TOZ Planet Renderer - Gamekit for generating procedural LOD Planet and Solar Systems

Hi would I be able to purchase your atmosphere separately? I really like your atmosphere in your demo. Cheers.

 

The atmosphere works on spheres such as planets. It wont work on straight worlds.
And the atmosphere is driven by the planet, it gets its color, thickness..etc values from the planet.
And this package gives you all together which is also currently on 50% sale until the year ends.

 

Hi,

Could be intresting to use or make compatible the GPU Instancer asset ( aviable in asset store ) for instancing the object and vegetation of planet ( That will also allow to use custom shader for vegetation and the more control for the density of the vegation like grass )

 

I have checked the asset you mentioned, although it sounds cool, TOZ Planet Renderer already does what that package can offer on instancing and lod related stuff at max capacity and specific for planet renderer.
Its not easy to do lighting here.

Anyways, you can see a photo of instanced details in the attached photo.

And await the new update on 30 June.

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Hi I'm new here and I recently bought the toz planet render. The question I have is can you please show a tutorial on how to make the planets, and share it on youtube please. I watch all the rest of th videos that was posted by you, but I had no luck trying to figure it out myself.

 

I will prepare a detailed video and put it on youtube as soon as possible. Also the new update is ready, and i will submit it this week.

Meanwhile, to summarize;
1- Put the sun prefab in your scene and adjust several variables
2- Put the planet prefab in your scene and adjust variables
3- Put the human or spaceship prefab in your scene, these prefabs are for demo only, you will have to make your own.

If you examine the demo scene, you might understand the procedure easier.

Customizing the planet is also easy;
1- Choose your shader type: Gradient, Color or Splat
2- If you want the default perlin noise, adjust the seed and scale values
2a- If you want a custom heightmap then open Noise Editor under Window>TOZ>Tools menu
2b- Adjust the Width and Height to be same as planets quality level.
2c- Prepare your map with the editor and finally click on Save NoiseMap button
2d- Pull the saved asset to custom noise map area in your planet creation tab
3- If you want a station on your planet, adjust the variables
4- Adjust all the other options such as atmosphere, ground, nature and water, planets fog, water color and other visuals are automatically calculated depending on your options here.
5- press play

 

After a long while, finally i finished the next update. Will be alive in the AssetStore shortly.
The new update brings the following:
1- Updated the lod algorithym and it is now 100% more efficient, now it has 2 stage lod checking including camera frustum.
2- Better asteroid belt rendering with new shaders and collision data.
3- Station placing on planets.
4- Everything is procedural except if you want to use custom textures for your planets.
5- Everything in the demo scene (can be seen in the below video) is generated with Unity and no external software was used.

Here is a short video of the new features and bug fixes in action.

 

Just submitted the new update 1.3, with lots of bug fixes and improvements. Also the planet lod is now 100% faster and more efficient as it also uses camera frustum to cull unseen polygons.

There is also now a PlayerBase.cs file that handles planetary gravity and other related stuff, you can make your own player scripts derieved from this file and most tasks will be already done for you.

I assume the new update will be alive in a few days.

 

Glad you revived this asset. I have a project that is half in Unity 3.x/4.x and then the rest reaching from 5.x-2019.x in stages.

I have not purchased yet, I wanted to release my Unity 4 stuff first...then do the 201X as experimental/beta - would it be possible to still get the older version of this asset if I PM/email you with invoice number?

Also, I too was previously using floating point origin (from page 1 of this thread) I am interested in your normal transform around camera.zero position. Is there a demo scene of this? If not, would you consider making one? These are the 2x things I had as pre-sales question.

Thanks!

 

The new update is submitted with 2018.3 but it will work with older versions like 5.6 or 2017.x. Still i suggest to use minimum 2018.3 as it has some important unity bugs fixed.

I dont understand why people are fascinated with floating point origin thing, its not required unless you are doing some infinite scroller game or something with few objects randomly popping up as you go, otherwise it is useless for big scale crowded scenes.
Still, if you want to, all the planets and other package related stuff such as asteroids, space stations and nebulae are ordinary transforms that you can move around like any other. Even if this idea might sound brilliant at first, you will face lots of physics problems later on. Ive been there before, so my advice is dont get involved and do some gate network to travel between long distances, galaxies or solar systems or whatever. If you still insist, i will write some code for it but i dont recommend.

 

On why people use floating point origin. Aside from world streaming, or doubles instead of floats which is hacky to do in Unity but I found a proof of concept - it was the only way discussed to do space games that had immersion. I get the space gate idea, or even doing a load async during a FTL drive fx. I think the thing is doing it well is perhaps harder than doing floating point origin, it seems easier to let the engine/framework do the work than to do it by hand. Also procedural generation plays a roll. Again, I think many of us doing floating point now only do so because we haven't seen your way. I have considered world streaming but again a lot of work, esp. in early stages.

Unity 5.6 assets don't import to 4.x I'm afraid. I was just hoping you still had your original asset package available. Generally unless the asset is submitted for the specific Unity version, downgrading leaves holes in the scenes like transforms with no names or meshes, or unhooked up prefabs because Unity changes stuff like how prefabs work so they don't backport.

 

My package calculates all planet related maths on object space, no double precision needed. In the demo, the solar system fits inside 15.000 units, lighting is the only problem and i have a little hack to overcome shadow flickering issues.
Asteroid fields also calculate in object space, no need for double precision.
What matters is, there is a _WorldScale constant which every object takes in account and everything scales automatically to fit in your visual space.

Finally, if you still want to use floating origin thing, my package has ordinary transforms and you can move them around with your already written floating origin code.

The package takes advantage of newer Unity version features, no 4.x version available.

 

Next update brings proper clouds!!

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Still working on the new update with;
* Proper clouds
* Better water shader with proper shore lines, Ice on polars and refraction changes on tropics to polars.
* Better Atmosphere shader and mesh.
* Package is now 90% procedural in generation

50% discount is still on until 15th of September!!

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Here is a short video for the upcoming v1.4 update features.

 

Finally improved the water shader to desired level which will be in the next update.
A variation of this water shader(s) also which work on mobile can be found in TOZ Water Shaders with additional flowmap support.

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Here is some progress on the 1.4 update.

* Optimised the lod calculations and tidied up code to be readable further more.
* Changed some meaningless variable names to be meaningfull.
* Improved custom editors for assets.
* Optimised the water shaders to gain extra speed and now added support for realtime reflections
* Optimised and improved the atmosphere effect and gained alot of extra speed
* Planet atmosphere now has more options to adjust atmospheric thickness and most dense point, sun size and blur.
* Made a better sun flare.
* Planet station positioning is now completely procedural and depends on the seed value and also is now pixel perfect.
* Planet stations are now sort of celestial objects, and have a custom monobehaviour to add logic.
* Planet stations can now trigger events when player or something else is in vicinity.
* etc.


Here is a video that shows the HUD for station/celestial positions.

 

Few photos of the current state of the upcoming update. Will submit it in a week.

Additionally improved the lod calculations and now has double frame rates than before. New update brings a price increase, so if you are planning to buy it, now is the time.

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Further photos

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New progress on 1.4 update.

* Wildlife population and simple entities using simple ai without physics will be on this update.

Here is a video of the initial slightly buggy version

 

Progress on wildlife

 

Final touches before i submit the 1.4 update, here is some improvement on the water shaders to have caustics and some dirty particles when underwater, as well as a simple effect to wiggle screen while underwater.

Caustics are visible when the depth is between 0 to 3m depth(adjustable) and animated obviously.

This will also be included in TOZ Water Shaders

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Final video before i submit v1.4.

Video shows a total population of 200.000.000 on 3 planets with wildlife.

 

Thank you very much for the discount.
I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

 

Happy new year to you too.
i can use an honest review on the asset if you buy it.

 

Just did and wrote you a review.

 

I want to test your water shader asset out. How? The demo url is broken. I need a light weight water system for a low poly mobile game. Can my player walk in the water or any underwater rendering? And any simple buoyancy?

 

Hey @aubergine a few quick questions -

On the topic of the third person controller

1. Will the gravity component assuming it is separate and works with other controllers?

I am using the Unity XR Interaction toolkit which includes its own character controller and I need that to stick to the surface of the planet.

2. Is there any closed spline based or path based system for quickly laying out realistic solar orbits? If not are there plans for one?

3. On the topic of wildlife - Is there any integrations with any 3rd party AI tools? Such as Emerald AI for example.

4. What is frame rate like using your asset? I need to get at least 90 fps for a VR Game.

Either way I am ready to buy this asset. I just need to know these quick questions.

 

I havent released the v1.4 yet, as there was a lack of interest (sales were much lower than expected) and i kind of lost interest. But now im working on it again. And the features you need are in it.

1-There is no gravity component, there are PlayerBase and WildlifeBase classes which only calculate the orientations to the gravitational direction of the planet, the ground normal, ground height, ground steepness(at the current position of the elements)...etc

The rest is just a regular controller, with one additional line to include gravitational rotation into account before moving the character.

2-There is a fully grown and very elegant spline class included, which i use to generate asteroid fields in the demo, but you can use it for anything else. Actually it is a very solid thing that i could sell seperately but it is included here for free. Spline is saveable. So, you can generate one both in game or in editor for speed purposes.

3-Wildlife at its current stage is very beta. In the video above there is nearly 200.000.000 population in both 3 planets in the same scene and all they can do is orient to gravity and walk towards a random direction at a defined speed after their binded patch lod becomes visible to player. No character controllers or anything. But in the code there are variable waypoints and could write a simple script to follow those however this will impact the population numbers.

I dont know anything about emerald ai, but i already included pathfinding and finite state machine as seperate modules (check the very first post in this thread) which means i am planning to support artificial intelligence my self. However, if you get the source code for emerald ai when you buy it, you can offcourse do it yourself as well.
Or, you can ask the owner of emerald ai to get my developer version and he can include it himself.

4-Frame rate is a variable term for such a package, you can get 1000fps with a simple planet and less population, or you can get 60fps with a full blown solar system, or you can explode your computer literally with the milkyway. Its up to you. I just provide the best possible LOD for such scale and it has limits.

Finally, i am here to help. I want people to make nice games with my packages, and my packages are generic ones, so any customer is liable to get customization of the package for their specific needs(reasonable ones).

But this requires much more work on your side than mine, i wont make your game for you. This requires advanced coding skills on your side.

 

If you mean the TOZ Water Shaders package, it is designed to work on mobile, low end and high end computers. I should fix the demo as soon as possible. But the video in the forum post is self explanatory i guess. Player can go inside water and there will be underwater rendering. No buoyancy though, it is a matter of character controller not water shader. I am also about to update that package with underwater caustics.

 

aha. sorry, didn't watch that video. Perfect! I like it. thx.

 

Firstly 'appy new year Aubergine

Thank you for creating this asset!! Exactly what I was looking for... it works nicely on the Oculus Quest.

I'm so glad you did not give up on this asset, I love the direction you are going in and second what Headclot88 suggested regarding Emerald ai

Quick question does TOZ have a built in 'Floating origin' solution.. I noticed when I apply my orbit script to my planets, I start to get the floating point jitters.. no worries if you dont I can sort it out.

Anyway I'm looking forward to 1.4!!

P.s. This is a great time to promote this asset, with the immense success of the Oculus Quest, we are all excited to release our VR open space games

 

Glad you are enjoying the package. I am a publisher since 10 years now, and supporting all packages since the beginning.

I know nothing about Emerald AI and i dont own it. Like i said i am giving my own solution for pathfinding and decision making as modules. But the owner of Emerald ai can do it himself if he wants. Further more, if you own their source code, you can do it yourself.

I dont like the term "floating origin" and the idea is not really suitable for this kind of "3d space game". What happens to physics objects when you shift the origin and move those along?
Also, i want to keep this package as generic as possible. However, if you need help when implementing specific things, im here to help.

1.4 is ready and will be submitted shortly. And im already working on 1.5 and it will bring some changes to planet rendering which improves generation times, overall look and much more speed.

Finally, if you own the package please give an honest review on the assetstore as the package lacks them.

 

I will submit 1.4 to the store this weekend.

Meanwhile im working on 1.5 and there is a way to make generation times faster with less work for cpu, slightly more work on gpu and i would like to get your opinion.

I will remove Gradient and bump mapped shaders and instead there will be gradient based on vertex colors and the usual splat mapped shaders.
This helps to solve the issue of north/south pole heightmaps distortion. And the generation time falls down to miliseconds. But lowers the precision of a height texture down to mesh vertex count. This doesnt matter on high quality planets, but it matters on low/mobile planets.

What do you think?

 

Just submitted v1.4 to the store. It will take a few days before approved and the price will be 200USD. So, get it for 50usd less while you can.

The only missing thing is the caustics and some improved documentation from this one and it will be on v1.5 which im already half way through.

 

Version 1.4 is live in the store now, you can download. Please remove the previous version completely before using this one and read the documentation about the layers used.

NOTE: In this release, there is a featured bug that is needed to gain some speed on lod generation, which is if a lod piece is not in view frustum, its renderer will not cast shadows and that will be seen very obviously when you are travelling around the dawn or dusk side of a planet.
If you dont want this;
Open PlanetTreeNode.cs file and change line 955 into the following:

Then it will cast correct shadows but will not get culled depending on the view frustum but instead a certain distance from camera in a circular fashion.

Will release 1.5 in a few weeks.

 

Hey Mate,

Thanks for your reply... will download 1.4 now... excited for it!! I'll post a review once I've tried it out.

Sorry about the "floating point" question I was too lazy to see whether it had been asked before lololol

Quick question... I've decided to go for a "Low-Poly" look for my Occulus Quest game, think Synty and Astroneer. Could you point me in the right direction to get TOZ PR to generate irregular triangulate terrain? or does TOZ PR do this already?

Anyway thanks for all you do mate...

 

I watched the trailer video, and i can say the terrain is rendered just as normal there but the texture is simply cartoonish. And the lighting is oren-nayar/toony and finally terrain normals are not split but exaggrated on local y axis.

For TOZ Planet Renderer to achieve same look;
1- To be usable, Planet gradient has to be fixed mode instead of blend mode thus TOZ Noise usage of gradient should be changed to use unity gradient instead of its own gradient class which is there since 8 years and changing it will require alot of work for me. Or to be easier for me, i can edit the texture creation part to create a 4bit texture(which looks cartoony or old play station textures)

2- New lighting function required for TOZ_Celestial.cginc file. You can do it yourself.
Here is how oren-nayar looks like(this wont work as is, its a function for old 3.x, 4.x, 5.x shaders, needs updating for new versions but the maths is in there)

Code (CSharp):

1. inline fixed4 LightingTOZOrenNayar(SurfaceOutput s, fixed3 lightDir, half3 viewDir, fixed atten) {
2.     //Specular term (Specular is roughness)
3.     fixed NdotL = dot(s.Normal, lightDir);
4.     half NdotV = dot(s.Normal, viewDir);
5.     half3 lProj = normalize(lightDir - s.Normal * NdotL);
6.     half3 vProj = normalize(viewDir - s.Normal * NdotV);
7.     half cx = max(dot(lProj, vProj), 0);
8.     half cosa = max(NdotL, NdotV);
9.     half cosb = min(NdotL, NdotV);
10.     half dx = sqrt((1.0 - cosa * cosa) * (1.0 - cosb * cosb)) / cosb;
11.     half a = 1.0 - (0.5 * ((s.Specular * 128.0) / ((s.Specular * 128.0) + 0.33)));
12.     half b = 0.45 * ((s.Specular * 128.0) / ((s.Specular * 128.0) + 0.09));
13.     float spec = (a + b * cx * dx) * s.Gloss;
14.  
15.     //Diffuse term
16.     fixed diff = max(NdotL, 0);
17.     fixed3 diffColor = s.Albedo * _LightColor0.rgb;
18.  
19.     //Sum
20.     fixed4 c;
21.     c.rgb = (diffColor * diff * spec) * (atten * 2);
22.     c.a = s.Alpha + (_LightColor0.a * spec * atten);
23.     return c;
24. }

Here is how toony lighting function looks like:

Code (CSharp):

1. inline fixed4 LightingTOZToony(SurfaceOutput s, fixed3 lightDir, fixed atten) {
2.     //Diffuse term
3.     fixed NdotL = dot(s.Normal, lightDir);
4.     fixed diff = 0.2 + max(NdotL, 0);
5.     fixed3 diffColor = ((s.Albedo * _LightColor0.rgb) * diff) * (atten * 2);
6.  
7.     //Sum
8.     fixed4 c;
9.     if(diff < 0.4)
10.         c.rgb = diffColor * 0.3;
11.     else if(diff < 0.7)
12.         c.rgb = diffColor;
13.     else
14.         c.rgb = diffColor * 1.3;
15.     c.a = s.Alpha;
16.     return c;
17. }

You need a mix of both and while doing it, you need to pay attention to how i calculate the light direction.

3- Normals exeggration is one line of code, open PlanetTreeNode.cs file and at line 625, multiply the normal.magnitude with some high or low number until you get desired look.

However, in your video, the overall look comes from detail rocks, trees and items. Terrain doesnt look cartoony itself.

Long story short, yes its doable but requires alot of work.

 

Here is a progress video for 1.5

You can see the example scripts in action for a spaceship, a humanoid character controller and a car like vehicle. There is also a spacesuit and a hovercraft example script im working on and these all will be in the 1.5 update.

I think ill submit the new update at the end of this month.

 

V1.5 is now live on the store, please remove previous versions before downloading this one.

 

TOZ Planet Renderer is now 50% OFF on the assetstore until 10th of March.

 

Last 2 days to get TOZ Planet Renderer for 50% OFF.

 

I just use the prefab of your demo scene and the planet is pink. What else am I missing?

 

1-Is there also the sun prefab in your scene? Without it, there will be many errors on the console..
2-If there is a sun, do you have any error messages on the console?
3-If there is the sun and you have errors on the console, open script execution order and check if sun.cs file is executed before default time.

 

Yes, there is the sun prefab.
hundreds of errors on the console:

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
UnityEngine.GeometryUtility.CalculateFrustumPlanes (UnityEngine.Camera camera, UnityEngine.Plane[] planes) (at <58a34b0a618d424bb5fc18bb9bcdac20>:0)
UnityEngine.GeometryUtility.CalculateFrustumPlanes (UnityEngine.Camera camera) (at <58a34b0a618d424bb5fc18bb9bcdac20>:0)
TOZ.Celestial._EYE._UpdateCamera () (at Assets/TOZ/PlanetRenderer/Scripts/_Statics/_EYE.cs:55)
TOZ.Celestial.Sun.DoUpdate () (at Assets/TOZ/PlanetRenderer/Scripts/Sun.cs:163)
TOZ.Celestial.Sun.Update () (at Assets/TOZ/PlanetRenderer/Scripts/Sun.cs:73)

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
TOZ.Celestial.Sun.DoDisable () (at Assets/TOZ/PlanetRenderer/Scripts/Sun.cs:133)
TOZ.Celestial.Sun.OnDisable () (at Assets/TOZ/PlanetRenderer/Scripts/Sun.cs:69)

And yes, the sun.cs is executed before default time.

 

From the errors, it seems your main camera is not tagged "Main Camera" or there are 2 or more cameras tagged or you do some additive scene loading while having main cameras on each scene and the reference to the initialized camera disappears meantime.

I assume the demo scene works?

 

Thx. Indeed, it's the camera issue. I have a complex scene with multiple camera but I have only one Main Camera which is a child object of another camera. Still trying to figure out how to make it work.

 

In the demo, i also use 2 cameras to prevent shadow flickering but its not a must, 1 camera also can be used.
Anyways, let me know if you need further assistance.

 

Hello people,

As I'm working on the next update for this product, there is an obstacle ahead and that is briefly called 32bit vs 64bit.
So, for the moment; i will split the product into 2 different products. And later on i will decide what to do with either one according to which direction Unity 2020.x goes to.
One for Mobile and lower end machines and second for Higher end systems with high processor counts.

This obviously brings the burden of handling 2 different assets. Previous and future customers will be able to upgrade to either one for FREE for a while. However, this means not very frequent updates.

My question is; which one is more important? High end or Low end?

 

Version 1.6 is almost ready. Will submit in a few days.
Here are the improvements:

Core:
* Got rid of precision errors on noise generators.
* Seams on polars are no more.
* Changed big textures for color with tiny gradients, saving precious texture memory and speeding up loading times.
* Rewritten planetary shaders to compress more data
* Changed some variables names to more meaningful ones
* Normals/Tangents generation is now fully correct and not estimated except 2 edges of the planet
* Realtime shadows are now more reliable, less estimated and non jittering
* Extra option added to noise builder to use individual maps for each side instead of same heightmap for all sides. (Although not readily available, it is in the code already and you must enable it yourself)
* Extra Minnaert lighting option is available in the shader lighting functions (Better than lambert and very close to oren-nayar)

Demos:
* Gravity for spaceships is now newtonian and driven with full physics
* Gravity for humans is adjustable and now fully NON-Physics except interaction with other objects.

Extras:
* Random improvements and bug fixes with the supplied utility classes that can be used as a generic library for all your projects