Time of Day - Dynamic Sky Dome

Guys I need some help:

Shader error in 'Time of Day/Cloud Layer': failed to open source file: 'TOD_Base.cginc' at line 12 (on d3d11)

Compiling Vertex program with TOD_CLOUDS_BUMPED TOD_CLOUDS_DENSITY TOD_OUTPUT_DITHERING
Platform defines: UNITY_ENABLE_REFLECTION_BUFFERS UNITY_PBS_USE_BRDF1 UNITY_SPECCUBE_BOX_PROJECTION UNITY_SPECCUBE_BLENDING UNITY_TEXTURE_ALPHASPLIT_ALLOWED

 

This is a somewhat common unity problem.

• Comment out that line
• Save the file
• Go back to unity
• Let it recompile the shader
• Go back to the shader
• Uncomment that line
• Go back to unity and let it recompile

That will solve the issue. It might happen a few more times in other files. Repeat the process.

 

I'm trying to sync the time over the network, but this doesn't seem to work.. I'm using Photon; does anyone have any good tips on syncing the time to all players?

Code (CSharp):

1.     void Update() {
2.         if (PhotonNetwork.isMasterClient) {
3.             Debug.Log ("Master");
4.             Hashtable ticks = new Hashtable ();
5.             ticks.Add ("RoomTOD", (float)TOD_Sky.Instance.Cycle.Hour);
6.             PhotonNetwork.room.SetCustomProperties (ticks);
7.  
8.         }
9.  
10.         if (PhotonNetwork.inRoom) {
11.             Debug.Log (PhotonNetwork.room.customProperties ["RoomTOD"].ToString ());
12.         }
13.     }

 

Still waiting on a response to mine from weeks ago.

 

Anyone have any thoughts on how one might implement an under-water effect? I had one working with Unity's standard fog, but after enabling TOD+Scattering it doesn't quite work since TOD changes the fog color to match the time.

 

Some reason why you ignored my solution to your problem? It's your ambient light settings, i.e. the various settings in the time of day object that control the ambient light during daytime & night. As per the manual, these ambient light settings/colours are used to fill in the rest of the reflection probe below the horizon, so if the colour of that part of the probe is causing you problems, thats what you need to change.

 

You didn't offer any solution dude. You offered a bunch of statements which were proven to be incorrect and thus of no help.

 

Proven to be incorrect? How exactly? Nowhere have you responded saying that you tried changing the time of day ambient light settings and it made no difference. I'm not convinced you tried my advice at all, there certainly isn't any evidence you did from your posts.

 

Some screenshots to demonstrate that my solution to your problem is relevant.

Here I will change the ambient settings for nighttime, I ensure the time is set to night, and then take a screenshot of the reflection probe in play mode. I have used a bright green colour to demonstrate the result clearly, but if you set it to black instead then the problem you complained about weeks ago should be gone:

 

Yes -
And if you think -
Setting your ambient light color to black -
Is a solution -

 

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but what IS the problem with setting it to black ... or to a dark blue, or whatever color is appropriate for your scene?

 

Wow. I'm done here, impossible, you won't be helped for whatever reason and you are rude.

 

Fringing around geometry appear when AA is enabled in quality settings. Using forward rendering.

See attached files.

 

Hello

I put a flare of sun on my camera but I have the reflection di sun completely moves with regard to(compared with) the sun.
How to put it in the real position of the sun?

Thank you

To the left the flare, to the right the real sun

 

I'm back from GDC, just going through the thread real quick - if I overlooked something that's still unanswered send me a PM or repost it in here.

Since it has to be calculated per-pixel there's no real way to improve its performance aside from downscaling the resolution.

What elbows said is correct, the ambient color is used in the bottom half of the sky dome. This is in line with the Unity render settings where the legacy ambient color is now used as the ground color, but I agree that this can be confusing. You don't have to set it to black, just don't set it to white - also, even if it's black you won't lose all ambient light when using spherical harmonics ambient light, you just won't get any ambient light in the bottom hemisphere.

However, from your screenshot of your reflection probe it looks like you render the actual sky dome atmosphere object into the reflection probe as well, which you shouldn't do (put it on a layer that's not included in the reflection probe culling mask) - the reason for this is that Unity doesn't allow you to use a different version of a shader in reflection probes, so the sky reflection is patched in via the "Skybox" reflection clear flags.

I can confirm this issue in forward rendering. I'll look, will have to see if it can be fixed on my end.

What's your Light.UpdateInterval parameter? Is the lens flare attached to the "Light" child object? Do you have TOD_Camera on your camera?

Regardless of this I very much recommend using HDR / bloom instead of the legacy flare system since in Unity lens flares are only occluded by colliders, not by geometry. This usually messes up as soon as you use simplified collider geometry or skinned meshes.

 

Hello

I forget put TOD_Camera on my camera.

Thank you

 

Is this still being updated? Does it work with Unity 5.3 or 5.4?

 

We're currently using it internally on both 5.3.4 and the latest 5.4.0 beta.

 

Still using it, still loving it. But plzdiethxbye, I haven't heard much from you lately! What cool stuff have you been working on?

 

Hi, i would like to ask how do i use TOD with multiple cameras and one viewport.

I dont have a main camera, im using 4 screens on a single computer with 1 camera/screen and i need all 4 cameras to render the sky, they are not in the same position.

 

To put the hour of the pc?

Hello, I want to put the game at the time of the PC when launch the game.
I do this but it don't work.
I make a button who show the date


How can i do ?
Thank you

 

Just wanted to post up some pics of what I've been doing with TOD.

I love this plugin.

more pics....

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/OwBJK

 

Why cloud shadows doesn't rotate along with clouds?

 

Would anyone happen to have a time of day street light fade script that can fade in/out both emission and a light source for street lights and garden lights? I would love this kind of control in Time of day as the night comes the street lights/lamps emission & lights fade in. I would buy the script if it existed on the Asset store.

 

Still trying to find time to finish up the next version, hoping this month will be it but no promises at this point.

You should be able to attach TOD_Camera to all 4 cameras and have the sky dome centered around each of them that way.

The TOD_Time script has a toggle to automatically set the ingame time to the current device time. Regarding the button to show the date - you'll have to do that yourself, but you can get the current DateTime struct with TOD_Sky.Instance.Cycle.DateTime which can then be converted to any string representation.

You mean the cloud billboards or the cloud layers? The cloud billboards are excluded from cloud shadow casting. For the layers there's currently an issue that leads to incorrect cloud shadow positions which will be fixed in the next release. Sorry for the inconvenience.

 

This looks great! Thanks for sharing.

 

Thank You will try this

 

Any suggestions on the possible cause for this sun/moon mesh visibility? (I am doing a render to low-res texture if somebody wanders on the low-resolution gfx).

Update: Upon further inspection, I've found that the render to texture seems to be the problem, but why? If I change the color format of the render texture to RGB565, the artifact around the sun goes away, while in the ARGB32 it is present.

I would be thankful for any insights.

 

I am experiencing an issue with "TOD_Rays" script on camera: When using a distortion shader on particles (for heat shimmer distortion effect), the "God Rays" gets blocked by the billboard rectangular shape.

Do you have any suggestions on how I got get around this usse? If I could exclude certain layers from TOD_Rays script it should do the trick...

Thanks!

 

I'm looking at getting an accurate sky based on lat/longs.

Do i need to use UTC to achieve this or can i just set the Lat/Longs along with the date/time?

I want to be able to use system time along with the users position to get a semi accurate sky map.

Cheers! Love the asset so far!

 

What's your exact camera setup - are you rendering the entire scene on the low res camera and then upscaling on the second camera? Or are there image effects on the second camera? Try writing an alpha value of 0 in the sun shader instead of 1 and see if that fixes the issue.

Make sure the refraction shader writes 0 to the alpha channel - either over the entire rectangle (disable alpha blending in that case) or faded out over your particle shape. The god rays use the alpha channel to find transparent ray blockers since those aren't writing to the depth buffer, so you have to make sure all transparent shaders write correct alpha values.

UTC is simply an offset of the time you set on Time of Day. If you leave UTC at 0 the time on the sky dome is always in the UTC time zone, i.e. midnight UTC could be daytime at your current longitude and latitude. If you want to use the local time you have to set the UTC property to the time zone of the country your position is in.

 

Hi,

I have a problem with the automatically instantiated reflection probe rendered by TimeOfDay in Forward / Gamma.
Its background is automatically set to blue which procuces wrong results.
When I manually set it to black in runtime everything gets fine:

 

I'm very interested in purchasing Time of Day, but I have a question I was hoping you could answer first:

Is it possible to save presets of overall Time of Day setups that I can then shift between based on time, trigger volumes etc? For example, I'd love to be able to designate set lighting 'looks' for specific areas of my game (sunny vs cloudy vs overcast etc.) and have it transition between those looks as I move around the game world. Also it would be great to be able to segue between different atmospheric/lighting conditions at random intervals of time (shift from sunny to cloudy day etc.). I'm currently using Playmaker for scripting a lot of game world events and it would great if I could plug Time of Day presets into an FSM and lerp between settings based on different triggers.

I'm not sure if this is currently something that I could easily do with Time of Day, so if not, is there any chance this might be a feature that you add in future.

Thanks for reading!

 

Just wanted to thank you. ToD greatly contributed in Greenlight success.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=604035651

 

This is already fixed in the current internal version. Do you have a workaround for the meantime or do you want me to provide you with one? You basically have to set the color in RenderToCubemap in the TOD_Sky+API.cs file.

The example weather manager does this for weather conditions, but if you're completely new to scripting you might not understand it. You can access all parameters with Playmaker, so there's nothing keeping you from getting this functionality working there as well, but there's no one-click solution for it.

The screenshot isn't working for me, can you check the link? I imagine what you're looking for are billboard clouds though - check out the "Billboards" child object of the sky dome (it's disabled by default) - you can plug in whatever textures you like!

Great to hear!

 

I can wait until the next Update, thank you very much.

 

Bought Time of Day toady, quite pleased how quickly I was up and running. Great Asset, really!

I have some questions thought I couldn't find an answer to in my short time tinkering with the asset (I have to leave in a short while, so forgive me if I missed something obvious):

1) Moon shadows: I see none. Sun / daylight shadows work fine, but as soon as night falls, shadows seem to be gone. IS this an optimization and shadows are not active during nighttime? If its a misconfiguration, which configs need to be active? I checked the nighttime setting, light is on, shadows are set to 1.

2) Cloud shadows: Again, I see none. I did increase the cloud coverage just so I do not miss them.... but I only see the shadows of objects in the scene... given that I cranked the speed of a day up to 1 minute, I would guess that I should see at least SOME pass by in near vincinity of the camera. I did add the TOD_Shadows script to my camera, and player around with the intensity, to no avail.
Any ideas what I could do wrong?

3) Customization: I currently use a pseudo-isometric viewpoint, so I mainly use TimeOfDay for its ambient and reflections, as well as light control.
Thus I am intersted in customizing the setup a little bit.
3a) are there any optimizations I could do, like render/calculation intensive objects I could deactivate without affecting the ambient, reflections or lights?
3b) Is there a way to crank up the star size and intesity so they contribute a little more to reflections (might not be totally realistic, but would certainly make nighttime reflections less dull)?
3c) Not really linked to my viewpoint, but couldn't find any control: is there a way to shift the sun rotation to simulate different longitudes or seasons? Or can I customize even more for fantasy/alien worlds, like add additional moons, change the sun billboard, and so on (don't care if I need to "hack" the system or change code really, if its possible)?

EDIT: After more tinkering, I found some of my answers... still couldn't get the moonlight to work, seems that no directional light is actually active, just GI.

Also, nighttime reflections seem way too dark. Any ideas about that? I changed all the values.

EDIT 2: Found out why I had no moon shadows... after cranking the moonlight all up to 1, I got them. They are still there even after backing the value down to 0.5... strange.

EDIT 3: nightime settings now work as expected, moonlight shows up at all values. Had to tweak a lot of settings for it, in the end correct combination of settings (HDR, Tonemapping, carefully tweaking GI Brightness and light colors) did the trick.

Still some issues, but most probably misconfigurations.
Besides the cloud shadows, which still are not working for me. Will check the examples, maybe I can sort it out myself.

One roadblock was that the documentation was not mentioning a lot of things... like the gradients handling color changes going from dawn to noon for the day, and from dusk to midnight for the night (with the rest of the time the gradient being used in reverse). Sound logical now that I know about it... but I would have progressed quicker if the documentation would have mentioned it.
Similarly, it would be good to mention what effect the Alpha channel has for different gradients. I have seen in the code that it is used at least for the environment color. I didn't dig deep enough to find the exact effect, but things like this should be handled indepth in a good documentation.

Anyway, tiny niggles not really tainting an otherwise great asset.

Regards

Gian-Reto

 

There are some bugs with cloud shadows in the current version on the Asset Store - they'll be addressed in the next update. Glad to hear you managed to find the solutions to your other questions yourself - let me know if you have any more issues.

 

We are using forward rendering, and when we enable antialiasing in the quality settings we get a bug on edges of geometry agains the sky when TOD_Scattering is enabled on the main camera..

Do you have any tip to fix this, and it would be really nice if you could implement a fix in the next release.

Other than this we loveTOD!

 

Good to hear... apart from some slight troubles with lighting (sudden changes in lighting levels during dusk, dawn), reflections sometimes going black for a single update cycle (couldn't really reproduce it yet), and the sun starting too low (thus the terrain shader I use - RTP - gets lit from below even though the terrain should still be in shadow), everything else seems to work fine apart of the cloud shadows.

I think I will be able to find the root cause for the lighting issues once I have time for it (in case of the terrain shader, most probably the RTP shader is to blame anyway, might need to talk to the developer of that)... The reflection issues have been occuring rarely and I couldn't reporduce it. Until I am able to, I guess its just a fluke.


EDIT: Found an easy fix for the problem with the terrain being lit from below: I just added an additional point to the light gradient at the end, fading light color to black. With some tweaking the light now starts when the sun/moon is already at a point where the terrain blocks the light. Also, the sudden jumps in light levels are now resolved, guess the fading to black helps with that too.

Thanks for asking

Gian-Reto

 

@plzdiekthxbye , Hey i really need help trying to get toonish styled clouds, i still don't understand how your Cloud Billboard Near script and material works, first ; if i use any other texture than the cloud_atlas it dosnt render anything, and i cant get to have "Solid " clouds, everything i get editing your clouds_atlas color channels is rather really transparent on the engine. I know this is not part of your asset, but it could be really cool if u can get a feature or atleast a tutorial on how to get custom clouds.

Am trying to get something like this, what do you think?


Thanks!

 

Hi, I have a question regarding sky dome position and popping the scenario location as the player moves across terrain tiles.

So in order to avoid floating point errors when I move the game character from one terrain tile to the next, I pop the location of all terrain pieces and the characters location so that the game character is always on a terrain tile located at x=0/z=0. However the real game world location is something like TileIndexX * terrainSize / TileIndexY * terrainSize.

So then this move occurs the SkyDome clouds think that I moved back to a location (minus terrainWidth) and the clouds pop when in fact I want to give the impression the player has not moved at all (the world around him has).

I've dug a bit into the shader (Cloud Layer.shader), passed the tile offset to it via parameters but can't figure out the shader math to keep the cloud shape/location so as if the character had not moved.

I hope this explanation makes somewhat sense. Thanks for any help.

 

Any discount anytime soon ?

 

We are checking this package for using in our applications. Does it works fine with VR? And deferred/linear setup?

Thanks in advance

 

Was playing around more with the color gradients.

Just because this might trip up other users at the beginning, and because I couldn't find it documented (might be, didn't see it):

- not only are the gradients only covering half a day (from dusk till midnight and from dawn till noon, with the other half being played in reverse). The Nighttime and Daytime gradient are ran through just the opposite way. So Dawn/Dusk for the daytime gradients is on the right side, while for the nighttime gradients its on the left side!

Well, not really a problem once you find it out. I was scratching my head for some time now because the nighttime lighting looked inconsistent though.

Oh, and it would be nice if the ambient gradient would be better documented. It SEEMS like it has only an influence once you set ambient to "color". Though a) it would be great if we could use it to "tint" the "gradient" and "radial" setting (don't know if possible), and b) it seems in the code its used for other things, like "groundcolor". Couldn't find this having any effect in my setting though.

EDIT: Thinking about it, there was "groundcolor" mentioned in the documentation as the color used for the bottom half of the radial GI.
So the environment gradient is used for that in radial GI Settings? And as the GI Color in color GI Settings? What is it used for in Gradient GI Settings?

EDIT 2:

Experimenting more with the gradients, I see that indeed Ambient Color is mainly used to influence the groundcolor.

Also, seems like I didn't read the Tooltips hovering over the gradient labels... the gradient tooltips do tell you how the gradients have to be used. Doh! I feel stupid now. Never even thought that the tooltips would be used for such a thing in the Time of Day scripts!
So I take back that this needs to be documented better. I just need to look at all the places were the documentation could be.

I have gotten a better handle on how Time of Day influences GI, and in Gradient mode, it works quite well for me.
Only two small things left:
1) seems like it is quite hard to really control the brightness of the GI over the full range of a day. I tried changing all the gradients, but I still struggle to make GI brighter during noon than during dusk/dawn. Maybe something else I haven't tried, but a GI Brightness gradient that would brighten/darken the GI independent of other gradients would certainly make the process of getting the right GI going for every hour of the day cycle easier.
2) The fresnel effect is overly bright in dark scenes, like during nighttime. I am not sure if I am doing something wrong. Didn't occur to me while using radial GI (most probably because this always too bright), but when switching to gradient or color GI, this becomes very visible on some meshes.
Why is there such a strong, bright fresnel effect going during nighttime? Does this come from the Specular Cubemap? Will check this when I have time, maybe the specualr cubemap is not updated correctly, or too bright.

The radial GI seems kind of hard to control. No matter what I changed with all the gradients, there is always some blueish sky color that has a way too strong influence on the radial GI. Even turning all the gradients to black, that sky color still is present (thus has nothing to do with the sky color gradient).
Doesn't happen in gradient or color GI settings.

EDIT 3:

And of course, as soon as I wrote it down here, I was able to fix my problems.
1) I was able to hack the Time of Day Code so the AmbientBrightness gets now multiplied by the dayTime, or 1-dayTime, don't know anymore. This makes ambient lighting get brighter during the day and fade back in the evening again, then darkening additionally for the night setting. Looks just as I wanted it.
2) Overly bright fresnel was indeed coming from a ReflectionProbe not updating. Found out I actually had my own reflectionPRobe still active! Deactivating that made the TOD ReflectionProbe work as expected, and the overly bright fresnel at night got fixed thanks to that.

So, now I am totally satisfied with the results I get from the TOD scripts. Sorry for spamming the Thread

 

What's the best way to handle keeping track of the time if the player moves to a scene without a sky dome? For example, if they go into a dungeon, stay there for an hour, and then go outside again, the sky dome should be updated to the correct position. Is there a way to use the Cycle and Time parts with DontDestroyOnLoad without actually having the whole Sky?

 

I'm still investigating this.

You can specify a minimum height for the light source that will also work around this sort of issue. Check out the Light.MinimumHeight parameter on TOD_Sky.

The billboard atlas works like this: The RGB channels are all cloud shapes that are cycled through as the billboards rotate to give them a dynamic feeling. As a test you can just set RGB to the same cloud shape and add other shapes later. I recommend those channels being mostly white with some fadeout towards the edges - almost like an alpha mask. The alpha channel itself is the cloud shading - in the case of the clouds you posted you'd store a gradient from the bottom to the top in the alpha channel in order to get that darker shading at the bottom.

There will be a parameter for this in the next version. For now you can just manually edit the TOD_Animation script - simply change the OffsetUV property to return Vector3.zero and you can do your Futurama hack without a problem.

No.

VR is fully supported. Of course deferred and linear are also supported.

You can keep the sky dome and simply make it invisible (disable all child objects). Depending on your scene setup you might also prefer storing the TOD_Sky.Instance.Cycle.Ticks property, manually keep track of time while in the dungeon, then restore the ticks and add the time that's been spent in the dungeon.

 

Thank you, that works!

 

I just started using this again on my latest project and it's working great for a nighttime winter scene. I'm curious though if there are any plans to update the asset. I notice that it hasn't had a new version in almost a year. If there is a newer version coming, can you share a list of features that are planned?

 

I'm seeing an issue with cloud coverage. I want to have complete cloud coverage for a winter storm scene, but even when cloud coverage is set to maximum there are still a few large breaks in the clouds. Here is an example: