Feedback Volumetric Clouds

@pierred_unity

Great to see more improvements and features.

I have a question about volumetric clouds contribution for ambient probe. Are they included in the environmental probe now? Or maybe the input is only from the clear sky (when using PBR sky)? The documentation of HDRP 12 says that volumetric clouds do not appear in reflection probes but I don't see anything about 'visual environment' or sky.

 

Looks very nice, good work!

 

How are you going to deal with different cloud types and layers of different clouds?

I would like to see presets for layers that refer to different cloud types such as Cirrus, Cumulous etc etc so that we can author layer skies where the lower clouds can have a different velocity to the upper clouds.

 

I think currently the only way to have layered clouds is to use the custom/advance mode.

But yeah it would be great to have options for multiple type/layers of cloud available as default instead of having to author them by hand.
I guess their current priority was to get the visuals/basic features right and then look into these things.

 

This should be the end result in my opinion for unity's cloud system if we want to cover all kinds of projects:

 

Hello!

Interesting new feature!

I'm wondering if there are cloud "maps" as well as "luts" available, even if it is the default textures used in simple mode, just for us to understand what these special textures are.

I'm seeing the CloudLutRainAO and WorleyNoise textures, but unfortunately, applying them in the cloud map/lut in manual mode seems to do nothing.

Thanks!

 

How do I enable the volumetric clouds? What exactly do I have to click on to turn them on? Using Unity 2021.2a and HDRP 12... keeps saying current asset is not supported...

 

Make sure you enable check box of volumetric clouds in HDRP render asset (Graphic/Quality Settings).
Make sure its on in camera custom rendering settings.
You can open debug view and in scene camera enable checkbox for volumetric clouds.

 

No joy, enabled volumetric clouds on the hdrp asset in graphics, still same error. I don't see a camera custom rendering settings area anywhere...

 

Had to change my quality level to high, then it worked.

 

I'm still not able to see any clouds on dx11 (Vulkan show the clouds fine).

GTX-1650, Win 7, HDRP 12.0, Unity 2021.2.0a19

 

No one can read here, or what? I already told Vulkan show me the clouds, this mean all settings are correct. I'm tired of being a beta tester of unity, the engine is simply falling apart, and nothing works.

 

One problem I found with new SRP Light flare system is that the flares don't get occluded by fog or clouds. It looks weird in my cloudy scene right now.
Directional Light and Volumetric clouds(non-local mode)


Point light and local Volumetric Fog:


Both can be seen through Thick Fog:

 

I also agree with this.

Well, I gotta say the new SRP lens flare system is good overall considering you also provide quite a lot of preset effects to use and learn from.
I am just waiting for the improved cloud system you showed earlier.

One of the things I find bizarre is that you cap the cloud's height to 0.01, I think you could allow it to go lower than that for scenes where we were supposed to be High up in the sky(above the clouds), maybe in a fantasy setting or something for which simple height fog is not good enough.

 

One more bug I found while playinng around in the "ExampleDirectionalLight" scene is that occlusion seems to buggy.
A lot of time when I look directly at the sun, the lens flare disappears (even without any obstacle in between) and many times even when it's fully occluded the lens flare is fully visible making the scene hazy)

 

The reason was this maybe:
Occlusion radius in the scene view and game view don't match even though I keep the FOV the same in both cases and the game resolution doesn't really affect this at all:

Although the size should be more in terms of angular radius for directional light and radius of the sphere in meters/units for other lights





Should I create another thread for this?

 

Wow i just wanted to read up on cloud volumes and i find this thread. Nice to see unity trying to fix the problems we find. I'm alpha testing unity 2021, only version that is letting me get grass detail in terrain right , hoping HDRP turns out for the best. soo many issues. Feels like HDRP came out too soon. But understandable it needs to get out there and ran to find the issues. Unity cant test for all our scenarios. but if unity needs some more in house testers message me. I'm willing to get paid for it! I think you've fixed enough for me to try it out now. Maybe ill be back with good/bad news.

 

It does render to a shadow texture though, right? Maybe the lens flares can sample from that in some manner?

 

I checked volumetric cloud in both the hdrp assets and in the graphic settings for camera lighting, but I still get this error message in the volume. Is this a known issue?

 

Whoa in latest beta the cloud visual looks better than before. . . . .really love how looks. Now i want more control over the cloud shaping. . . .

 

Glad to report that in 2021.2.0 beta1, clouds finally works for me. (Also other bugs disappeared)
Thank you.

 

@pierred_unity I'm wondering, could you share the examples texture for the cloud?

 

Could you share your cloud volume settings?
Would love to get the same look

 

Yeah, I increased it to such high value when tuning it in the scene view but when I turned on the gizmos in the game views that's when I noticed the size difference.
Well, I will create another thread anyway.

 

One small bug with currently how camera preview is shown makes the clouds (or any other temporal effect) look weird:


This happens in both cases when local mode is turned on or Off

 

This is my current settings

 

Could you share the texture maps?
I really have no idea how to create them in an artistic way except using any random noise texture

 

all the texture actually comes builtin with HDRP, so it's already in your project

 

Sometimes watching these things just make me cry

This is running on a 1080ti. The terrain and especially clouds look phenomenal

 

This issue is still present in the current build.

 

One strange behaviour due to how cloud calculate directional light is that even when sun's angular diameter is big enough to visible below horizon, the clouds get completely dark.

At 0 degree:


At -0.001 degree (it flickers and looks unstable):


At -0.1 degree completely dark:


This problem is magnified when the sun's angular diameter is even bigger.
Example:

At 0.1 degree:

 

i notice this issue too, was hoping a smooth light transition
is your sky aerosol density are zero?

 

I used the default physically-based sky in this case:

 

One more thing is that when not in local mode, non-volumetric fog should affect clouds as well.
When my far clip is around 100 I get this ugly looking curvature effect:
Low Fog density, 1000m Far clip plane


To occlude that using fog I have to increase the far clip plane for my camera which invalidates the reason non-local mode clouds were introduced (to optimize far clip distances)
Low Fog density, 100000m Far clip plane

And increase the Fog density in case of big curvature values (Volumetric Fog disabled) ( which also require high far clip plane values to work properly)
High Fog density, 100000m Far clip plane

High Fog density, 1000m Far clip plane

TLDR: Normal Fog should affect clouds and the sky even though the far clip is low.

 

Sun Occlusion Bug:

PS: It only happens when rotating the camera, doesn't seem to happen when the camera moves.

 

One more suggestion I have is that you could allow for baking the non-local volumetric cloud into an HDRI with really high quality (such that the edges are clearly defined and so on and not blurred as they are in real-time mode) this could allow devs to get clouds to their liking on low-end devices as well, or made squeeze out a bit of performance in dynamic clouds are not needed.

 

Can't you use recorder for that?

 

Can it be used to capture 360 images?

 

Actually I tried it and due to temporal nature of clouds and bugs related to rapid camera rotation movement
This is the result of capture:

As you can see it's not really working properly
My recorder settings:

Edit: I inter-changed the width and height properties
Option for Accumulation for 360 views could solve this imo

 

Great work on the clouds, it's looking promising! a couple of requests:

1. Could you remove the cloud bottom ceiling? It's clamped to 0 now, and some of us want to build games around flying where we need the cloud altitude to be negative (so we don't have to shift all assets up in the sky)
2. Could we feed a color map to all the cloud layers to tint them? this is so we can do "dark" clouds, etc not just one color.
3. Would it be possible to add actual cloud volume "elements" we can manually place? a big ask but it would be cool
4. are there any plans to affect the cloud lighting with point lights, etc? to make things like lightning strikes in thunderstorms?