1

2408361--181307--CloudsVidThumb.jpg
2408361--181307--CloudsVidThumb.jpg1433×799 192 KB

The last few months I’ve been working on a fully 3D volumetric clouds solution for Unity3D. kode80 Clouds is now available!

  • Fully 3D, raycast rendered volumetric clouds
  • Realtime sun lighting via a regular Unity directional light
  • Raycast shadows from clouds onto your scene’s geometry
  • Animatable ambient lighting
  • Simple setup, add to your scene, pick a camera to render to, go!
  • Fully animatable, from the clouds themselves to their position in your scene
  • Custom Unity integrated editor that allows you to paint clouds directly into your scene
  • Lots of optimization options, including spreading the rendering workload across multiple frames
  • Export high quality cube maps straight from the editor, for lower powered devices

Latest Version: 1.1.1 (released April 20th 2016)

Rather than selling kode80 Clouds in the Asset Store, I’ve decided to try something different. The project is hosted on GitHub & is free to use for non-commercial purposes.

If you’d like to use kode80 Clouds for commercial purposes, or support this & future kode80 development, commercial licenses are available for purchase from my new online store!

Full details available here: http://kode80.com/blog/2016/04/11/kode80-clouds-for-unity3d/index.html

I’ll keep this thread up-to-date as well and look forward to your feedback!

20 Likes
2

@caitlyn rush this one through :wink: Rob the Hippo wants <3

1 Like
3

I like this a lot

4

Thanks!

5

Looks amazing Kode :slight_smile: Will keep an eye on this one :smile:

6

Looks really great. Looking forward to it.

Is the sky gradient also rendered by your plugin, or is that the default procedural skybox from Unity?

7

Yup, it’s just the standard procedural skybox. The clouds buffer is simply drawn from the camera’s post render delegate as a screen aligned quad at the far clip plane, so it draws over the skybox but under the scene. This allows you to use any existing skybox with the volumetric clouds drawn overtop.

8

Ok, good, because I thought it was the weakest part in the images you showed :stuck_out_tongue:

The clouds themselves look really great. :slight_smile:

9

Hehe, thanks. I figured for now this was the most flexible approach, so people can still use photographic skyboxes for background etc. I am still seriously contemplating expanding the shader to be a full skybox shader that’ll render it’s own atmospheric scattering/cubemap etc. but if so, that’ll definitely be post-launch.

10

To be completely honest, I am making a completely underground game. But that said, I just wanted to stop in and comment on how nice those looked. Those look amazing.

1 Like
11

I am imagining a situation where i have an hdr photobased cubemap with slight cirrus/stratus clouds and then your plugin on top for the more cumulus clouds. I bet it’s going to look great.

(with that said, I am definitely not against turning this into a full fledged sky plugin)

12

Yup, exactly my thoughts. Or, a nice night sky with the cloud’s ambient/direct light colors set to reflect the moonlight color.

13

Hey, your Cloud system is looking great, probably the best one I’ve seen so far judging from the preview.

With that said, I do have some questions/requests/suggestions:

I noticed the clouds seem mostly very “planar”. They look good in some screenshots but when you move around it becomes more obvious. I think this stems both from lack of height variance, both in position (all Clouds are in the same plane) and size (all clouds are equally tall).

http://www.rgbstock.com/cache1pn2PJ/users/t/ta/tacluda/300/mJdHHlA.jpg
Even clouds positioned around the same height can have wildly different vertical sizes:

Another good example:

1280×960 82.8 KB

I think this is the reason why most cloud systems look incredibly fake, since it’s usually a plane of clouds looking at us, stretching all the way towards infinity, which is not how clouds look like. At distance, we can see the full body of the larger clouds and they usually cover the sky horizon. Clouds beneath that line tend to look very misty, so the distant sky can often look like this:
http://i.jootix.com/o/unnamed--4f28f54a61.jpg
You only need one big cloud to cover everything behind it, which will eventually happen at some distance. The “clouds stretching toward infinity” are usually very misty.

Clouds at distance can often look more perpendicular to the plane than parallel, which is how CG clouds, even good ones, usually look:

1920×1200 380 KB

Anyway I’m pretty sure you’ve given consideration to these issues, but I had to illustrate my point. This is a problem that every real-time 3D solution I’ve seen faces, but if you can solve it and improve in this area your solution is gonna be even more fantastic.

14

That’s looking rather nice! My question would be, is it VR ready?

15

Thanks! I really appreciate the feedback.

I think the planar look you’re referring to is more a due to the specific clouds in this scene than anything else. The atmosphere is a thick wedge, literally 2 spheres; one acting as the start of the atmosphere, the second acting as the end of the atmosphere. The clouds in this tech can exist anywhere within the atmosphere and can have height across the full range between these 2 spheres. My editor gives you the ability to alter the height of any of the clouds as well as the way they are modeled, from flat and diffuse to tall and defined. A lot of the clouds in the scene shown in the video are more in the former category, if you look later in the video, the clouds behind the camera are more in the latter.

Also, again since the clouds exist in a spherical atmosphere, it is entirely possible to watch clouds move away from the camera and eventually sink down below the horizon. There is no infinite plane used in this approach.

I’m going to be producing a final promo video for the asset this week that will hopefully demonstrate the full range of cloudscapes you can achieve and I’ll definitely bare this feedback in mind because the last thing I want is to give the impression this is just another flat cloud plane style solution.

16

I haven’t tested it in VR yet (I have the DK1 and DK2 sitting upstairs). This & mobile are my first checklist items post-launch. There’s nothing (outside of performance requirements) that would prohibit this from working in VR and in-fact I’m expecting it to look rather great since it’s a full 3D solution - i.e. you’ll get true stereoscopic depth on the clouds.

17

will there be an option to change Y axis of the clouds ?
so we can also look on them from above ?

18

flinches and makes a half-hearted grab for the framerate butterflies fluttering out of reach

The full VR thing would be pretty amazing.

2 Likes
19

that looks awesome :slight_smile:

1 Like
20

Right now, no. The goal of this is asset is to provide quality 3D, animated clouds from a ground level. To be clear, the camera is free to move up/down and you will see the clouds rendered correctly (i.e. as you walk up a mountain you will get closer to the clouds) but the camera must remain inside the atmosphere.

This isn’t a restriction of the tech, just a design goal to keep performance/code maintainable. It would be entirely possible to render the reverse, i.e. outside the atmosphere looking in, it would just need a slightly modified version of the shader. If there is enough demand for this, it’s definitely something I can work on.