You have plenty of options to customize the clouds and the lighting looks correct, especially in combination with the PBSky (the other cloud option “Cloud Layer” doesn’t, but that’s another story).
The only major drawback is the way how cloud shadows are handled.
It just uses a light cookie on the directional light, which works fine if every object/surface is below the clouds, but as soon as something is above them it looks wrong ofc.
It also seems that the clouds only support one directional light at a time. I use two (sun+moon) and I have to turn off the sunlight to make the moon effect them, however this might be just a bug.
My feedback is, cloud layers are too thin, for example red dead redemption 2 has multiple layers and looks a lot more believable and realistic. Being able to add thicker layers/more layers with different noise patterns would be great!
I would love to see good translucent shadows in the future for stuff like volumetrics and particles(also dreaming about something like volumetric output for shader graph)
Current we indeed support only one directional light as a light source for the clouds. That is a consequence of HDRP’s unique “Sun” mechanic (We say sun, but we mean dominant directional light that casts shadows).
That said as long as you don’t have the lighting of both your sun and your moon at the same time affecting your clouds it should be just fine.
The sun is the first shadow casting directional light. If that is not practical to define your current “sun” (between your sun and your moon) maybe we could think of an explicit flag on the light to define the current “Sun” (aka dominant directional light that casts shadows and should be used for clouds).
(I hope I made it clear, tell me if I didn’t).
For the shadows we are aware of that limitation, we will handle the over-cloud volume issue and will also offer a better shadow casting technique panel in the future.
Indeed, by using the manual mode you can decide to go for more stylized clouds like the ones you can find in RDR2. It is a bit trickier to setup than the simple or advanced modes but (almost) any cloud profiles remain possible.
yeah then, I would say better presets that would allow us to get these types of results w/o going into the manual design process would be much appreciated.
Also, it will be helpful if the game object could cast shadows on the cloud as I’m imagining it to be the case for some sort of stylized high rise building or mountains maybe
Also, it will be helpful if the game object could cast shadows on the cloud as I’m imagining it to be the case for some >sort of stylized high rise building or mountains maybe
Hi, The current cloud feature is optimized to be seen from the ground (i.e it is not good to fly inside the cloud or be above it). Future version will extent the usage to other cases (at a cost).
For some reason they are not rendered for me, I enabled them in volume and render settings but I’m not seeing any changes when I enable them nor I have an option to select them in the clouds option of the visual environment:(
Hey @Ruchir , first, there’s no dropdown to select volumetric clouds in the visual environement. The “background clouds” select is only for the “flat” layer of cloud provided with the cloud layer override. (which can be used in combination with the clouds)
Secondly, be sure that volumetric clouds is enabled in your HDRP default settings (to be able to see them in scene view)
Third, volumetric clouds are displayed far away most of the time and the default far camera plane is set to 1000m by default (1km), so too see them, you’ll need to increase this in your “game view camera” and in your scene view camera too by disabling dynamic clipping there.
There’s a great video showcasing the RDR2 volumetric clouds here. Would love to be able to fly through and above them using HDRP volumetric clouds, even if this means extra performance cost. (starting at 2:30)
Haha, you have no idea how hacky and heavily scripted this hot air balloon scene was in practice.
Also, remember the balloon flies at a very slow speed, so this avoids/minimizes a lot of sampling artifacts. With the volumetric clouds in Unity, you can fly through them too, as long as you’re aware of the temporal accumulation issues (or you can increase the number of samples to reduce them, at the price of cost).
At the moment, the presets we provide (sparse/cloudy/overcast/stormy) are mainly tuned for “on the ground” scenarios, where the tiling is less visible than “outer space” ones. The former represents the vast majority of use cases. In the latest version of HDRP, we pushed improved presets btw, with higher frequency details and even less visible tiling than previously.
Of course, if you need more fantasy clouds and need to fly through them and be frequently above them, you’ll certainly want to invest more time into the system and create your own cloud coverage maps and LUTs to have more layers. This is something you can easily do either with the “Manual” or “Advanced” mode. The system is very flexible in that regard: you get 1-click Simple presets out of the box (which indeed are quite generic, by definition), and if you want, you are more than welcome to push it further with your own maps.
I will produce a Unite Now video about the volumetric clouds to explain the system in more detail, especially the custom LUT part, as this can be fairly complicated to grasp. Probably for the second half of this year.
Hah, if that’s the case then I have some idea what’s going on.
I don’t have any graphics/master branch running here. Is there currently any functionality for (slowly) transitioning between these presets at runtime? I’m looking forward to the Unite Now video.
If you use the “Simple > Custom” preset, you can do transitions easily, from super sparse clouds, all the way to giant storm clouds. It’s just a matter of tuning a handful of sliders to tune the noise levels and density, as well as altitude and thickness; and you get a very flexible dynamic system.
Alternatively, you can feed a render texture for the more complex “Manual” mode, so you’re free to do all sorts of crazy weather transitions this way, by generating your own cloud coverage map on the fly.
