code without issue.

 

@chingwa

I have two issues with Tenkoku at the moment,
1. It seems between hours 18-20 & 5-8 that the LIGHT_World turns off leaving the whole scene unlit, which makes it look wierd, can it be changed to just color the light black or something instead?
2. When using the Snow OR Rain weather settings on max it creates a HEAVY toll on performance, I have SLI high end cards and brings it down to less than 30 FPS, like 15-20 FPS, previous version did not do this

 

Reflection probe was rendering the new clouds (legacy setting still works)) but suddenly it stopped rendering the new clouds. Any idea why?