Time of Day - Dynamic Sky Dome

I want to buy your asset, but first I want to know if it works in unity 5.3.1f1, thank you

 

I'm using it with 5.3.1p1 with no problems.

 

Ok thank you Obsurveyor

 

@plzdiekthxbye

I have found reproducable problem with the current Version 3.1.0:

When I add TOD_Rays to my camera the Sky Dome Reflection Probe gets rendered with clouds on black background.

 

Is there a way to get the minutes of the current Hour time??

Currently having to find a way to with Cycle.Hour but cant seem to find a way!

 

Hello! How to change the time of sunset and sunrise?

 

The system is based on true longitude/latitude positions on the earth.
So I would say you can best set the time of sunset / sunrise by playing with World/Longitude or latitude.
If you want to know the correct values of a special place on earth, you can easily find them out with google maps: The values are in the URL:
Latitude: 51.2383712
Longitude: 6.6742678

 

@plzdiekthxbye

Have another issue:
When setting Ambient Mode to "Spherical" the Day/AmbientMultiplier does not work, right?

 

Thanks for the details. Do you have any shader compilation issues in your Unity player log on the device?

I replied to you in my last post: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/time-of-day-dynamic-sky-dome.172763/page-28#post-2455496

Did you try that?

You can access TOD_Sky.Instance.Cycle.DateTime to get a C# DateTime object, which also contains the day of the week: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.datetime(v=vs.110).aspx

You have to exclude the "Clear" sky dome child object from your reflection probe pass.

You can access TOD_Sky.Instance.Cycle.DateTime to get a C# DateTime object, which also contains the current minute of the hour: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.datetime(v=vs.110).aspx

It should and does so for me. It's possible that Unity has some cached spherical harmonic solution in edit mode though, but at least in play mode this should be overwritten?

 

Ok, this also works when completeley deactivating the Clear-child.
What is the Clear-child good for then?

Until now the Day/Ambient Multiplier didn´t work here at all when in Playmode.
I tried in EditMode and now it works again - strange.

 

how can I exclude the 'clear' sky dome child object?
thanks

 

Could you let me know how to set up fog? I have set the atmosphere foginess to 1 but there is nowhere near dense enough. I tried adding Global Fog but that does not affect the sky.

 

Hi, your system is able to blend the fog color with the sky behind it, making a smooth transition behind the sky and the fog?
Thanks

 

I just tried PreethamFog - an adapted global fog shader (free) which does affect the sky. However I am having issue with it and the water - I think its to do with the rendering queue.

I would welcome any further ideas from the TOD developer..

 

I'm not sure if anyone else has encountered this, but particle systems won't simulate outside of play mode while the script "TOD_Sky" on the Sky Dome is active in the scene. It's not really ideal to have to (effectively) turn the sky off to preview particle systems outside of play mode. Does anyone have any info on this? Thanks!

Tried it in a fresh project as well as our working one. Using Unity v5.2.0f3.

 

Hi,
Does enabling time progress cost any performance in mobile ?

 

Thanks for mentioning this - yes it also happens for me. It caused some head scratching I can tell you!

 

i've a problem.How to make sync it ? i read doc. but i dont understand.

 

I've run into an issue with the onSunrise and onSunset events.
It appears as though the SunriseTime and SunsetTime don't account for UTC offset.
i.e. I'm currently using a +10 offset for AEST and the sunrise and sunset times report as about 6PM and about 9AM respectively.
Setting the UTC offset in the world settings to be 0 then makes the sun's visual position match these times (that is, the sun rises around 6PM)

 

It's used to reset the color buffer alpha value before rendering the clouds, which is then used for clouds and transparent objects to properly act as sun shaft blockers. That being said, it will be retired in the next update.

So it works in both play mode and edit mode now?

Move it to a layer that's not included in the reflection culling mask.

You can use the TOD_Scattering image effect for this type of aerial perspective / fog. However, the fog density is not adjusted by Time of Day and should be managed by your weather system.

TOD_Scattering does exactly that.

This was a Unity bug. It's been fixed in one of the 5.3.x releases.

Only if you're using Unity's dynamic GI or the cubemap reflection mode in Time of Day. The cubemap reflection mode is usually fine on mobile, can't speak for Unity's dynamic GI.

If you don't understand the network synchronization section in the docs you should really read up on your networking solution. All you have to do for the time to match is synchronize the TOD_Sky.Instance.Cycle.Ticks variable of type long.

Thanks for reporting, I'll look into it as soon as possible and report back.

 

Sorry no, in my current project it doesn´t work in Editor and also not in Playmode at all.

 

Hey, I just purchased this asset because some folks at our local GDC highly recommended it. I have to first say, this is a really well put together tool and very effective. I gave 5 stars the first night playing with it.

Please forgive me if this has been asked. Do we need a directional light in the scene with this asset? It seems that messes up the lighting effects and shadows.

I removed the Directional Light I had in my scene because it was conflicting with the lighting used in the Sky Dome. However, now some things in my world just can't be seen at night without it.

For example, you can download RainMaker from unity for free and it's a nice package for creating rain. Very simple to use. When I change the clouds to overcast and atmosphere to storm and activate RainMaker, the rain is great until nightfall and then I can't see the rain. (without my light). What do I need to do to have lighting at night that better illuminates my buildings, landscape and rain better? I baked in an area light (type directional) and that seems to help (but is to bright in the day) but I wanted to check with all of you here to see if there is a better solution.

Also, I use RainMaker because this system doesn't provide a solution for that :-( I have no idea what TOD_Weather Manager Rain/Rain Particle System is supposed to do. I thought I could use this RainMaker asset with it but that didn't pan out. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.

 

its a realistic lighting if you go outside at night with overcast sky and there is no proximity light (cities) you will see nothing, you can add spotlight or change the night lighting/ambient night color.

 

Hey thanks Damien for the quick reply! In this case, I found only the Directional light to work well. All I did was add the RainMaker prefab (and its children particle systems) to a layer called RainLayer and set the Directional lights "Culling Mask" to the RainLayer only. That allows the rain to be seen in the dark and has very little effect on the rest of TOD lighting. Thanks again! I hope this helps others who are looking for a rain solution to extend the wonderment that is TOD ;-)

BTW.... I created my own TOD_Weather Manager (based off TOD's) that allows me to use the RainMaker prefab rather than a single particle system. If anyone is interested ;-) NOTE: RainMaker is a free asset and comes separate.


using UnityEngine;
using DigitalRuby.RainMaker;
using System.Collections.Generic;

public class TOD_WeatherManager_Custom : MonoBehaviour
{
public enum RainType
{
None,
Drizzle,
Light,
Heavy
}

public enum CloudType
{
None,
Few,
Scattered,
Broken,
Overcast
}

public enum AtmosphereType
{
Clear,
Storm,
Dust,
Fog
}

public Transform RainMaker;

public float FadeTime = 10f;

public RainType Rain = default(RainType);
public CloudType Clouds = default(CloudType);
public AtmosphereType Atmosphere = default(AtmosphereType);

private float cloudOpacityMax;
private float cloudBrightnessMax;
private float atmosphereBrightnessMax;

private float cloudOpacity;
private float cloudCoverage;
private float cloudBrightness;
private float atmosphereFog;
private float atmosphereBrightness;
private float rainEmission;

private bool _isConfigured = false;
private RainScript _rainScript;
private bool _isRaining = false;

private void Awake()
{
if (RainMaker == null)
{
print("You need to include the RainMaker prefab to use this script with TOD.");
return;
}

_rainScript = RainMaker.GetComponent<RainScript>();

if (_rainScript == null)
{
print("The RainMaker prefab is missing the RainScript.");
return;
}

if (_rainScript.RainFallParticleSystem == null)
{
print("The RainMaker prefab is missing child particle system components.");
return;
}

_isConfigured = true;
}

protected virtual void Start()
{
if (_isConfigured)
{
var sky = TOD_Sky.Instance;

// Get current values
cloudOpacity = sky.Clouds.Opacity;
cloudCoverage = sky.Clouds.Coverage;
cloudBrightness = sky.Clouds.Brightness;
atmosphereFog = sky.Atmosphere.Fogginess;
atmosphereBrightness = sky.Atmosphere.Brightness;
rainEmission = _rainScript.RainFallParticleSystem ? _rainScript.RainFallParticleSystem.emissionRate : 0;

// Get maximum values
cloudOpacityMax = cloudOpacity;
cloudBrightnessMax = cloudBrightness;
atmosphereBrightnessMax = atmosphereBrightness;
}
}

protected virtual void Update()
{
if (_isConfigured)
{
var sky = TOD_Sky.Instance;

// FadeTime is not exact as the fade smoothens a little towards the end
float t = Time.deltaTime / FadeTime;

switch (Rain)
{
case RainType.Drizzle:
_rainScript.RainIntensity = _rainScript.RainIntensity < .18f || _rainScript.RainIntensity > .21f ? Mathf.Lerp(_rainScript.RainIntensity, .2f, t) : .2f;
Atmosphere = AtmosphereType.Fog;
Clouds = CloudType.Scattered;
_isRaining = true;
break;
case RainType.Light:
_rainScript.RainIntensity = _rainScript.RainIntensity < .48f || _rainScript.RainIntensity > .51f ? Mathf.Lerp(_rainScript.RainIntensity, .5f, t) : .5f;
Atmosphere = AtmosphereType.Storm;
Clouds = CloudType.Broken;
_isRaining = true;
break;
case RainType.Heavy:
_rainScript.RainIntensity = _rainScript.RainIntensity < .98f ? Mathf.Lerp(_rainScript.RainIntensity, 1f, t) : 1f;
Atmosphere = AtmosphereType.Storm;
Clouds = CloudType.Overcast;
_isRaining = true;
break;
default:
if (_isRaining)
{
_rainScript.RainIntensity = _rainScript.RainIntensity > .11f ? Mathf.Lerp(_rainScript.RainIntensity, 0, t) : 0;
Atmosphere = AtmosphereType.Clear;
Clouds = CloudType.Few;

if (_rainScript.RainIntensity == 0)
{
_isRaining = false;
}
}
break;
}

//rainEmission = (_rainScript.RainFallParticleSystem.maxParticles / _rainScript.RainFallParticleSystem.startLifetime) * _rainScript.RainIntensity;

// Update cloud state
switch (Clouds)
{
case CloudType.None:
cloudOpacity = 0.0f;
cloudCoverage = 0.0f;
break;

case CloudType.Few:
cloudOpacity = cloudOpacityMax;
cloudCoverage = 0.1f;
break;

case CloudType.Scattered:
cloudOpacity = cloudOpacityMax;
cloudCoverage = 0.3f;
break;

case CloudType.Broken:
cloudOpacity = cloudOpacityMax;
cloudCoverage = 0.6f;
break;

case CloudType.Overcast:
cloudOpacity = cloudOpacityMax;
cloudCoverage = 1.0f;
break;
}

// Update atmosphere state
switch (Atmosphere)
{
case AtmosphereType.Clear:
cloudBrightness = cloudBrightnessMax;
atmosphereBrightness = atmosphereBrightnessMax;
atmosphereFog = 0.0f;
break;

case AtmosphereType.Storm:
cloudBrightness = cloudBrightnessMax * 0.3f;
atmosphereBrightness = atmosphereBrightnessMax * 0.5f;
atmosphereFog = 1.0f;
break;

case AtmosphereType.Dust:
cloudBrightness = cloudBrightnessMax;
atmosphereBrightness = atmosphereBrightnessMax;
atmosphereFog = 0.5f;
break;

case AtmosphereType.Fog:
cloudBrightness = cloudBrightnessMax;
atmosphereBrightness = atmosphereBrightnessMax;
atmosphereFog = 1.0f;
break;
}

// Update visuals
sky.Clouds.Opacity = Mathf.Lerp(sky.Clouds.Opacity, cloudOpacity, t);
sky.Clouds.Coverage = Mathf.Lerp(sky.Clouds.Coverage, cloudCoverage, t);
sky.Clouds.Brightness = Mathf.Lerp(sky.Clouds.Brightness, cloudBrightness, t);
sky.Atmosphere.Fogginess = Mathf.Lerp(sky.Atmosphere.Fogginess, atmosphereFog, t);
sky.Atmosphere.Brightness = Mathf.Lerp(sky.Atmosphere.Brightness, atmosphereBrightness, t);
}
}
}

 

Hello this asset is very interesting , and a friend of mine has already purchased it. He showed it to me and i noticed something , the clouds are repeatable , i mean you can notice the paterns if you move in a straight line so i was wondering is there any way to produce cloud seeds for random clouds ?
Besides that the plugin looked amazing , looking forward to buy it as soon as it gets a discount
(any idea when it will get a discount btw? )

 

I get shadows clipping off/on when I turn. Is there anything I could/should change to prevent this?
For some reason at certain angles a shadow pops in but if I turn a little it goes away. There is definitely something afoul with shadows. (or my settings...which should be pretty standard for this sandbox trial). Anyone else having this issue??

****Update****
So I found that if I select 'Light' in the Sky Dome prefab, I can adjust the "Baked Shadow Angle" and this made the anomaly go away. For a little...but then there it was again!!! Arrrrrrggg...So, I adjusted the Bias and my near clipping to .5 and the shadow flicker is gone but I still get these big shadows poping in and out when I look around. So, I changed Baking to "Realtime" and that got rid of the damn shadow blinking in/out. This is not a great solution obviously. Whats the deal ...anyone??


*****Unity Update******
Hi! We are aware of the current issues with mixed mode lighting and will be working on fixing it soon. It is not a trivial thing to get working across the full deferred, the (Legacy) light pre-pass deferred and the forward renderer, but we will fix it for sure. It was deemed to risky to include in the newly released final 5.0 version because touching a lot of code late in the beta is not a good thing for stability.
Several bugs have been logged on it already, so you don't have to file more.
Mixed mode lighting is intended to be used exactly as you wrote, with the limitation that it is used for sunlight only. Right now the UI allow all light types that were Auto in 4.x to become mixed and that doesn't work well so that will likely be changed. -KEnglestoft

 

Hi, I have a question. I'm making a game where a game clock pauses when the character stops moving.
Similar to the overworld map in Mount and Blade.

I've been able to get everything working so far using a dateTime variable and TOD_Sky.Instance.Cycle. my game time and TOD_Sky all stop and start appropriately when the player stops or moves.

The only problem is I would like it if I could get the clouds to stop moving as well. I can't figure out how to change the windspeed in my scripts (I'm not much of a coder). Is there any way to get at the windspeed from my TOD_Sky instance?

if not, could someone demonstrate how to get at the windspeed from inside a C# script.

Thanks in advance.

Edit- I forgot to mention, I've already tried disabling the TOD_Sky when I'm stopping time. This does stop the clouds, but when I move again and the script sets it to enabled, they jump to where they would have gotten in the intervening time.

 

Have you tried just eliminating the wind speed? Maybe you can set the TOD_Animation CloudUV vector3 ...outside of that I'm not sure it's possible but I'm new to this asset so....

 

Thanks, I will see if I can get to those properties. I'm new to the asset too. I'm not even sure how to get at the TOD_Animation properties. I've been doing everything from TOD_Sky.Instance. maybe I need to add that TOD_Animation script to the object. I'll do some experimenting.

 

Thanks Chuckalicious,

I finally got it with your tip. I needed to add a "[SerializeField] private TOD_Animation sky;"
to my scene controller and Drop my Skydome object into that slot in the inspector. Now I can set sky.Windspeed
whenever the time starts or stops.

Thanks.

 

fyi I finally found it was the TOD_Scattering on camera that just doesn't work on android for me (5.3.2 testing) works fine in editor, but on device it was messing up the graphics.. disabling it fixes it.. of course then no nice blending of terrain with sky

and no shader errors for it on the device either.

also 10 of these warnings "ParticleSystem.emissionRate' is obsolete: 'emissionRate property is deprecated. Use emission.rate instead"

will you be doing any update soon its been like 7months

 

plzdiekthxbye - I notice the mountain edges on my terrain (using Unity's built in) are not clean/smooth (there is some strange pixelation or dithering going on). If I disable the sky dome this goes away. It's most noticeable against the sky background and I don't really see it otherwise. Any ideas?

 

It's been a while since I set up a new project with TOD. I'm having trouble getting the skybox/cloud reflections to show up. Originally I was getting what appeared to be the default Unity skybox reflection because there weren't any clouds and I could see the brown underside. But I don't know what I did to completely disable as shown in the screenshots. I have the TOD reflection set to cubemap.

Also, I'm developing for WebGL, so I'm only using baked lighting. But I don't think this should have any effect on the reflections.

 

oh that's another thing.. the cloud billboards seem to flicker at certain camera angles

 

I'm still messing around with this without any luck. Have I missed something? Does this have to do with the update? I went back to 5.3.1 and still couldn't get reflections to work. Please advise, thanks.

 

I use some metal materials which of course requires a cubemap for reflection, the reflection multiplier must be set to almost max for the metal to really show. This however makes the whole scene EXTREMELY bright. I understand that it´s what happens but is there a way "around" this? Because right now everything is a mess, metal in Unity is a mess... :/

I use Unity 5.3.1

 

Quick progress update: I still have some stuff left to do for the next update, mostly minor fixes for issues that have been reported over the last couple of weeks, so my next target for a release date is this month, but if that doesn't work out the it'll have to wait until after GDC. The biggest problem right now is that the Unity 5.3.x releases so far have been quite disastrous and as many of you have noticed there are still quite a few open issues all over the place even with their most recent patch release. Whenever someone reports an issue I have to go in and try to reproduce it, and lately more often than not things turned out to be a Unity bug, in which case all I can do is report it to them and try to find a workaround in the meantime.

Thanks, I was able to reproduce this and it seems to have been caused by a change in one of the last Unity releases. I'm currently trying to figure out if it's an intended change or a bug. In any case I have a workaround in mind which I'll include in the next update. Do you have to ship a project in the near future and need the fix before I release it to the Asset Store?

You can plug in custom cloud textures if the default one bothers you, and usually it isn't a problem at cloud scales that aren't too extreme. Evaluating the cloud density entirely without a lookup texture (purely seed based noise) is unfeasible performance wise, but there are some hybrid solutions which I'm planning to look at in the future. No discounts are planned at the moment.

Are you using forward rendering or deferred rendering?

These will be fixed in the next update, but you can safely ignore them until then since they don't have any negative effect aside from being slightly annoying to look at.

See the top of this post.

Are you using forward rendering or deferred rendering? Also, are you using Unity's AA implementation (not the image effects)?

The realtime reflections are using dynamic reflection probes, so if you're only using baked lighting I don't think you can use them and have to bake everything in the editor. The last time I checked Unity's WebGL runtime didn't support non-baked reflection probes at runtime at all. If that's still the case you have to manually add a reflection probes to your scene, bake them at edit time and disable the Time of Day reflection mode.

This is a bug with Unity's dynamic batching that was introduced last December. I'm trying to get it solved, but I might have to exclude the cloud billboards from dynamic batching in the meantime.

Since Unity postponed screen space reflections again currently your only options for really good-looking reflections on metallic surfaces in Unity are to either use baked reflection probes (which won't update when the lighting conditions change) or to include more objects in the Time of Day reflection culling mask (which uses a realtime reflection probe).

If your scene is fairly basic or very optimized you can probably get away with including a bunch of objects in the Time of Day reflection culling mask for decent results until they finally release screen space reflections.

 

Hi, today I purchased this and have been getting to grips with it, it really is amazing!

However, one issue i have come across is the following:

My camera has a large clipping plane, which comes right back to 0.25 in order to "fit everything in to view". When this camera is active there is bad black artifacts flicking on screen?

How can i overcome this? (I assume it is the clipping, the artifacts seem to go if i increase the min clip)

It is hard to show, but i manged to capture one, but most of the time its many of these!



Thanks

 

using deferred

 

No, thanks for debugging.

 

I just picked this up this morning and am looking forward to integrating this into our Wii U game. I'm really hopeful that the performance and visual results will be good on the Wii U. From what I'm seeing, this can really improve the look of our game.

 

Yes, this has unfortunately been a problem all around. Maybe they are planning to scale back a little bit on new features for the 5.4 release and put more energy toward getting it all stable. (?)

 

Although Unity's own SSR effect didn't exactly arrive on schedule, it is available, both in the asset store and on bitbucket.

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/cinematic-image-effects-pre-release-package.372562/

 

Hi, im still having this issue? Ive also started to notice this is not just down to the clipping plane, (if at all) as even when i shorten the plane it still does it?

Andy

 

I've been testing this on the Wii U and am happy that all features seem to work fine. However, I've been tweaking settings for better performance and I saw something that doesn't make sense at all. I am going to recheck this again because I can't believe it, but when I turned down the sky dome settings all to low quality from their default high quality settings, the performance actually went down by about 10 fps. I was doing a lot of tests so it might be that something else caused it, but I'm not so sure.

Also, I notice if I just leave the simulation running and let time pass that when it gets around dusk, the fps also drops about 10 fps. When night finally hits, it goes back up again.

EDIT: Not so sure there is a problem now. I tried again and didn't see the FPS drop. I'll keep you posted if I see it again.

 

Any idea why the sky dome is casting these shadows? If I turn the sky dome off, they go away?

 

I've been experimenting with Time of Day and trying to achieve a certain look to my scenes. Here is the kind of lighting I'm shooting for.

One thing I see is that the lighting in my scene is just never bright enough. The sky looks nice and bright, but the landscape and characters always seem just too dark. So, I went to bump up the Sky Dome Light intensity, but it won't let me move the slider. I assume that Time of Day is locking this down. So, how can I adjust the lighting so I get something more like the video? Is there some other place I need to change to increase light parameters?

 

I'm not well-versed in answering that sort of question but I fancy having a stab at it so apologies in advance if any of this info is duff:

Plenty of things to play with that will influence your lighting. Most of which can be found in the main Time Of Day component thats attached to the Sky Dome GameObject in the scene.

Open up the options that are found under the Day section - you can play with colours and there is a Light Intensity slider there that you can control.

If it were me I would also want to make sure I have other aspects of lighting setup properly before playing with that too much though. For example various Time Of Day Ambient and Reflection settings. And your Unity projects Colourspace, and ToneMapping or other colour correction effects settings such as exposure (assuming you are using HDR on your camera).

 

Thanks. I was looking around at all the options and didn't see that. BTW, I am using Linear colorspace and HDR camera.

 

Glad it was helpful. Given that you are using HDR, what image effect have you got near or at the end of the effects chain to process the HDR down to a sensible viewable range? Exposure and other settings on these can make a huge difference.