TENKOKU - Dynamic Sky

@DesertRaven I remember Unisky, but I never used it.

Yes, the clouds in Tenkoku are very nice, especially when the sunset lights different layers with different colors. It's quite beautiful. There is currently an issue with the new clouds, at least on MacOS. The edges have temporal aliasing, causing the edges to look kind of like a swarm of mosquitos, with particles flashing on and off constantly. The shader that addresses the aliasing is currently broken on MacOS. However, I've also noticed the effect, to a lesser extent, on Windows.

Tenkoku's rain seems less dense to me than UniStorm's rain, and you can control how dense it is with the "Precipitation Quality" setting. Here's what rain looks like with the default, medium setting:



Here's the maximum setting:



And here's the minimum setting:



I also use Suimono. It's awesome as well!

 

I'm not sure which asset is the culprit, but if PlayWay Water and Tenkoku are both visible on the screen at the same time then my framerate is horrible. If it's just one or the other then my performance is great. Any thoughts on what this could be?

 

What does your profiler say? It could be any number of other issues besides just those two assets such as lighting of terrain or vegetation.

 

@emrys90 I don't have PlayWay to test this out... The first culprit that I can think of in Tenkoku is the Reflection probe. I would make sure it is not rendering the playway water layer (I assume it has it's own layer?). The next issue Is possibly the clouds. In normal useage the clouds are slightly processor heavy, but not enough that it would usually interfere much with FPS, but perhaps Playway is re-rendering the clouds a second time? It's conceivable this could start to create a bottleneck. You could put the cloudsphere object on it's own custom layer, and then perhaps disengage this layer from Playway reflections.

But I'm just guessing here. It's possible there is something in Playway that is causing an FPS hit that I'm not aware of.

 

I keep getting stuttering with Tenkoku unless I disable Reflection Probes. Is there a performance trick I should know?

 

The reflection probe FPS update timing can be lowered as well, but I suggest you go to the Tenkoku_ReflectionProbe object in your scene and make sure it only renders game layers that are absolutely necessary. Depending on what else is in your scene the probe could be hitting a performance bottleneck. You can also choose to have the probe render no layers, in which case it should still pick up the sky info properly.

 

What is "Absolutely Neccessary"? Right now it's set to default and everything is default. It's actually a pretty empty seen to be honest, nothing but terrain, trees, and grass. Does it maybe have a big impact on the grass maybe?

 

It's probably the trees that is causing the most performance impact. For the probe you'll have to decide what is necessary for your project and scene goals. In general you could probably get away with not rendering any layers in the probe and just having it default to the sky, but it depends on your project. If you have water in your scene (just as an example) that might require additional reflection data for it to look properly like water... that's why I say it depends.

I just wrote a post about tree rendering performance trick that you might find interesting:
http://tanukidigital.com/forum/index.php?topic=966.msg3701#msg3701

It doesn't improve the performance of trees specifically, but it gives you a bit of rendering flexibility when using Tenkoku (and more specifically Suimono) in your scenes. But in general I do recommend using Unity layers to your advantage. There are many different reasons to separate objects onto different layers, but rendering flexibility is an important one.

 

Thanks! That summed it up

 

Does this work with VR Single Pass Rendering?

 

Maybe? I don't have a VR Kit to test with so I can't say 100% for sure, personally. I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't work though. Maybe some other users can chime in here with their experience with VR Rendering.

 

@chingwa Regarding the banding issue I reported earlier: I've almost entirely eliminated the banding by switching my tonemapping from Filmic Tonemapping to Beautify, which is amazing in almost every regard. Everything looks better. I'm now able to leave light rays enabled day and night, and I see almost no banding around the galaxy or other objects. The only banding I see now is a rather subtle effect during sunset and sunrise. Beautify includes its own light ray/flare effect, but I prefer Tenkoku's effect, so I'm continuing to use it. Tenkoku's effect looks more natural.

 

@Dwight_Everhart Thanks for the update! I never could reproduce the banding that you're seeing. However now that you mentioned the difference in Tonemapping I took a look and can definitely see some influence in my scenes from the Tonemapper. I don't get banding as bad as what you showed in your screenshot, but there is subtle banding during dusk/dawn areas in the sky blending. When I turn off Tonemapping these bands go away completely. When I move the Tonemapping to be below/after the TemporalReprojection components the banding disappears completely... though this can create some other unwanted color shifts.

I'll do some further investigation with this in mind, though the banding looks to be strictly due to the quality (or lack of) in the Tonemapping component one is using.

 

@chingwa Interesting about the banding going away when the tonemapper is placed after the temporal reprojection components. Those components are, of course, currently disabled on macOS, which might explain why originally I saw the banding, but you didn't.

 

Tested it out, it must be a unity bug, just abandoned the thought of using multiple cameras, cuz the lower cam in charge of landscape will not render the player's own shadow on ground if it culled the character model's layer. Then the character looks very strange without shadow on ground XD

 

Just bought your product and it doesn't work with 5.6 and HTC Vive. How do I get a refund?
BTW, Your registration page won't allow me to sign up because it says I am not typing in the verification letters correctly-- even though I am. Tried it 10 times. Ugh!

 

@chippwalters Email me your Asset Store order number at konnichiwa@tanukidigital.com

 

Is it possible to synchronize time to the network ?

 

Hi @toloo yes, check out the guide on page 11 here:
http://www.tanukidigital.com/tenkoku/documentation

It's simply a matter of accessing an encode function on the server, and then syncing the resulting variable and decoding it on the client side.

 

So pass the current time with the program (server game) running on the server.

 

Yes essentially. You could do the time variables by themselves, but the above referenced encode function will handle all time/weather variables for you in a simpler/more automated way.

 

@chingwa I seem to be having issues with very noisy shadow bias when I use Tenkoku, Do you have advice.

 

This is often an issue in Unity. You could raise the shadow bias on the LIGHT_world objects slightly, but I also recommend raising the near clip plane on your camera a little bit. This setting seems to have an exponential effect on the stability of shadows, and just raising it a little bit can often help dramatically.

 

I just put your sky in and I noticed the Daytime ambient sound slider is stuck on 1.0. I finally deleted the sound. Also I was wondering if you could supply a different daytime ambient on the next release. There is a grinding noise in that sound file that starts to drive you a bit nuts after listening to it for hours.

 

When can we expect the "Upcoming Features - Advanced weather automation system"?

And the same for SUIMONO, "Upcoming Features - Underwater light ray FX - Improved River Support"?

 

One question
I dont wanna read the 14 pages since you wrote that.
It is still not working with forward rendering when AA is active?

 

@SoloChristian I haven't noticed this being an issue before.... In my tests here there is no problem in changing any of the Sound FX volume settings. Hmmm. I wonder if anyone else here seen anything similar? In relation to the grinding sound, are you referring to the buzzing insect sound?

@FlyHigh I don't yet have a release date for the Advanced Automation System. Hopefully I'll have more news about this soon.

@bnogalc It works in Forward fine. If you're referring to MSAA there are sometimes issues depending on various project settings. If you see any trouble with Forward and MSAA send me an email and I'm sure it can be worked out.

 

On my stereo speakers it sounds like a 700 LB insect at best. LoL and because it loops it gets old after awhile. Maybe if the loop was longer. But either way, With a loud speaker system it does Not sound like an insect. It sounds like a recording error. It's minor except it gets old. And I can't turn the sound down because the slider for it is frozen at a value of "1"..

 

Hahaha, I'll look into doing an edit of the ambient sound files

 

I'm curious, are you using the latest version? There was a bug a looong time ago that prevented editing of certain settings, such as the sound files, but that has long ago been addressed. Also Tenkoku should be disconnecting itself from the prefab reference once it's put into your scene, can you confirm this is indeed happening?

 

@chingwa @SoloChristian I just loaded into a Tenkoku scene and when I focus on it I think I might know what sound you're talking about. There seems to be the layers of bird chirps and what sounds like either wings flapping or some kind of insect clicking, but then if I turn down the wind volume (as well as the turbulence options which I always turn off anyway), there's a base "buzzing", almost like a cicada in the distance, or someone using a metal grinder, or a grass trimmer like this -
I could only hear it when I turned down the wind volume and specifically listened for it, but I kinda can't unhear it now. Is that the sound?

 

Do you think it will be possible to make the cloud's seem a bit more random/unique, currently right now all the clouds are basically the same size, I kinda want a mix of fat and smaller clouds.
Is there a texture controlling the clouds that I could modify (this is using the newer clouds).
Cheers

 

Sorry for the spam, but thought you might like this Justin

Crowfall, one of the most anticipated MMO's of 2017 recently had a big reveal of their new graphical update, and I spent some time with their lead environmental artist Jon O'Neal last weekend.

I was literally gobsmacked about how heavily they were using asset store assets to do such amazing things.

In this video, the terrain and texturing was done with Gaia 1.5, general environmental spawning was done with GeNa, the terrain shading was with our new shader (just into beta yesterday), the character and camera movement was Pegasus, and last but very much not least, the lighting and weather is Tenkoku!!

Pretty awesome for us as publishers to be able to help such amazing talent to do such cool stuff!

 

Thanks Adam, It's BEAUTIFUL!!! That's awesome to see them making such progress.

 

@Tiny-Man The higher elevation clouds (Stratus/Cirrus) can be edited using the tex_clouds_a_hires texture. They are broken down by channel, so each cloud texture is greyscale and occupies one of the RGB channels.

However the Cumulus clouds are done via a couple 3d noise textures which are not easily editable. You can generate your own 3d noise volume or try and edit the settings on the Worley/Perlin texture volumes, though I don't really recommend that. You can, alternatively, adjust the cloud frequency and detail in the 'configuration' section which may give you a better expanse of clouds.

 

Sorry to bug you again @chingwa but I am having this issue:



The trees at a certain distance (and I think specific trees) are not being affected by the fog, unless I get closer.

 

Go into terrain and look at the shader settings of the LOD1 in the tree prefab for that kind of tree.

 

@jessejarvis I assume the trees not affected by fog are starting to turn to billboards at that distance? Billboards are very difficult to deal with when it comes to post-process fog, such as Tenkoku. There is a solution though, Iwrote about this on the TanukiDigital forums a couple weeks ago, check it out here: http://tanukidigital.com/forum/index.php?topic=980.0

 

Just came here to say thanks Chingwa and Tenkoku Dynamic Sky.

Heres a video of what i have produced so far

 

Thank you very much, I'll take a look at that now.

Edit: Yep! I got it One problem after another though. Shaky shadows. Ended up finding out something about Floating Point error? Using MapMagic right now. Makes my bow stutter too so the shaky shadows *may* or *may not* have to do with that. I was adjusting the shadow settings to no avail. It sometimes reduced the issue but it was still there.

Just gonna deal with the Shadow issues for now until the Floating point gets fixed. Or a work around, etc.

Floating Point Workaround! (Needs further personal testing but at a glance it works: http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php?title=Floating_Origin)

 

Hello,
I have just bought the asset and am trying to set it up. I can't seem to scale the cloud sphere bigger than 87.5, which is a bit too small for my current scene. Am I doing something wrong? Also, could you explain what the cloud plane is for? I didn't see anything in the documentation about this.
Thank you.

 

Hi @Trucker,

The 'cloud_plane' object is only used when Tenkoku is set to 'Legacy clouds' mode, otherwise it is turned off.

Are you trying to scale the cloud sphere object itself? I don't recommend this... the sphere scale is usually set by Tenkoku automatically, based on your camera far clip distance, and this may be why you can't scale it yourself. It's better to adjust the 'cloud scale' setting under the weather tab, or you can also adjust some settings(quality, frequency, detail) specifically for the volumetric cumulus clouds in the 'Configuration' tab.

 

Hello Chingwa,
Thank you. I am struggling with setting up the asset. I couldn't figure it out, so I deleted it and now reimported it.
However, I still can't make it work. There are no clouds in my scene. Not when I press play either.
Then sometimes I get these strange looking clouds, but they disappear when pressing play.
It's a VR project, and the camera is on the FirstPersonCharacter. Adding Tenkoku just added this aquamarine sky to the scene .

 

It sounds like Tenkoku is getting confused as to which camera it should track... in the configuration panel, try switching 'Camera Mode' to 'Manual Select' and then drag your main VR camera into the slot.

The sky elements should then be able to follow around your scene properly everything *should* display better. Also, once Tenkoku knows the correct camera it should be applying the 'Tenkoku Sky Fog' camera effect to your camera (and a few others, depending on your settings) which should also help improve the visuals. If it doesn't add these then you can add them manually through the component-->image effect-->Tenkoku menu. Let me know if this helps!

 

Thank you! Unfortunately pairing the camera manually didn't help. Now I get this situation. This is the config.

 

Is the CenterEyeAnchor a camera object? I recommend manually adding the Tenkoku fog component to each of your VR cameras. What does it look like in the game window while playing?

 

Thank you. I get clouds now. I didn't touch anything (same camera config, no extra effects) and now I have clouds. Something still doesn't feel right though. Just above the horizon line there are these flickering dark lines, probably clouds.
Adding the sky fog effect to the EyeAnchors crashes unity every time I press play. Even if I only apply it to the CenterEyeAnchor. So I can't do that.
Also, the aquamarine color is a bit overwhelming to the scene. Knowing how much you care about colors, I doubt that this is meant to be like that.
Unfortunately all clouds have disappeared again.

I don't know if EyeAnchor is a camera object. This is how it looks like in the inspector:

 

I can't get it to work. This is what the Oculus documentation says about the OVRCameraRig:

"OVRCameraRig replaces the regular Unity Camera within a scene. You can drag an OVRCameraRig into your scene and you will be able to start viewing the scene with the Gear VR and Rift."

The clouds sometimes appear, then disappear again, without touching Unity. It's odd. When pressing play, they usually disappear. I had them running once or twice however, and was able to move around in the game with the clouds (however they had these flickering black cloud lines just above the horizon). It all seems pretty random.

Is there a VR set up guide? Does Tenkoku even work in VR?

 

Hello there! Firstly, holy crap, this asset looks very good!

Do you plan on putting the asset on sale anytime soon, as I would not want to pay $65 and them find out there is a sale soon! Thanks!

 

1000th post!