Feedback Volumetric Clouds

I would really want these features, especially 3 since it's much easier to do compared to making texture maps.

 

What do you exactly mean by the light rays? (Is it the scattering ray inside clouds)

 

Ok,i have to confess that i underestimated this cloud system.
it got a pretty good potential.
but unity team should add more better default settings to make people got some faith for it.

 

Is there a way you could share the scene in a unity package?
I really want to try it out along with the textured terrain(my skills are pretty bad at terrain creation )

 

One important thing missing is that we can't tint the cloud, we can just change the scattering tint. Maybe you could allow for colored textures for color maps alongside a global tint if possible.

 

Beautiful

 

For me that only changes the color of scattered light(I mean shadows), not the cloud itself

 

Hi,will there be some optimization that let us render half or 1/4 size resolution of the cloud in none "Local Clouds" mode?
i think it will be fine that rendering a 1080p cloud sky into a 4k game's background.
Horizon:ZeroDawn had done it before and it worked pretty well.
the performance of hdrp cloud system is good but i think there still are some space to improve it.

 

Glad to know it got the concept done already!

So...how about a little button let us to decide what resolution should be used?
sometimes we want a full res high detailed cloud sky for high quality animation rendering and sometimes we might want a 1/8 resolution low detailed but high performance sky to give players with low end spec have a good game experience.

And i just wonder is the ability of blending different volumetric cloud volume profiles on the roadmap?
i tried to blend a manual control cloud with a simple preset cloud, can't get it work.

 

One thing that is really so important if this is to be useful in simulation is Time of Day and Geolocation. We should be able to choose a geographic location on the globe, time of year and time of day. I would be so happy if this was integrated.

 

When I turn my volumetric cloud I get super low res white blobs...how do I get clouds like in your screenshots...I tried a few things but I can't seem to improve quality.

 

Just some feedbacks.
combined my game's terrain with the new hdrp cloud.
i must say "Beautiful!!!Well done!!!"
the reasons i kept with hdrp are the physically based sky and its fog system.
and now a new reason is rising up.

there are still something annoying,i listed them by crtical level.

1.the cloud shadow is too light and it feels like a screen overlay not real shadow, cause it just make real shadows and specular darker not properly blended with them. i have to turn it off and use my cookie texture in direction light to act as cloud shadow.

2. the specular caused by the occluded sun.(i saw the thread talked about this problem,just want to list it out,i think this could be fixed with the first problem)

3. clouds can not be baked into the reflection probe.(it was pointed out in the document,but it's a big problem to make it production ready)

4.the tiling feeling on the side of the clouds is too heavy,there should be some options to reduce it.

5.the cell feeling on the edge around clouds makes it look like low resolution, especially on the close distance clouds.

 

You can edit this by enabling additional option for cloud volume: (Shadow opacity)

 

Thx,bro.
i see the problem cause i don't even have these options,you guys are talking about the version on github all these time...
i'm still using the version downloaded from package manager, downloading github version now.

 

that option are available in the package manager version

 

I'm still using the package manager version, you enable additional settings by right-clicking on the volumetric cloud section title and enabling a checkbox

 

SUPER BIG THANKS TO YOU!
i didn't know this trick for all these time with hdrp...

 

Oh right, i totally forgot about that thing. Always set them as visible

 

This is also applicable to all the foldouts these days, Like the emission, shadow, etc foldouts for the light component.
Hope it helps

 

Hi,thank you for reply!
I fixed the problem 1&2 by changing the shadow opacity in the hidden options, didn't know it before.
but the shadow looks a bit too hard to me,if you guys decide to add more soft shadow in the future,please don't forget make the shadow grow a bit to avoid the specular leaking in soft part.

the problem 4.i had given the shape & erosion values to my clouds as much as i could in my test.
i guess the only way to fix it is the ability to random blending 2 or more Cloud Lut textures on clouds.
not sure the performance cost though.

the problem 5 is mostly caused by the noise texture used by erosion effect.
if there are 2 or more layers of the noise texture could be used that will most likely fix it.
one layer for big shape erosion, one layer for small shape erosion.
and the small shape layer could use some other type noise texture to add more details.
imo worley noise is not good for small details and thin part of cloud.
still not sure the performance cost.

just my thought, i'm already happy with what i have got for now.

 

This is what is used by https://assetstore.unity.com/packag...c-skies-clouds-and-atmospheres-in-hdrp-192456 as far as I am aware and it gives really good looking results imo

 

Is there a way clouds could work with Dynamic resolution, because right now I tried dynamic resolution by forcing screen percentage of about 50% (Just to check DLSS and AMD FidelityFX ), and considering the clouds are already quater res, They really look like blobs of dark and light color with dynamic resolution.
Native:


DLSS:

Would it be possible to mitigate this issue somehow considering DLSS somehow manages to make the textures look like native resolution?

 

After updating to beta 2, I started noticing weird black spots under clouds:

I tried increasing the steps to maximum but they still are present. Am I missing some settings?

 

I must say it's quite a big jump in quality over previous iterations



Just the presets don't seem to have been updated in this release yet.

 

It seems the weather gonna be sucks.

Anyway. love the improvement in the beta2.
Now i'm wondering, any chance we can get a distance scale for the Erosion noise? right now it kinda hard to balance the detail between near cloud and far cloud
oh also shape and erosion parameter tilling please so we can create a stretched clouds.
Would also hoping for a distortion parameter, but i'm not quite sure how it's going to work

 

Nice update in beta2.
Hope the soft cloud shadow is coming soon.
so we can do some real project with these clouds.

 

This might not directly related, but i'm wondering. Is HDRP Volumetric rendering are unified? i mean Volumetric fog and Cloud are maybe rendered in Single Volumetric pass? well maybe except non local cloud.

 

I don't think so considering they don't receive shadows or are affected by lights(other than the main directional light).

 

I followed the instructions here https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition@12.0/manual/Override-Volumetric-Clouds.html and on the volume it still says "The current HDRP Asset does not support volumetric clouds."

The instructions don't seem to 100% match the reality: "The property to enable in your HDRP Asset is: Lighting > Volumetric Clouds > Volumetric Clouds."

All I can see is Lighting > Volumetrics > Volumetric Clouds. Anyway I've checked this in the HDRP Asset and Lighting > Volumetric Clouds in the Default Frame Settings and it still doesn't work.

Did anyone else have this problem? Am I missing something?

 

Try ensuring you have the quality level with the right HDRP asset selected. (it's in Project settings>Quality)

 

Thanks for your help. Working

 

ah that's a good point. . . make sense

 

I am facing a weird problem:


With Cumulonimbus map multiplier at anything > 0:

With higher value (only Cumulonimbus map is visible):

All other clouds disappear for some reason.

Is this an intended behavior? (I remember seeing a post about overlapping clouds maps before)
But considering there is no height difference between these maps it's pretty pointless to use all of them at once.
This is the beta 3 btw, also presets haven't been updated till now (I'm looking forward to using them)

 

One more bug I found was that sometimes the offset randomly changes when changing view to game view from the scene view or playing the game.
This is really annoying when I try to get a specific view and then it's gone for no reason.
The offset value remains the same so I guess it has something to with wind, but it shouldn't change the whole cloudscape in a second or two to be unrecognizable from the initial offset.

 

One more thing I noticed was that whenever I tried passing through clouds it was as if my camera had a sphere around it inside which the cloud density was zero, the problem being this volume seemed to be pretty big and noticeable:

It isn't easy to show in a picture but I should be inside a really dense cloud volume right now But I can see the ground pretty easily. If I go up a bit I can see the circle you see in this Screenshot decreasing:

 

Well, just a thought but would it be possible to have an input for height maps and thickness maps (considering it's just like terrain with one layer in this mode)?
It would become easier to create some stylized scenes this way and author tools like a simple heightmap and thickness map painter.
And you could just offer another mode for this if you are adding support for multiple layers.

 

@pierred_unity , @auzaiffe

Hi,

I have two questions. Do you plan to add support for volumetric clouds contribution for ambient lighting in dynamic mode (visual environment component) during the 2021.2 beta or 2021.2?

If I understood replies in this thread right clouds are not included in the ambient lighting, so even if the sky is completely covered in clouds ambient lighting still uses input only from clear Physically Based Sky (or other sky type that is currently used). Am I right? Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Same question for reflection probes support. Can we expect it to be added in 2021.2?

Thanks.

 

It would be really awesome to define a box that has clouds INSIDE it. That would allow to place specific clouds in a game. (working on a skyfarer game where you control a skyship and clouds should become somewhat of level-boundaries, so I need to be able to place them in specific spots)

Is something like that planned/possible ? (I got intrigued because the 'Local Clouds' toggle states they could be moved around, but I don't think that's implemented yet ?)