Hi, here’s a sneak peek at my new landscape renderer, the whole thing runs at 500fps on a GTX680 in HD.
I’m posting on here because the fractal cloud system will eventually go in to the asset store.
Height and depth of cloud layer settings all done in real-time.
Renders as a single parabola sphere-map texture, and displays the whole thing quickly as a SINGLE QUAD! : )
Shading depth, density, and transparency settings.
Clouds created in 3 layers, the sky, the fog and then the clouds.
Has a real-time rendering option, that updates the clouds in as many frames as you want by dividing it up into small sections.
The fog layer is a post process that blends your scenery into the sky and fog colour.
Sun flare obscured by the depth map, NOT a collision mesh - useful for out-of-bounds areas like track buildings and
untouchable tree branches.
Sun diffusion through clouds.
Mathematical lens flare - it’s fake, but it doesn’t use any textures so it’s not going to colour-band or have any visible pixels.
I think that’s all of it - hopefully I can get the GLSL shaders workings soon and it’ll be ready to go to the store.
It’ll be for Windows and Macs, not quite suitable for mobile devices just yet.
Cheers,
Dave H.
That looks nice! The whole rendered to quad thing makes me think of post effects or even demoscene world rendering (raymarching and wotnot, doesn’t work well with raster by basic nature), would it be something you wouldn’t mix up with other assets that affect your scene rendering? Examples being maybe wether it would show up in a SSR post process, or be grabbable for any kind of reflection, would it be altered or could it contribute to the overall illumination influence of a scene (Like in PBR setups where a cubemap of the environment is providing ambient illumination and also a skylight amongst other things)
It does look very pretty and one of those things where I think about how much i’d like iq’s clouds on shadertoy.com to ‘just work’ in Unity rather than… being a long long way from 'just work’ing. If these do work very nicely with other asset products it would be very attractive, typical example for me would be products that provide time of day and weather systems where clouds like those would be an ideal addition
Thanks, it creates a squashed sphere-map texture that can be saved and used later. The vector rays along each pixel of the rendered quad are projected onto the sphere-map which is then layered over the top of the realtime sun and sky renderering.
I can give direct access to it, if you give the shader a camera or a ray direction.
So you can have pre-rendered clouds with a sun moving behind it and setting etc.
It is based on the my own shadertoy here: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4dsXWn
Only with this, the user user has control over lots of parameters.
How have you found the whole process of moving from a shadertoy (and i suppose, demoscene) kind of approach where much is drawn to a quad and calculated procedurally in-shader rather than the typical rendering of a 3D game engine such as Unity? - there’s a ton of smart people at shadertoy and some great effects, including your own, which would be very desireable as effects in a game. Nuaj, another cloud system (twice i’ve mentioned that today now) came from a demoscene background so it’s quite a rich source of possibilities. I can imagine it’s not straightforward but seems a lot of talent that could be getting some appreciable alternative income as asset store products if an implementable analogue was found for the effect that played nicely with Unity’s rendering and i guess the decent proportion of popular Unity asset store augmentations. You might be onto something!
It could very easily have lightning, the clouds can be lit up using shaders without re-rendering the sphere map, so it’s all possible. I will have to script the sun colour to light the game objects up when it strikes. I will give all the C# code and shaders of course.
ahh! i guess i tend to automatically label shadertoy related things to demoscene, probably because of the site creators roots, but i guess thats being a bit presumptious. definitely always great to see what someone’s come up with next, some feats are amazing, not least from coming right out of your browser
Hey thanks. Yes that’s my fractal terrain system, it works by creating detailed bump maps on the fly and streaming them in as needed. It runs really fast, it never repeats, and doesn’t use textures. It’s one of the ‘infinite’ size landscapes things. Here’s an old video of the OpenGL version if you want to see more:- (old cloud system, and a bit dark):
It’s part of another project, but I won’t be making it an asset though, sorry.
I’d love to see that kind of procedural texturing and landscape feature forming work along side things like scrawks recent Proland port to unity, its a pretty neat ‘entire world’ builder originally created by some big guys in figuring out all sorts of interesting things about natural phenomena, uses a really lovely (but a bit heavy) fft ocean generator and wot not - has quite a typical aesthetic though and wonder if it’s possible to break it up with methods like this. I’ll give a link to the port just so people know what im on about http://scrawkblog.com/page/2/
