TENKOKU - Dynamic Sky

You are my hero! Thank you--I will implement this as soon as I get home from my business trip!

 

Just a quick question if Tenkoku has been tested on Unity 2017?

 

@FredrikS Yes It's been tested up to Unity 2017.1

 

Interesting...although I'm not sure they overlap enough to bother with ditching the particle system for them. But I guess if they all had refraction I could see it being expensive with particles.

Anyway...I'm done fiddling with my elek sky edits (I'm thinking of them as "atmospheric elek").
Original post, with screenshots and stuff
Would include actual game screenshots, but game is in a semi-broken state.

Here's the rundown...um, before I get into the shader edits, some general notes.
1. We didn't realise TAA was enabled on our post fx (I wasn't the one to set them up) so we had both enabled for a bit...that was pretty confusing to find. Some auto checking might not be a bad idea.
2. We found we needed to draw base terrain + sky to the reflection probe, so I made a script to copy the terrain gameobject at runtime so as not to also draw trees, grass, etc. We also set the reflection probe to calculate one face per frame. Script attached.
3. Although we are using hdr and tonemapping, we found sky amount at 0.6 to still be decent. An example scene with tonemapping on might be good for showing the best of how its meant to be.
4. tenkoku 1.1.5e, so anyone be warned all ambients / gradients won't be the same as what would be needed for 1.1.6, due to the too-dark dawn/dusk bug in 1.1.5

Oh and...general disclaimer: I might not always be right, but I'm never wrong. But seriously, I'm no artist; and these shader edits are a bit esoteric too.

Shader code edits (not sure if you want me including the file itself loosely):

The rough rundown of the following code
1. Uses hue as primary input for how much "warmth" to apply
2. Applies warmth by changing the colour to be more orange.
The shade of orange is customisable, but the range is basically from yellow to red.
(in theory; in reality its more yellowy orange to pink)
3. Conserve several things to make sure it still looks natural.
This is why saturation is included, especially to keep blues.
But more specifically, it conserves:
- pixel brightness
- time of day in the form of fading it out with sun altitude
- upper sky blues
- blues in the gradient from warm colour to blue. ie don't go through a weird hue shift in between warm and blue

Added in the Properties block

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. // Sun warmth
3.  
4. // colour settings
5. // green is here so the range of colour from red to yellow is available, ie orange sunrise
6. _RedFactor ("Sun Colour Warmth", Range(1.0, 10.0)) = 1.0
7. _GreenOfRed ("Sun Warmth Hue (0 - red; 1 - yellow)", Range(0.0, 0.5)) = 0.1
8.  
9. // shape settings
10. _SunWarmthPower ("Sun warmth shape by hue Stretch", Range(0.01, 5.0)) = 0.0
11.  
12. // fade settings
13. _SunWarmthBlend ("Sun warmth blend", Range(0.0, 1.0)) = 1.0    
14. _SunWarmthAltitudeFade ("Sun warmth altitude fade", Range(0.1, 1.0)) = 0.5
15.  

Before frag function

Code (csharp):

1. void GetHSV0to1(float4 colour, out float hue, out float luminance, out float saturation)
2. {
3.   // red - 0; green - 0.5; blue - 1.0
4.  
5.   float _min = min(colour.r, min(colour.g, colour.b));
6.   float _max = max(colour.r, max(colour.g, colour.b));
7.  
8.   luminance = (_min + _max) / 2.0;
9.  
10.   if (colour.r == _max)
11.   {
12.     hue = (colour.g - colour.b) / (_max - _min) / 6.0;
13.   }
14.   else if (colour.g == _max)
15.   {
16.     hue = (2.0 + (colour.b - colour.r) / (_max - _min)) / 6.0;
17.   }
18.   else // colour.b == _max
19.   {
20.     hue = (4.0 + (colour.r - colour.g) / (_max - _min)) / 6.0;
21.   }
22.  
23.   saturation = luminance < 0.5 ? ((_max - _min) / (_max + _min))
24.                                : ((_max - _min) / (2.0 - _max - _min));
25.  
26. }

In the frag function, before gamma shift

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. // Dawn Warmth Colour Modifacition
3.  
4. float hue, saturation, luminance;
5. GetHSV0to1(inscattering, hue, saturation, luminance);
6.  
7. float redFac = 1.0 - pow(hue, _SunWarmthPower);
8.  
9. redFac = saturate(redFac);
10.  
11. float greenFac = redFac * _GreenOfRed;
12.  
13. float redMul = lerp(1, _RedFactor, redFac * saturation);
14. float greenMul = lerp(1, _RedFactor, greenFac * saturation);
15.  
16. float blueMul = lerp(1, _RedFactor, (1.0 - redFac) * _SunWarmthPower * (_RedFactor / 10.0) * 0.5 * saturation);
17.  
18. // conserve energy - calculate original brightness
19. float originalBrightness = inscattering.r + inscattering.g + inscattering.b;
20.  
21. float3 originalRGB = inscattering.rgb;
22.  
23. // apply increase
24. inscattering.r *= redMul;
25. inscattering.g *= greenMul;
26.  
27. // adjust blue for retaining blue sky above
28. inscattering.b *= blueMul;
29.  
30. // conserve energy - calculate new brightness
31. float newBrightness = inscattering.r + inscattering.g + inscattering.b;
32.  
33. // scale brightness down
34. inscattering.rgb /= (newBrightness / originalBrightness);
35.  
36. // blend, taking light direction into account so that it is more normal (cooler) closer to noon
37. float blend = _SunWarmthBlend * (lightVec.y < 0 ? 1 : (pow(1 - lightVec.y, _SunWarmthAltitudeFade)));
38. inscattering.rgb = blend * inscattering + (1.0 - blend) * originalRGB;
39.  

The shader edits and material properties are mainly what's needed. Also of note for the "more atmospheric" elek sky is mie amounts (bigger sun/moon), sky brightness, and the gradient colours were adjusted to be more orange iirc.

 

Hi, I've got a problem using Tenkoku in unity 5.6.2 with tonemapping screen effects:

It seems I got some color leak and those ugly color blocks are killing me.

everything looks fine if I disable the tonemapping effects.
This was not occurred in unity 5.4 that I built my whole game up.

Now no matter the legacy effect script Tonemapping or store asset "Filmic Tonemapper Delux" or unity's new post-processing stack (this one will always cause the color leak no matter whether I enable the color grading effect or not).

I suspect it's my computer's hardware causing this problem ( I tested in a whole new project with Tenkoku's demo scene and this problem remains, but it doesn't seem to occur on another computer which has a higher level graphic card) and would like to know if this will affect the built game running on low end PC or has any downsides if I build the game on this low end graphic card PC?

Edit: My graphic card on the PC with this issue is GT730.

 

@Harekelas What you need to do in this case is to ensure that the tonemapping/post-process effect is located after/below the Tenkoku image effects on your camera. The tricky thing here is that by default Tenkoku just adds all the image effects automatically for you at runtime, so you may question how you can reorder the stack... the solution is to add the Tenkoku effects you are using to your camera manually.

Click on your camera object and go to Component-->ImageEffect-->Tenkoku and add these components to your camera in the following order: 1) TenkokuFog 2) Tenkoku SunShafts 3) Tenkoku Temporal Aliasing

Now once you run your scene Tenkoku will use the effects you added instead of automatically adding effects. Now that you have these on your camera you can add or reorder your tonemapping and post-process effects so that they are below/ after the Tenkoku effects. I tested in 5.6.2 this morning and it should remove the sky banding. Let me know if you still run into any trouble.

 

Haven't tested it on my working PC but I tested it at home, and it's fine even if I put some of the tenkoku effects after the tonemapping scripts.
The PC in my working place has low end hardware (i3 CPU and GT730 graphic card) I highly suspect it's unity's rendering method changed in v5.6 that will require higher hardware to perform.
Anyway, I'll try this method out on Monday when I get back to work

 

I had this issue until I switched to Beautify's tonemapping. Then almost all the banding went away.

 

This seems to be caused by some HDR to LDR remapping issues, I'm not familiar with rendering techniques so I can't say for sure.
I own beautify, too. It lacks some functions the post-processing stack has. I'll try some other post effect assets along with beautify, maybe Prism post effects.

 

@Dwight_Everhart @Harekelas Guys, this is an error in Tonemapping systems. Just FYI, the Unity Post Process effects were just updated today to version 1.0.4, and they no longer have this banding issue when used with Tenkoku. I checked in both Unity 5.6.2 and 2017.1

I've not used Beautify, but glad to hear it works well

 

Super excited to hear! Thought it was concerned to tonemapping, so glad they fixed it!

Edit: And I got a question to ask: how can I override the Light_world directional light's minimum strength to 0.001 instead of 0? For I'm using Ceto ocean with Tenkoku and the back-face of the water surface will be pure black and can cause some post-effect glitch if the directional light is set to 0.

 

Hi, Chingwa!
I'm using a custom billboard shader for my trees (not speed-tree's billboard shader)
Then I found the tenkoku fog won't apply to the billboards, so what should I add t the shader to allow tenkoku's fog apply to it's results?

 

@Harekelas This is a somewhat difficult situation due to the problem of normal billboards not writing to the depth buffer. There is a solution though, take a look at this post over on the TanukiDigital forums here: http://tanukidigital.com/forum/index.php?topic=980.0

 

@chingwa I added tenkoku to a project and as soon as the Tenkoku DynamicSky prefab is enabled in the scene the editor becomes almost unresponsive. Playmode seems to be ok. Any idea what might happen?

 

@daschatten I'm not sure, I've not ever experienced a lag in the editor due to Tenkoku. It's possible it's due to the included reflection probe object... you can turn this off in the Tenkoku settings, or go to the Tenkoku-->SkySphere-->TenkokuReflectionprobe object and disable it. What version of Unity/Tenkoku are you using?

 

@ching

Reflection probe off makes no difference. Unity 5.6.1f1 / Tenkoku 1.1.6

I tried another project with similar assets (Terrain Composer 2, CTS, Beautify and Post Processing v2). No problem here... strange.

 

@chingwa I noticed you call LoadObjects() in TenkokuModule.cs (Line 1284) in LateUpdate() in Editor Mode. I added a Debug.Log() and result: LateUpdate() is called 18 times after enabling Tenkoku Dynamic Sky Gameobject, some times more if you move around the view. Additionally i found 52 occurences of GameObject.Find() in TenkokuModule.cs and it seems they are all called in LateUpdate(). Further there are 82 calls of GetComponent(). Combine this with my spanwed > 30.000 GameObjects and you know why editor is mostly unresponsive for me...

Can't you use static references for the tenkoku objects like windzone, planets and so on, including the components?

In the other project where it works i had the same assets but no objects spawned... only terrain. This is why it works there.

 

@daschattan wow, 30k game objects? In my experience static references do not work properly in Editor mode, or at least not reliably, and often the references will get lost and break the Tenkoku lighting preview while in editor mode and that is the reason I force call the object reference loading. I can see though why this would be a serious problem on your end. This isn't an issue in play mode since it is able to properly (reliably!) cache the objects into local references.

In your specific case I would recommend just turning-off/commenting-out the editor specific load object code (starting line1284 in TenkokuModule.cs)...

Code (CSharp):

1. //get objects in editor mode
2. LoadObjects();
3.  
4. //rotate sun in editor mode
5. sunlightObject.LookAt(sunSphereObject);
6. worldlightObject.localRotation = sunlightObject.localRotation;
7. nightSkyLightObject.localRotation = moonObject.localRotation;

This will remove lighting updates until you hit play, but honestly this is a small price to pay for performance. The in-Editor lighting positions are not 100% completely accurate anyway.

I'm not sure what the solution would be in a general sense. Perhaps I can instead reference all local objects manually in the Tenkoku_Library object (I do this with materials and shaders already) and then just feed references to them from the internal object instead of from the scene. I will have to test how well this works when dealing with prefabs and across multiple projects, but it seems like the best solution to me.

 

@chingwa I can live with that, no problem. I think using references from another object should be fine.

30k game objectsbecause it's 4x4km terrain. Will be way larger later

 

I read the thread and this seems to use unity's fog along with Tenkoku's fog, my billboard shader actually can apply unity fog but I don't want to use them together, they may cause some undesired graphic issues.
Any suggestions that how can I modify a shader to write them into the depth buffer like speed tree billboard shader does?
I'm a fresh learner of shader writting so I can understand the fundamentals of a shader and can find where should I insert or calculate extra stuff.

 

You can't write them into the depth buffer. This is a Unity limitation where Transparent objects do not render depth, and since the billboard shader is marked as transparent, you can't do post process fog on them. So to get around it you need to calculate the fog/distance calculations based on the vertex positions, instead of the pixel positions. the UNITY_TRANSFER_FOG(o,o.pos); function is a very handy way of calculating this since it's already built into Unity and easy to use... of course you need Unity fog enabled or this built-in function won't work.

Alternatively you could probably calculate the vertex world position in the vertex shader using something like the below... just note that this code is not complete and I have not had the opportunity to test it yet...

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. struct Input {
3.     float vertDistance;
4. };
5. void vert (inout appdata_full v, out Input o) {
6.     UNITY_INITIALIZE_OUTPUT(Input,o);
7.     o.vertDistance = distance(_WorldSpaceCameraPos, mul(unity_ObjectToWorld, v.vertex)) / _TenkokuDistance;
8. }
9. void surf (Input IN, inout SurfaceOutputStandard o) {
10.     fixed4 col = tex2D( _MainTex, input.uv);
11.     //Calculate Screen Coordinates
12.     float2 screenUV = input.screenPos.xy / input.screenPos.w;
13.     half4 skyColor = tex2D(_Tenkoku_SkyTex, screenUV);
14.  
15.     //Calculate Fog Color
16.     half4 fogColor = skyColor;
17.     fogColor = lerp(fogColor, fogColor * _Tenkoku_FogColor, _Tenkoku_FogColor.a);
18.  
19.     //Apply Fog
20.     o.Albedo = lerp(col.rgb, fogColor.rgb, IN.vertDistance);
21. }

 

Thanks! I'll try this and see if I can get it to work. Or I'll just use the unity fog instead

 

Hi,
I have tried to use unity's fog with my own billboard shader.
It works fine when the light brightness is fixed. When it comes to night I'll have to change the fog's color accordingly.
And also I found the sun's texture is covered by fog, this causes a colored dot in middle of the sun:


I can write a script to change the color of fog depend on the time of day, but have no idea how to get rid of this dot in sun.

 

@Harekelas Ah yes, the sun shader is not implicitly turning off Unity fog which is why you get the dark spot. This was an oversight on my part, since usually Tenkoku forces the Unity fog to be off. Simply open up the SHADERS/Tenkoku_sun shader file and add 'nofog' to the end of the first #pragma line:

#pragma surface surf Ramp vertex:vert alpha nofog

This should fix it. Moon and stars already have this applied, so not having it on the sun shader was a big oops.

 

@chingwa Can those regular changes in /Assets/TENKOKU - DYNAMIC SKY/TEXTURES/mat_cloudSphere.mat be avoided? Or should i put it in .gitignore?

 

@daschatten I'm not getting these messages in my tests here. Do they occur in editor mode, or in play mode? (or both?) You could probably put it in gitignore without any ill effects.

 

The changes appear on scene open. I try with adding it to .gitignore.

 

Whats the fix for ambient working 6 out of 10 times?
It's driving me nuts, it randomly decides to stop setting correct ambient and everything is black.
50-50 that when i hit play in editor it's going to be dark.
And it goes into build aswell.

 

hey, discovered something minor.

The reflection probe moves continually, while it only updates periodically as per the setting for it. This causes some popping affects as the capture doesn't match the new position. Presumably, it should be decoupled from the rest of that stuff and moved when it updates. We're updating at 0.5fps (cheap, low resolution, frequent updates).

 

@theLittleSettler So you suggest linking the probe position updates to the render updates? Interesting. That sounds like a great idea, and probably should have been done from the beginning. I'll look into this for the next update.

@pointcache I think this is the first instance of this issue I've heard... are you sure it's ambient lighting and no the reflection probe? if you increase the probe fps or disable the probe (as a test) does it change this behavior at all?

 

Hey All,

Quick question... is there anyway to make the fog render on top of clouds?
Currently the clouds (all types) act like alpha on the fog.
I know there is a known issue with transparency and fog but I was hoping @chingwa would have a fix for this

Thanks

 

@pointcache that's gorgeous

@veddycent Are you talking about the built in Tenkoku fog or a secondary Unity / post-process fog? Tenkoku fog should be overlaying the clouds as they reach the horizon... Can you post a screenshot of what you see for clarification?

 

I've uploaded three images to highlight what I'm experiencing.

Image 1 has Tenkoku Fog With Density set to 0 - This is correct
Image 2 has Tenkoku Fog With Density set to 1 - This is correct
Image 3 has Tenkoku Fog With Density set to 1 and clouds showing - In the image you can see how the turbine has fog on it but where the clouds are there isn't.

I am right in thinking that you shouldn't be able to see the clouds?



P.S whilst I'm here, is it possible to just set 1 colour for the fog?

 

Thanks for the images @veddycent this shows me exactly what you're talking about, and you're right the clouds really should be fogging along with the other objects in your scene. Unfortunately I don't have an immediate solution that I can share with you, as I'll need to investigate the shader code somewhat. I will definitely have this fixed for the next update, if not sooner.

As for having 1 color fog, I don't think it's suitable. It might work ok in the middle of the day when the sky coloring is fairly consistent, but will look very strange when the sun and lighting is at a more severe angle. However I will also look at perhaps doing some saturation blending with higher fog values, which may be more realistic.

 

I've experienced this bug with a few fog effects and looks to be the known issue with alpha, because they don't write to the depth buffer (not sure how Tenkoku clouds are handled regards to this)
Yes you're right about the colour during dawn and dusk when the light is more vibrant and varied, but during the day it looks odd having the fog match the sky colour... is it worth trying to shift the colour slightly more to grey that way the colour is more subtle?

 

Sorry. Sure the answer is in the forum, but it is too long to read it and I have to tell me now, which is on offer.

Does the software have weather and weather synchronization for networking? UNet and / or Photon?

Thank you.

 

There are functions written to facilitate weather networking, yes. It is up to you to actually send the serialized data (I like to use RPC's), but it is dead simple.

 

Thanks!!!
Enviro don't like me too much. I'll try with this.

 

The same functions are also very useful for saving the current weather state, too. We have a single player game that uses Tenkoku and saves the state with a single line of code.

 

And these lines of code are public? (With TENKOKU)
Thanks

 

http://www.tanukidigital.com/tenkoku/documentation/tenkoku_documentation.pdf

Page 11 has the networking references. Now, if you want to be 'hyper efficient' you will want to do your own syncing of some of the variables for networking, but for initial loading, the full data sync that is written there works well. Generally after initial sync, I only send changes to the weather as needed on a per-property basis.

 

@Barritico Just as @CaptainMurphy says, the built-in encode/decode function is where it's at for networking. All you need is to encode data on the server into a string, pass that string to your clients and then decode the string data. And of course just as suggested, it may be more efficient to subsequently access and sync specific variables after the initial system sync. The Captain knows this system even better than I do

 

Thank you very much.

Something that worries me too. I downloaded the demo for PC and I see that the FPS fluctuate a lot. Even at certain times they fall below 30.

The climatological system I need is for a car racing game on 10x10 km terrain.

Can any of the kind users, or the author, tell me how the system actually performs?

Thank you very much again.

 

@Barritico I admit I'm surprised the demo goes down to 30 on your end. I'm not running a fancy machine at all (It's a good 5 years old now) and the lowest I get in the demo is about 58fps. Tenkoku does include options to lower the performance load... which is mainly due to two functions:

1) Volumetric clouds - you can lower the quality settings for better performance, or switch to the legacy clouds which run faster (at the cost of visual fidelity)

2) Reflection Probe - this re-renders your scene at a given interval to capture reflection data for Unity's Standard Shader. You can lower the capture interval, or reduce the game layers that it renders which will both increase performance.

 

FYI: Tenkoku is 50% off at the asset store

 

Thanks.

 

Hello !
I just download the demo and I can't make any change on the parameters. I try barely any buttons and mouse movements. Does the demo broke or am I doing something wrong ?

 

Hi @BaptisteB Do you mean you downloaded the demo EXE file from the website? I just checked it on my end and all parameters are working as expected. Or do you mean you purchased/downloaded Tenkoku and are trying the included demo scene? If that is the case the Demo UI supercedes some of the Tenkoku parameters, in which case you can simply disable the UI object in your scene and all Tenkoku settings should work again.

 

Hi @chingwa . I downloaded the demo EXE file from the website, click everywhere on the parameter, try every buttons on my keyboard and nothing change.