I know that only one directional light is supposed to cast shadows and that’s totally fine, but I need both the sun and moon light to have the PBSky properly simulated, especially at dawn/dusk.
And suddenly turning off the sun when the moon appears isn’t a good solution in this case.
So atleast make it pick the real “sun” (which is the shadow casting light) automatically.
I’d like to use both solutions together, but unfortunately they use inconsistent lighting.
The cloud layer has a very different and simplistic lighting model and obviously doesn’t match the lighting of the volumetric clouds, so it’s impossible to use both in combination.
I found some bugs in this version of volumetric clouds where they just seem to flicker a lot like the temporal accumulation is completely disabled and are hardly visible at all, also towards the end you can see it doesn’t really look natural how it fades into the fog when going below the ground plane
Thanks, please report the issue (Help > Report a Bug, in Unity), with a stripped-down version of the project (already looks like one). It might be hardware/driver-related as well, it’s not something we’ve experienced so far afaik.
You need a more correct basis and the problem gets a lot easier. Switching on a moon light when you switch off the sun light is wrong and is just creating unnecessary problems. Base it all on luminance. It’s a relatively small amount of additional work for a much improved outcome.
So you have body luminance, ambient luminance, and then DL’s are simply a thing that a dominant body gets in a specific luminance range. What you will end up with in a sun/moon scenario is a fairly large gap where there is no DL on at all. The ambient light will be dominant.
Directional lights are really an engine construct for performance reasons. So it’s easy to conflate things here that really shouldn’t be.
Not sure what you are referring to, but the entire rendering (and the ambient light ofc) of the PBSky depends on the directional lights as they are the only source of light (except the sky emission texture). So you cant just turn them off or arbitrary manipulate them, because it would just break the sky rendering in an unrealistic manner.
I’m sorry for mentioning other engines, but I’m really curious – if anyone has experience with both volumetric clouds in Unity & Unreal, how does unity’s VC perform?
If no one has experience with both, I’ll check it out soon when I got time
Last I checked Unreal’s cloud do look better at default settings(didn’t really know much as to how to customize them much, so can’t go much into details) but somehow the performance was much worse for me, Unity’s volumetric cloud does seem like a nice compromise between performance and quality, they look pretty good for in 90% of the situations(i.e, for when you are not above them or inside them) and if Unity provide a better shading and shadowing model in the future for those who need it, I don’t think there’s anything we are missing out on
The video is actually fairly out of date and only used an earlier implementation. Remember it’s only meant to be released with HDRP 12 (end of the year with Unity 2021.2), so there will be more improvements/fixes coming. For now, the system is tuned to work very efficiently.
I noticed that the lighting (using the PBSky) of the clouds isn’t effected by the actual position of the sample points in world space, so I looked at the clouds shader code and found out that the lighting is always sampled at origin (0,0,0) and not where the clouds actually are.
Will this be fixed in a later version or atleast add an option for it?
Because I’d like to have proper physical lighting especially at higher cloud altitudes at dawn/dusk (it currently behaves like the earth is flat).
Another question;
Will there be some sort of point light support for the clouds, in case someone wants to simulate thunderstorms with lightning?
