Feedback Volumetric Clouds

adjust the scene camera clipping plane settings
for GodRays you need volumetric fog enabled, set the VF distance to high value and base height higher. .

is this included on the latest beta?

 

I've already tried that when I started, doesn't seem to help. The clouds are also not set to local clouds so I'm not sure if it needs a high clipping plane, although I did try setting it to local, no luck.

The volumetric bit was a good point, but I don't think shadows are working on the master github branch.

 

I've only achieved that with cloud layer so far:

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

But not with volumetric ones

 

@pierred_unity Hey, I was thinking if someone knows the answer it ought to be you.
are shadows functioning correctly in the following video?
I've tried it with local clouds on and off.
Terrain has shadows on, and shadows work as expected with cloud layers, but not volumetric clouds.

Worth noting that I also tried increasing the Density multiplayer, which doesn't really help.
What ends up happening is, other than cloud visual differences, the terrain just gets a bit darker overall, not by dynamic cloud moving shadows though. it's as if i lowered the light intensity.

 

One thing I noticed in these scenarios:

Clouds don't have any kind of ambient occlusion right now, it is just too bright at the bottom part (I know we could use the dimmer value but it would remove contribution from whole sky not just bottom part).

So unreal somehow has a method for ambient occlusion for clouds (Not just for noise details):

 

Couldn't wait, so I applied it manually Any hint about how to make the Godrays more emphasized and stick out?

 

Thanks a lot for your response, much appreciated!

It's still a pity if the clouds will be limited to 1 directional light only, because then you can't really have scenarios where both the sun and moon are visible at the same time. And it appears to be a bit inconsistent with the physically based sky, which supports any number of directional lights...

 

This is true, but it's currently still problematic at low sun scenarios (i.e. dawn or dusk), where the sun is still visible, but the moon slowly becomes the dominant light...

However, thanks for adding the sun light dimmer, this helps a lot to create a good transition Now if we could also get a way to define the main light (which was mentioned by @auzaiffe in this post), it would be much easier to create proper day-night-transitions which also play nicely with the physically based sky (if such a flag would exist, we could even create a "fake" light which does not contribute to diffuse or specular lighting and solely affects the clouds, giving us quite a lot of control)

 

I am really happy with hard works of @auzaiffe and @pierred_unity . Thanks Unity Gurus You guys should look into unity terrain and water system as well These two are really lack for openworld games....

 

When you say master. . . on which unity release this changes will be included?
it's just been a while since the last time i use SRP directly from github

 

I hope this helps:

 

Please release this as a sample project

EDIT: Can you share the fog and sky settings in the meantime

 

I could be wrong, but I believe worley noise was only recently added and wasn't always there.
imo it gives better quality/results.

The ghosting reduction option is awesome, really helps with fast moving clouds. Although if your clouds are moving slowly, you're better off with it off.

 

Nah... worley noise is there from day one.
and i'm not sure how could it give better quality.
perlin noise looks more like real clouds.
i'm feeling lucky they added perlin noise.

 

I am hesitant to share any of my work that I am tinkering with(just a prototype anyway) because it is not nearly as good looking as the rest of the stuff in this thread. But I made a very basic day/night cycle. Ive just been laying out the framework and will worry about tweaking values here and there later on and adding things like better ambient lighting, better fade in/out, etc.

Out of the box I think the clouds look great with hdrp, cant wait for them to work properly with DLSS.

Right now I am trying to render particles behind the clouds (stars on top of the emissive texture) and having a unbelievably tough time. I know alot of it has to do with transparent images being broken in HDRP right now. And I think the solution is going to force me to learn how to write some kind of basic shader.

But one of the solutions I tried was to change the render queue of the materials that the particles use, but it turns out that the procedural sky and the volumetric clouds use the same render queue number.

Does anyone know if there is a easy fix for this, or should I just wait for a update?

 

Regarding this, would it be possible to have this control per light as well.
For example, I was trying to achieve Red/stylized sunset cloud lighting and with another normal sun light for rest of the scene. I have option to disable the Diffuse and specular effects for the stylized directional light but the main light was way too bright and overpowering the stylized light for clouds. Having control for cloud Dimmer would really help with stylized situation or scripted events in my opinion.

 

So if we are just using the latest beta of 2021.2 and HDRP 12 - what is the procedure to get this latest Git version? We definitely do not want to be moving projects into an alpha version, but we are already doing live projects in 2021.2 beta 11 so happy to give it a go, but I would not quite know where to look for the GIT versions. Can somebody at Unity help with this to make it easier for us to test the latest features?

 

@pierred_unity

We have been using truesky for a while now and it has a nice feature of a timeline approach for creating custom sequences over time and a method of layering your base sky and cloud layers.

Any chance we could see something like this built into the timeline so we can make our own animated sequences?

 

Unity timeline works really well with many many exposed params.
you can easily tie in layers for specific elements, other timeline assets, signals/triggers, volumes etc. though it's linear at first glance, once you start building your core components in a modular fashion it really becomes quite powerful.

we use it in general to centralise our PBS ToD/weather systems, much to the same degree with TrueSky albeit it there is no native XY

 

Also, it doesn't seem to support path tracing currently.

 

Interesting - thanks for your input - that will give us something to consider!

 

I'm trying to get the following clouds thickness/look in HDRP's volumetric clouds.
The following I did with an asset called Expanse:



This is my attempt with HDRP's volumetric clouds, using a week or two old SRP master fork:


The problem is HDRP's clouds are too high. the Y/cloud altitude. In expanse I just lower the Y position of the clouds. Lowering or upping their altitude. I really hope this altitude problem gets an update.

In HDRP's clouds, the only option I found is cloud Altitude. When set to even 1, it's still way too high. The images have a high thickness value, when the thickness value is very low, altitude parameter works better.
Tested with local on and off.

In expanse there's also setting to controlling the bottom thickness of the cloud, and upper thickness.


My hope is volumetric clouds will still be improved, not just in quality (I understand the performance focus, and it IS quite fast, and the quality now is pretty nice) but especially in modeling the clouds, without having to use any textures.


The following is expanses modeling menu, completely game object based:

 

I like like how clean the clouds look, very little noise when the settings are right.
The temporal denoising 'Num primary steps' does a good job.

For my clouds, I need it set to around 33 for a nice clean look. Gets rid of most of the noise, but performance goes up a bit. From approx (wrong) 2ms to 2.7ms, which is an acceptable cost for games.

EDIT: actually it's much faster. Around 1.3ms for a GTX 1070!. I was running it on the wrong resolution.


I wish time of day was easier to do though.
Please give us an option to lower the clouds further, cloud altitude parameter doesn't help at all when the thickness value isn't very low.

 

Will there be floating origin support in the future?

for now i have to clear up all clouds in the sky to hide the switching of world origin.

it's really a pain.

 

Same question, will floating origin be supported?

 

Shouldn't the sun be hidden by the clouds covering it up? I realize if i Increase the hell out of the Density option it'll do it. But that gives it a completely different look, a worse one in my case.

Can we do anything about this? Looks seriously off when the sun is showing up as if there's nothing covering it at all.
Using latest SRP github (1~ day ago)

 

Also, the clouds never show up in the scene for me to this day. On beta, github master, and alpha.
Scene camera's Far plane is set to a very high value.

 

@pierred_unity I found one more issue/bug with how fog is currently handled by non-local clouds.

When I decrease the Far clip of camera, fog's effect on cloud also decreases (I am talking about normal fog not volumetric fog) so I can't really decrease my camera's far clip to say like 100 units as this almost completely removes the height based fog effect from screen(making the low quality clouds at horizon visible), this doesn't happen with normal PBS sky though when clouds are disabled, so I think this could be fixed.
As non-local mode was added to reduce the need to increase far clip of cameras, I guess this prevents me from decreasing it to fit my needs in say small prototype levels.

 

Some screenshots:
With far clip at 2000m


With far clip at 100m:

These are my volume settings:


When Clouds are disabled, normal PBS sky is unaffected by far clip.

 

I actually spotted this when using dynamic clipping in scene view and thought that it was really distracting when I zoomed in on an object (Alt + right mouse button), the fog started disappearing

 

Thanks for the info, I'll try your flare suggestion.

Although, the clouds's thickness is very high. I believe it should be covered up, but in any-case It doesn't look good, realism aside. It looks good when the sun is constantly blocked and unblocked as clouds move. But currently it looks really off.

But I also see value in blocking the sun completely as clouds cover it up, especially when the clouds's thickness is very high.
And although the density is low, when looking at it as a player you will without a doubt feel it's seriously off how the sun is showing up so clearly as if there's no clouds.

Ideally i don't want to reduce the sun's size to mitigate this, because It looks good when the sun is constantly changing along with the shadows of the terrain.

Looking forward to the disk occlusion bit you mentioned.

 

It really is quite impressive just how good looking these clouds are given such a low performance cost

 

Looks great, quite some improvements indeed! Is this latest version released on Github already?

 

It's still not merged in the main branch: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/pull/5804

 

That is looking really much improved! - we are testing at the moment too - one thing, can we ask for a Sun controller with Geographic location/time of day on the Sky Volume?

 

You can purchase aggregated astrological and geographical time API data that you can integrate into your own connective code in unity from elsewhere.

otherwise, a good alternative would be building your own database from the already available, as the databases for these are massive and for games, you can create more simplified data based on your project location(s).

 

While it's easy to show off sunrise and sunset while camouflaging everything else, I personally prefer the look of bright daylight. That's where any engine really shines. Great animations nontheless