Time of Day - Dynamic Sky Dome

I think that's what you see when the camera's far clipping is not making it quite as far as the edge of your skydome. So adjust one or the other, or check the box on the TOD_Camera script to keep them in proportion.

Another possibility is your camera and skydome are not centered.

 

@hopeful: thanks for being so helpful
TOD_Camera solved my issue #1.

 

I cannot see the sun mesh, moon or stars. I don't believe I've done anything different this project. What are some things I can check to begin troubleshooting. Thanks.



Edit: Added TOD_Camera to my main scene camera fixed the issue.

However, with the update the time appears to be off. I am using device date and time. It was 4:30 am here when I tested it, it should have been completely dark, but there was sunlight.

 

Try clicking Reflection: cubemap off and see if that helps.

 

I think I might be able to fit it into 3.1.1, which is planned for a July release. I can't guarantee it though - so far you're the only one to request this feature, and I cannot prioritize it over features more users have requested.

You only have to attach TOD_Camera to the first camera that is being rendered, all cameras that follow don't require it and can use any clear flags they like. The reason the first camera requires black clear flags is that the stars have to be rendered against a black background and the "Space" child game object is now optional and no longer guaranteed to always clear the entire screen.

I reckon your first camera doesn't use "Don't Clear" clear flags because if it did everything would break, so this should be fine?

The shadow quality depends on a number of things. First of all, they only flicker when the light source moves, which is why it doesn't happen in the demo scene by default. You can confirm this by disabling "Progress Time" on TOD_Time.

If you want to use a dynamic day / night cycle you can reduce the flickering by increasing the Light.UpdateInterval inspector variable on TOD_Sky, which will only move the light source once every X seconds. Of course there are disadvantages to this approach, because now the shadows jump in small intervals.

You can also increase the shadow quality by reducing the shadow distance in the quality settings or by moving your near clipping plane further away from the camera.

I reckon what you are referring to is the "atmospheric scattering" effect of the project - and yes, Time of Day includes this effect as well. You have to add the atmospheric scattering image effect that's included with Time of Day to your camera, as described in the image effects section of the docs. Let me know if you run into any issues with it.

 

Did you set the UTC time zone offset to the time zone at the longitude / latitude you set up, as described here?

 

Yes...

Latitude: 35.7
Longitude: 78.6
UTC: 6

I'll test it again at the end of the day. It may have something to do with the attached camera script and the horizon. I liked seeing the 'progress time' checkbox. Thanks.

 

I just reproduced your setup and can confirm that you can see some brightening around where the sun is going to rise around that time. If your country uses daylight savings time you might have to add 1 hour to your UTC time offset btw (Germany for example is usually UTC+1 but UTC+2 in the summer).

Since the time we're talking about is a transitional time period it could be that the atmospheric scattering is simply slightly off to your location because certain atmospheric factors aren't perfectly mapped to the ingame parameters. For example, there might be air pollution or surrounding terrain that hide that slight hint of light.

 

Thank you for the suggestions, my issue has been resolved. While re-importing the shaders and scripts folder didn't fix my issue, deleting TOD and re-importing the entire package did. Thanks again for quick support and also your great asset!

 

I updated to the new version, although I seem to be getting alot of errors.

edit: disregard, deleted everything and re imported, works wonders.

 

It was daylight savings time. That might be a good addition to your Time component, for people like me . And again, thank you for your terrific support!

 

With the latest Unity Version 5.1.1p3 I can't reimport this asset anymore. The editor crashes. I've filed a bug.

 

Time of Day was just featured on AssetsReporter.com - http://assetsreporter.com/2015/07/06/time-of-day/
Great work we really enjoy your magical skydome

 

Hi, can you do something that we'll be able to put textures on sky?

 

I have a question that may have been answered but how would I sync my sky dome with (Unity Network)?

 

If someone could give me a very basic script to sync the time over the network that would be epic

 

Just updated to 5.1.1p3 and cannot reproduce this. Can you try importing into an empty project and if it still crashes send me the editor log via PM or email?

Thanks a lot!

What exactly do you mean? At the moment you can use custom cubemaps at night using the "Space" child object and you can use custom textures for the cloud billboards. Are you talking about having a mountain billboard in the distance or something like that?

The docs mention which variables you need to synchronize between client and server. For most projects simply synchronizing the date and time (i.e. TOD_Sky.Cycle.Ticks of type long) should be enough, but you can synchronize the clouds as well if your project is more simulation-leaning. For a guide on how to synchronize variables with the new Unity networking system you'll have to check the Unity docs or a tutorial since I haven't used the new implementation yet. It should be easy enough to do though.

 

@plzdiekthxbye Just wanted to stop by and say good work on the clouds. They look really nice in game. I had to make some adjustments on how to control them with regards to weather (getting Light Fogginess, Coverage [density], Brightness, and Fogginess) to play nicely with each other.

A bit tricky to get right but well worth it in the end. Excellent results. Thank you for the nice upgrade.

 

To be honest: I am totally blasted by 3.1.0 the clouds look awesome and the new cloud shadows are extremely cool! Keep up the good work!

 

Yeah I'll third this - the new update is great, and I really like the extra control you've provided over sunrise / sunset colours. Well done man, this is great stuff.

 

@plzdiekthxbye

New clouds shader is awesome. But now we have one parameter - Size. I 3.0.2 we have more variants of sky. Can you add more parameters for unique sky in many scenes?

 

Would it be relatively simple to add a second Sun or Moon to ToD?

 

Atmospheric Scattering and Suimono Water

I'm loving the atmospheric scattering effect with the new release of TOD but its effecting the Suimono Water making it look murky and the reflections become dull and it looses a lot of the nice look of the water. Is there a way to keep the atmospheric scattering above water level so that it does not effect the water. I have tried playing with the parameters but with no avail. Please can this be looked into or examined to see if anything can be done?

 

Doxyfile Error -

Can you explain to me what Doxyfile (without the extension - not Doxyfile.cs) does? This was causing a major conflict with another asset I had. I love ToD and I use it practically everything, but I hope you can understand it seems very suspicious when I find a file with no extension that is causing conflicts with other things within Unity. Keep in mind that ToD was not being used actively at all, a simple download of it (and subsequently Doxyfile) caused a pretty weird bug - that was the only way I discovered it.

 

Doxyfile has to do with generating documentation with Doxygen:

http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/manual/config.html

 

May want to consider leaving it out of next build because it can potentially cause conflicts with other assets and serves no meaningful purpose - since you have the info all within doxyfile.cs

 

The latest release 3.1 has issues with the atmosphere not rendering behind the terrain and scene objects. Different levels of noticeability can be found by adjusting the Rayleigh and mie settings.
No Atmospheric scattering is being used in this screenshot.

 

@GXMark Definitely can see that and it looks like default Unity stuff. I will offer a different perspective on this. I use Tonemapping Deluxe from the Asset Store with Unity Bloom Optimized and the automatic eye adaptation from Tonemapping as well. I removed ToD scattering and the results are fantastic. Definitely not what happens in your picture. So this would be another Unity Asset Store addon that we all just shake our heads and wonder....why?

The pics on my weather page for Time of Day are with the Tonemapping. And although I did not hilly terrain in the pics you can see what happens to the lighting. When I turn it off I get what you are showing.
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/fr...ers-realistic-weather-for-time-of-day.310180/

By the way....I have done the same thing with UniStorm and Force of Nature with the same results. UniStorm's sunlight is even more potent than what you are showing.

Hope that helps a bit.

 

I lost the ability to make the scene truly dark. It was working by turning the ambient and reflection values down in the night component. Now it's bright again and i'm not sure what changed. I do not have a second light in the scene. What are some things I can check to fix this? Thanks.

Edit: It looks like this is related to GI. But if anyone has worked out how to get the GI to play nicely with TOD night cycles, please let me know. Thanks.

 

Strangely enough it disappears if you either turn god rays off or put it at the end of your image effects pipeline on the main camera.


QUOTE="Olander, post: 2195681, member: 686905"]@GXMark Definitely can see that and it looks like default Unity stuff. I will offer a different perspective on this. I use Tonemapping Deluxe from the Asset Store with Unity Bloom Optimized and the automatic eye adaptation from Tonemapping as well. I removed ToD scattering and the results are fantastic. Definitely not what happens in your picture. So this would be another Unity Asset Store addon that we all just shake our heads and wonder....why?

The pics on my weather page for Time of Day are with the Tonemapping. And although I did not hilly terrain in the pics you can see what happens to the lighting. When I turn it off I get what you are showing.
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/fr...ers-realistic-weather-for-time-of-day.310180/

By the way....I have done the same thing with UniStorm and Force of Nature with the same results. UniStorm's sunlight is even more potent than what you are showing.

Hope that helps a bit.[/QUOTE]

 

@Olander @toxtronyx @mickyg Thanks guys, always great to hear positive feedback!

There are a lot more parameters than size for the new clouds - have a look at the "Clouds" parameter section of TOD_Sky.

You can just copy the moon game object, but you'll have to either manage the movement of the second moon yourself or make it a child object of sun or moon to have it always be positioned in the same spot relative to them.

The only solution for what you're trying to might be to manually force the Suimono water to be rendered after fog image effects (i.e. adjusting its tag to something along the lines of "Queue"="Transparent" or "Queue"="Transparent-100") - having the fog affect water is the correct behaviour and is preferable in most scenes, so both Time of Day and Suimono are working correctly.

Doxygen requires both the "Doxyfile" and the "Doxyfile.cs" files - while I can leave those files out of the Asset Store package, this will prevent people from rebuilding the docs on their own (for example to have the HTML version of the docs on their local computer), so I would prefer not doing that. Can you provide more details on the error that is occuring?

Two things come to mind:

• Could it be that those are simply the god rays being affected by an image effect that's following them?
• Are you on Unity 4? There are a bunch of bugs with image effects that are using the depth buffer in Unity 4 that can cause the depth buffer to be corrupted when for example doing image effect fog (even with the Unity default Global Fog image effect), so I'm not sure if I can fix it on my end.

Can you try lowering Night.AmbientMultiplier and Night.ReflectionMultiplier even further? The values were re-scaled in 3.1.0 so it's possible that you get different (brighter) results with the same parameters - all you should have to do is adjust the parameters again.

 

It is interfering with foam generation in Suimono (2.1 non experimental). If Doxyfile is present in Assets and I click out of the editor and back in the editor (During gameplay) it screws up foam generation. If I delete Doxyfile, foam generation is normal when I click out of the editor and then go back to it during gameplay. This is very strange to me because the simple inclusion of doxyfile in the project causes this error. Does that make any sense to you?

 

Just purchased your plugin, really nice work!

Im trying to get the asmospheric scattering to work on mobile (iphone 4s), but it seems to really slow down my game quite a bit. Is there anything I can do to improve scattering performance? or to fake a similar effect somehow?

Thanks!!

Eric

 

Well placing god rays after the image effects did cure that issue.

 

Hello,
what is please recommended setup if I need layered cameras?

One camera for near things like cockpit map etc.
And second camera for far things.

So I have this setup:
NearCamera (0.01-0.3 clipping planes)
Depth 1
Clear Flags - Depth Only

FarCamera (0.3-1000 clipping planes)
Depth 0
Clear Flags (I must have TOD_Camera script here because it doesn't allow Depth Only clear)
TOD_Camera

But with this setup I see only blue sky without ToD affecting it. After disabling SSAO it's at least working. But still it's interfering with other ToD image effects?
It's possible to configure it correctly or it's simply not compatible with more cameras?
Thanks
Peter

 

Hello and thanks for a great asset. I have a bit of a different use case and am experiencing an issue that I haven't been able to figure out. My project is to take a photo of Big Ben and turn it into a "living image" where the picture changes with the actual time of day and weather in London. In this project, I import the photo of Big Ben as a 2D sprite with a Sprite Diffuse Shader material (so it is impacted by the scene lighting).

By and large it's working as you can see in the first picture, which is set to 4pm in the afternoon. The problem I am running shows in the second picture, which is set for 2am. It should be entirely night but it never gets to night - it goes to twilight and then eventually comes back to sunrise with out ever turning to night. I've play around with a lot of settings, but my theory is that I haven't got it positioned correctly in the world space. I've included screen shots of the inspector showing the latitude and longitude settings, as well as the position of the sprite. The sprite is rotated on it's X axis to correct the skewing of the perspective camera looking up at the sprite.

Any ideas as to why night does not come fully?

 

It looks that I was facing similar problem like mentioned in this thread:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/de...-posts-ssao-bugged-ufps-onrenderimage.198632/

Setting "nearcamera" to forward rendering has helped with problems...
Not sure if it's clean way how to do it. But I get image effects working now.
Regards
Peter

 

Just reporting some findings with trying to make TOD scattering work more smoothly with older mobile devices.

So I setup a diffuse/depth vertex shader that's pretty fast and also attached a script to the camera that updates the fog color based on sky.SampleAtmosphere() and the camera direction. This is working really well so far and is much faster than using the more robust scattering camera script.

Although Id like to get more pretty colors from the TOD sky into fog colors. Ive read of using a render texture to blend into, but Im not sure if this is overkill. Does anyone have any other thoughts on this? Maybe sample several locations using the sky.SampleAtmosphere() call and generate a lowres texture of the sky for blending (not sure if this is possible).

Thanks for any ideas!

Eric

 

This very much sounds like a bug in Suimono - can you reproduce it in a new project with just Suimono in it simply by adding a file without any file extension?

As you already found out combining image effects and multiple deferred cameras is an issue that's related to Unity and not Time of Day - though of course the image effects that are included with Time of Day can encounter the same issue. Your setup is correct - TOD_Camera has to be on the first camera that renders, so in your case FarCamera. Generally speaking if you add all image effects to the first (far) camera everything should work just fine, but if you render a second deferred camera after it and have image effects that rely on the depth buffer on that second camera you will run into issues.

There are more or less hacky ways to work around it - the most solid one is really to keep all image effects you can on the far camera or if that works for you to switch the near camera to forward rendering and report the bug to Unity or upvote existing bug reports in the bug tracker.

This behaviour is probably somewhat correct (the darkest London gets around that date is "astronomical twilight", not full night) for the date and scattering parameters you're using. It's possible that your atmospheric parameters don't match the parameters in London however (i.e. the brightening is a lot more diffuse in real life) or that some of the slight sun glow is hidden by objects at the horizon in real life. To mitigate, try the following:

• Reduce Atmosphere.Directionality (try something like 0.5)
• Adjust Atmosphere.MieMultiplier and Atmosphere.RayleighMultiplier

I'll look into whether or not this should happen out of the box and check if there's a bug in the scattering calculation for suns that are only a few degrees beneath the horizon.

TOD_Scattering is an expensive effect on older mobile devices (especially if those devices have retina displays) because it has to calculate the atmospheric scattering per-pixel. Unfortunately there's no way around it, so you'll have to disable this image effect on older mobile devices like the iPhone 4 or 4s (for a fallback on those devices see below). You can still use it on newer devices if your scene has some headroom there, which I reckon it does if you're targeting the 4s as the lowest-end device.

The fog color workaround is supported out of the box - set "Fog.Color" to "Directional" on TOD_Sky and it'll set your scene fog color to the current sky color in view direction. This is the way I recommend using on older mobile devices because anything more complex will affect performance significantly - just use the nicer fog effects on newer devices.

 

All parameters in section TOD_SKY (Opacity, Coverage and etc) - is the secondary parameters. It does not give us unique sky for another scenes. In previous version we had two size parameters. If you can not add more parameters through shader, maybe you add more clouds textures?

 

Hi,

Would you consider adding a DirectColor fog mode that just uses the day and night fog color ranges rather than blending them with the atmosphere color?

We're using height fog in some scenes and we don't want to set the "Fogginess" slider as it adjusts the atmosphere color to match the fog.

I've tried changing the code locally to add a DirectColor fog mode and it works exactly as we'd like, but it would be a pain to have to add it back in each time you update TOD. Plus other people may find this fog mode useful.

 

Thanks for your response. I did try what you suggested but it did not seem to have the desired impact. However, I have another clue that may point to what the issue is. When I debug.log TOD_Sky.SunsetTime and TOD_Sky.SunriseTime for July 17, 2015 at 51.5008 lat, 0.21247 long, sunset time = 20.91235 (which is pretty close, Google says 21:08). However, TOD is saying SunriseTime is 3.327077. This is pretty far off as Sunrise is listed at 5:04.

Do you have advice to troubleshoot?

 

Hi, I just upgraded to the version 5.1.2f1 of Unity, and seems that god rays is not working properly. Can anyone confirm this?. Regards.

 

Interesting. I always had the feeling that the times do not work properly too.

 

While adding more textures might be an option, this is probably something that should be done on a per-project basis by the people who use Time of Day since, even if I add more textures, some repetition across scenes (or across projects for that matter) is bound to happen. If you want to add a customized cloud texture for every scene, note that the RGBA channels of the cloud layer texture each specify the clouds at a different altitude. Imagine it like 4 slices through the clouds that are layered on top of each other and then traced in the shader.

That should be possible. I added it to my TODO list for 3.1.1 and will will try to fit it in.

I just upgraded to 5.1.2f1 and I cannot confirm any issue with TOD_Rays - works the same way it did in 5.1.1 for me. What does "not working properly" mean - i.e. what's happening exactly?

While it's possible that this is an indicator for a bug I should note is that there are multiple ways to measure sunset and sunrise times - TOD_Sky.SunsetTime and TOD_Sky.SunriseTime are using the definition of "civil twilight" (sun altitude of -6 degrees) and I don't know what Google uses. That being said, I have it on my TODO list for 3.1.1 to have another look at the problem you reported, so I should be able to say more on the issue once I've done that. I've been very short on time over the last few weeks, so I cannot give an ETA at this point.

 

@plzdiekthxbye Hi, I can't see the god rays. If I disable or enable from main camera, I don't see any difference. It seems that is not working. Without touching my project, I just upgraded to 5.1.2f and rays stop working. If I modify the values of TOD_rays, for example increasing the intensity and radius a lot, but really a lot, I can see the rays but the effect is strange and ugly, and definitely different from how it looked before. I'm on OSX, using TerrainComposer+rtp. Regards.

 

Can you create an empty new project, then import Time of Day and report back if the god rays work in there?

 

In a new empty project is working fine. I tried to remove the asset of my project, reimport it again and then create a new camera with TOD scripts attached and finally is working again. Sorry for the "false" report and thanks for your fast support.
Regards.

 

Thanks for your reply, that's helpful in understanding which twilight you are using for Sunset/Sunrise. I looked up the twilight tables for London here: http://www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/london and it appears that the TOD_Sky.SunriseTime is more closely matching nautical twilight which is listed as 3:15 for July 17th while Civil is listed as 4:17. Is it possible to override the calculated sunset/sunrise time with times downloaded from Weather Underground without impacting other function?