Feedback Volumetric Clouds

100%! Being able to author/place individual cloud volumes would be really cool, it would help a lot with compositing level design, like having mist around mountains, space nebulas, etc.

 

Thanks for the detailed answer!

It sounds indeed like a temporary workaround that might work. I'll give it a try once I don't have entity-package compile errors regarding subscenes after porting my project to 21.2

My concerns would be though, that this workaround is quite limited (I totally get the performance argument of course) in terms of flexibility (what if I want to open a section ? I woud have to do a texture swap and design all these textures i guess...)

Another concern is the height flexibility. The textures are 2D right ? my game would require more of a 'sphere' inside a cube 3D texture than circle on square. (In general, setting the height of cloud areas would be quite the feat for me)

 

Where are the LUTs located? I wasn't able to find them

 

Yeah, I feel dumb for asking.. but I can't find the LUTs either. I also saw a previous post that said there were some default noise textures too, but don't know where those are either.

 

I think unigine 2 has a volumetric cloud System similar to what unity is making and is a good reference point for the user facing controls and the quality settings:

 

Should help finding those built-in textures

 

Is there an example project available?

 

Because this is the 4th iteration I've been using this in different Unity versions and the volumetric clouds have a severe usability / accessibility problem. Here's how it looks when I create a new scene and add the volumetric clouds:


By the way it would be super awesome to have a button with which the required volumetric clouds settings are activated instead of having the user find out the 2 locations where he has to set them manually.

Edit: I fiddled around some more and this is how it looks now:


However it would be nice to have a reference project just to see how it's supposed to look like.

 

@pierred_unity

Sorry for bumping my own question again (maybe my post was missed in action or you don't have any ETAs yet) but as you are talking about the final release I'm very curious about environmental lighting and reflection probe support. I've quoted my post with these questions below. Any info would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

 

dynamic volumetric clouds and baked reflections probes? better than nothing but not really 2021.2 i think
we have a full time of day and various weather conditions.
it also would be nice to add the possibility to add one or two more noise samples to make the clouds catch up with expanse. the clouds from expanse just look so nice but are so expensive. and it is not the ramarching but all these extra passes it performs to combine its atmosphere and the clouds with the sky.

 

Just to get my point: It would be very helpful if you guys could provide example scenes. Good ones. It took me a while to find out how to make a scenery like this with the clouds layer and lighting settings:

Even small values in the settings make a huge difference and make eg the godrays work or not work. I don't want to spend time yet again to find out how to make such a scenery with the volumetric clouds when you guys already know how to do that

 

The 2D cloud layer just doesn't react to Sky's ambient light at all, I wasn't able to see any change in its color when rotating the sun (like in sunset scenes) and it always has a weird glow to it making it impossible to get a dark scene at night (Or I have to change the exposure values to force it to be dark which doesn't look good at all). So, the only scenario I can use the clouds is when the sun is high enough to be completely white. Also, when I enable the lighting toggle, all it does is that it adds shadows to the clouds which are also present when the sun is no longer visible.

Are there any plans on improving the Shading techniques for this cloud layer?

Although can you please share the settings you used in this video (it looks pretty good )

 

Great to hear that. Thanks for the reply.

Looks like real-time reflection probes will be supported too:

https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/pull/5192
>This PR adds the support of volumetric clouds for baked and real-time reflection probes.

 

Sure, I created a dedicated thread, everyone feel free to join and share your settings here:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/cloud-settings-shared-by-the-community.1145537/

 

How does fly-through look? I have a big dragon that urges for diving through a sea of clouds

 

These look really good .

I have a question, Are there any plans for handling mixing two cloud volumes.
What I mean is maybe I transition from a stormy cloud volume to sparse volume then would there be some kind of mixing/morphing available to smooth out the transition?

Currently they just suddenly change on basis of which volume's weight is higher. It would be good if some kind of transition is implemented as it would help with cinematics/maybe could be even part of gameplay and the only other way to achieve this currently would be to create custom atlas textures for the transition or maybe a custom compute shader to act as coverage and rain maps.

 

In that case, it would be helpful if we could view the settings that are set by current presets, currently the option just become invisible, you could make it so that the options that are adjusted by the presets are grayed out instead of hiding them.

It would really help understand user how each value impacts the clouds as well (basically act as documentation in itself)

 

We are getting close to rdr 2 day by day Thanks

 

In the PR I saw attitude distortion mentioned, can someone tell me what exactly it is?
https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/pull/5184

 

Would something like this would be possible:

The only way I see is having to create compute shaders to modify custom render texture with compute shader

 

One thing that could be improved upon a bit, in my opinion, is how currently clouds are blended with background near its edges, Currently, it looks like a really hard edge when passing through them and is exaggerated by the high "near clip" distance:


If the clouds faded away instead of abruptly ending and having a harsh edge then the near clip won't be that noticeable and just be considered that the cloud density is low.

Normal:

Clipped:


It maybe doesn't look that bad in the screenshot but is more severe when in motion

Edit: Video

P.S:This is the latest GitHub version btw

 

I understand that (as explained in a previous post as well), what I am suggesting is having a fall-off distance over which density of the cloud is lerped/transitioned to zero instead of just a hard cut-off near-clip and exposing this fall-off distance as well as near clip distance (which is hard-coded right now) as parameters. This should solve the problem with reprojection as well as help with the hard-edge issues for now.

 

how did you get the god rays with the volumetric clouds? im playing around with it and cant get a similar result

 

@camerondus you can combine cloud shadows with volumetric fog to achieve that effect. mostly make sure that fog can reach up to a decent height and adjust the anisotropy value

 

Just wanted to point out that this still happens in the latest GitHub versions.

 

It's really nice to see new features and improvements regularly. Great work.

Any plans to add more cloud types in the future? Or maybe actual set (cumulus, alto-stratus, cumulonimbus) is sufficient and can be used to act as other cloud types so other 'built-in' types are generally not needed?

 

But currently, they aren't really up to par with the volumetric cloud system, they really don't react to lighting and really blow out the scene in default exposure, if I try to lower the exposure to make them fit in a day scene then they become pitch black in others. Also, sunset scenes look really bad with them sadly

 

Still, I feel there should be better shading applied to them by default
I have attached a video showing the problem:

These are my settings:

 

I submitted one (Case 1353955)

 

seems cloud shadows arent even working for me at all. do i have to enable them separately somewhere? i have them enabled on the fog override