Hey guys - just wanted to let you all know that UniSky, our procedural sky tool, is now available on the Asset Store.
It costs $100 USD ($125 where VAT applies) and includes all future updates. This tool is functional with Unity Indie as well as Unity Pro but in Unity Indie the illumination (3d shading) is disabled due to its usage of render targets.
UniSky Features
* 24 hour day/night cycle with sun, moon and stars * Atmospheric scattering for realistic sky colors at any time of day * Dynamic directional light color and positioning for the sun and moon * Procedural 2D cloud animation with dynamic 3D lighting and shading * Parameterized cloud cover, precipitation level, atmospheric scattering, glow, wind direction/speed and colors * Highly optimised and runs almost entirely on the GPU
To clarify, the clouds are not volumetric and so are not “fly-through” - this was decided because volumetric clouds usually cost more performance-wise than they are worth. Dynamic 3D lighting is implemented to achieve a similar 3D look without the overhead of polygonal clouds.
Is it compatible with the Unity built-in lens flare effect for a Directional light?
Also, I need the clouds to be “fly-through” so, are you going to include this in near updates?
@pixelstudio - Yes, rayleigh and mie scattering is calculated - no lookup tables. It’s based off of Sean O’Neils article in GPU Gems 2.
@angel_m - The sun is represented as a directional light, and positioned accordingly. Also, we will not be doing volumetric clouds - they proved to be far too sluggish for our game.
@duke - The clouds are produced procedurally, so no texture is involved. I suppose you could hack around the script to use a static texture for the cloud distribution but you’d be losing out on some of the cool features like animation and lighting.
WOW !!! awesome !!! it’s really impressive. I was waiting for that for so much time.I saw the you tube video tutorial. i think you should do a little improvement : creating a script or a manager that handle the atmospheric variations according to tweakable fonctions. ( sky transitions, shiny weather to cloudy/ cloudy to stormy/ stormy to stormy with lightning / by night etc ( parameters like transition duration, weather duration and next weather step ( maybe a random parameter too ) putting this in an array to do the same as a play list. Isnt’t that a good idea !!!
Great job, i’ll buy this as soon as possible.
Damn you guys are doing a good job of keeping me broke! Just an idea, I love how you matched the day/night cycle with the system time! What would even be cooler is if the weather could be linked to a zip code with acuweather or something along those lines for local weather!
This looks outstanding, I watched the tutorial video and I’m stunned, jaw dropped. I want this and need this for my current project. I will be buying this.
@kfrench16 - yes, I apologize, I should have included that in the description. It uses render targets so it does require Unity Pro.
@3dDude - Your cloud system looks absolutely fantastic and has the benefit of being “fly-through”, so it serves a unique purpose. Had fun in the webplayer, ran absolutely smooth even when flying through.
@Antitheory - Yes, multiple layers of noise are carried out on the GPU as well as pretty much everything else. Very little of this tool is calculated on the CPU, giving you space for game logic.
@TheLlama - The first update is dynamic weather. I can’t tell you when it will be released, but I’m working on it right now. It will involve procedural, localized storm clouds and effects (rain, snow, wind, etc.) and will of course be free for license holders through the Asset Store’s update feature.
@cosmodog - I’m not sure what you mean, compared with a skybox - You could buy static skybox textures cheaper, but the two aren’t really comparable. As for baked textures, I’m afraid there isn’t an easy solution other than writing something yourself. Since the lighting changes dynamically in this tool, the shadows also need to be dynamic. However, you could homebrew a script that fades between precomputed shadowmaps, as you mentioned.
nice stuff!
Now to see how many pennies are left in the kiddy for new stuff.
