☁ Weather Maker ☁ AAA Clouds, Sky, Weather, Water, Volumetric Light & More!

The x and y are for stretching the weather map, to make long, stretchy clouds. Z is the scale.

 

That kind of defeats the purpose of striving for the best performance. With any asset I use on a console system I look for every ounce of optimization I can get. So, naturally, I look for any settings that can be changed to give me better performance even if it sacrifices quality.

Assets that I use and perform better are Time of Day and Azure Sky.

 

I suggested to do max settings on all the assets you are comparing FPS on, that way it's as close to apples to apples as possible. This is of course not totally possible as rendering styles and quality vary widely among assets.

Weather Maker has performance profiles that map to the Unity quality level, so you can tone down things like ray march steps, or texture sizes, etc. to improve performance. So if you set Unity quality level to simple, Weather Maker will auto-match and run really fast, at the expense of visual quality. To auto-match, ensure your performance profile is null before building or playing.

I'd love to see your actual FPS or numbers from your tests, and to be sure you are on Weather Maker 5.7.2. I've compared Weather Maker against top assets to ensure it at least matches or exceeds FPS. It's hard to do apples to apples given that everything looks a bit different and renders differently. Weather Maker volumetric clouds, in my opinion, are the best looking on the asset store, so it's also hard to compare against an asset like the ones you mentioned that do not have the clouds, one pass volumetric lighting, etc. of Weather Maker.

 

Hi! My scenes are very dark, even when I set intensity of the Sun to 3.
What am I doing wrong? Maybe I need Global Illumination?

 

Are you showing clouds at all? Is the weather maker sun object active? Are you using a night scene? If so you can try tweaking the ambient colors in the day night profile.

 

Yes, I can see the clouds.
The sun object is active.
No, I'm not using the night scene.

Thank you, tweaking "Ambient colors - Day" helped!

 

@jjxtra can you please allow in a future update for Light Base Intensity slider to go up to 5?
I have a scene where I needed it to go more than 3 so I could achieve a specific look.
For now I edited the script myself but it would be cool if you'd allow it by default

 

Sure I will make it 10 max

 

How are you? You get better?
@jjxtra

 

Mostly healed up as far as the surgery itself goes. Bowels are a bit out of whack, lots of sick feeling, hopefully that goes away with time.

The ranges have been increased, just refresh the 5.7.3 download.

 

Jeff,

I've been trying to slow down the cloud changes to a more normal rate, instead of them moving and changing shape so fast. Would like to be able to have the clouds change from what they do in 2-3 seconds to have it take 60 seconds, for example.

Is this possible?
I've tried changing velocity, but it seems I can only increase it by huge amounts but not decrease the same way.
I mus be missing something.

I love the new changes, I don't know what it is, but things seem much better in my scenes.

 

Cloud movement speed is controlled from the cloud profile. Look for the weather map coverage and type velocity values. Let me know if you have any problem tweaking the values.

 

I played with velocity but no real affect.
Using 1,1,0 instead of the 11,22,0 on WeatherMakerCloudProfile_LightMedium and the clouds are moving the same speed and changing the same as well.
Any pointers?

 

The cloud script clones the clouds upon pressing play, so you would need to make the changes before pressing play, or uncheck the auto clone checkbox on the cloud script. If you uncheck the box be careful as then it will modify your original cloud profile during play mode which can have unintended consequences.

Let me know if it still doesn't work after that.

 

Just looking at the screenshot a second time, you want the weather map cloud coverage velocity and weather map cloud type velocity fields to be set to small numbers.

 

ok thanks!
I'll give it try.

 

That was it!
I was missing coverage velocity.
I knew I was missing something.

Thanks for being there for us!!

 

hey @jjxtra, here is some more inspiration for you
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/3l23Rh

btw did you manage to integrate fog blur which i mentioned before?

 

Yes it is on the list, can you post the link again to that project?

 

Weather Maker 5.7.4 is out and includes sharp temporal reprojection turned on by default for clouds. When there are lightning strikes, it switches to blur temporal reprojection to avoid the artifacts of fast moving lights, then switches back to sharp once the lightning disappears. This should give you much sharper, crisper clouds by default.

To disable this feature and use the blend mode specified in the temporal reprojection material, turn AutoSetTemporalReprojectionBlendMode AutoSetTemporalReprojectionBlendMode to false on the full screen cloud script.

 

here it is:
https://github.com/OCASM/SSMS

 

Stormy weather...

 

Atmospheric scattering is coming in the next update (5.8.0), probably tomorrow or early next week. Global wetness will come after that, sometime in July.

I'm also adding a LWRP toggle using Window -> Weather Maker -> Enable/Disable LWRP, will also come in 5.8.0 update.

 

@jjxtra - I'm thinking about buying Weather Maker today and I'm wondering if the temperature variable was enabled? If so, does it change throughout the day/night and season cycles? Thanks!

 

It is not currently enabled. I am considering at some point to make it melt the full screen snow overlay, but no ETA on that yet.

 

OK...melting snow sounds cool. I want to use temperature for damaging my player in a survival scenario - e.g. too cold/hot and the player needs to find shelter or they receive damage.

 

Preview of atmospheric scattering, coming in the next week or so...

 

Wow! This is sooo beautiful!

 

I've noticed that real time/dynamic lights don't seem to be interacting with the full screen snow overlay effect, I've looked over most of the settings I can think of, but can't find one that helps.

I'd assume that having lighting affect a post-processing filter like this would not be easy, but wanted to make sure I hadn't overlooked anything.

For an example, I've attached a screenshot - the barrel fire is applying to everything around it that isn't covered in snow, but the snow hides the lighting effect. Is there anything I can do to fix this?

 

You need to add any lights to interact to the light manager. Let me know if you need guidance on how to do this.

 

That's what I had originally thought, so I tried changing the light manager to detect new lights every frame, and it didn't seem to make a difference.

My assumption is that it's going to have issues with them either way, as they're actually light-generating particle systems (not a single static/dynamic scene-based light). I've been meaning to change them over to a single light for a while now for performance reasons anyways, so this is definitely a good excuse to take the time to do it.

Appreciate the assistance, I'll let you know if I have any issues once I change them over and set them up with the light manager.

EDIT: Seems to work without any issues with lights from a source other than particle systems, so should work for my use case once I finish changing things over!

 

Great news. I am not sure how to support particle lights, does Unity expose these lights somehow?

 

Hi,
What's the latest status on this working in Metal/OSX ?

Thanks.

 

I haven't heard from Unity whether the tex3D bug is fixed, so the easiest way to check is fire up latest Unity 2019.1.X and try it and see if clouds show up. If you don't yet own the asset and need metal support, then I would suggest waiting until I announce that the Unity engine bug is fixed.

 

hi,jjxtra,screen snow will support mobile devices?

 

Should do, use deferred rendering. Would recommend mid or higher end mobile as a target for deferred rendering.

 

Question:

the Starfield is a little "less" in his Intensity, is it possible, to do it really brighter ?

 

And on the starfield, can the flicker be turned off or slowed down to near none. I’m looking for bright stars without the flicker

 

You can tweak the twinkling or turn it off, along with changing the night sky intensity. See the sky profile on the sky sphere.

 

Atmospheric scattering is almost ready!

 

Hi.

So I've been playing with the 2D weather w/ 3D Cloud/Sun/Moon. Is there a way to get the sun to go behind the clouds as it rises/sets? It looks kind of odd with the sun in front of the clouds

Also, how would you make the explosions for the 2D precipitation collisions be smaller... they look a bit too big.

Thanks in advance.

 

You can turn off the horizon fade on your cloud profile. You can edit the particle systems in the prefab, look for RainPrefab, SnowPrefab, etc.

 

Okay.
I found the setting I need to change for the 2D explosions (Start Size)...

I'm not seeing anything labeled as "horizon fade" in the cloud profile though.

Also, I don't see any lightning when I press the lightning button (I do hear thunder though).

 

I found the lightning... it was being cast in the exact center of 3D camera way far in the background.... even though I'm using a "Main Camera" which is just a duplicate of the 2D camera (not inside the Weather Maker 2D Prefab)... with some other scripts attached and that camera is set to be part of the lightning within the script.

Any way of getting the lightning back into the sights of the Main Camera?

 

You may have already done this, but the camera distance needs to be set pretty far out to see the lightning. At least on 3D, I haven't done any 2D scenes.

Check the readme to get the correct distances, also, I got caught on this one, the readme is very long so you must fully open the file or you miss a lot of settings. But I'm sure you've done that already.

Just throwing it out there.

 

@dsilverthorn - Thanks. It had been a while since I looked through the ReadMe... I learned/re-learned a bit while reading it. I don't feel I've found my answer in there though.

I actually found that the 3D camera probably has nothing to do with this issue (or not that immediately effects what's going on)... It just happens to be also set at the location the lightning is happening... (at 0,0,0). I've tried changing the location of the lightning portion of the prefab with no luck. I find it odd that the weather, clouds and celestial objects (the ones w/ 3D settings in the 2D world) are all in the correct place, but not the lightning.

 

Just playing around in the demo scene 2d. I followed the canvas instructions to make it show 3D clouds. Then I pressed B to show lightning bolts and they appeared in 2D as expected. How is your scene setup?

 

Weather Maker 5.8.0 is now live! This is a huge update, so backup your project first...

- BIG UPDATE! Backup your project first.
- If you get any errors, delete and reimport Weather Maker and re-add the WeatherMakerPrefab.
- Add a editor command to toggle LWRP on and off. Much easier to get in and out of LWRP now. Window -> Weather Maker -> Enable/Disable LWRP.
- Add physically based atmospheric scattering solution from industry standard BSD licensed open source project. See Sky Sphere -> Sky Profile -> Atmosphere Profile. Not yet supported in VR.
- Add atmosphere profile and attach to sky profile.
- Option to blend sky sphere into scene, sky fade parameters are on the sky profile.
- Add additional moon fade options to moon material.
- Sky sphere, atmosphere, clouds and aurora borealis (northern lights) are all rendered in the full screen clouds script now which must not be deactivated.
- Fix full screen snow in forward rendering. Deferred rendering is still highly recommended for full screen snow.
- Fix and improve cloud and fog shadow interaction.
- Fix fog too bright at night with moon.

 

Awesome!! I can't wait to play with this tonight.

 

If you don’t see the lwrp option after importing the lwrp package restart unity.