It’s the Atmospheric Scattering from the Blacksmith Demo converted to work with HDRP in Book of the Dead. Seems using it you will have to use the version of HDRP it was released with for Book of the Dead Environment or if you know what you’re doing you can add it to another version. There should be a version of Atmospheric Scattering coming officially in HDRP so we just have to wait for that.
Linear and Exponential fog is already in HDRP just not a full Atmospheric Scattering model yet.
I havent tried the latest github version for some weeks now, but I note there have been some improvements made to the system, including quite a few things today. Changes include:
Tooltips that properly explain what quite a few of the volumetric parameters do
A global volumetric dimmer
Ability to enable high quality volumetric mode via pipeline option, rather than having to edit a couple of pipeline files.
Nice, I shall take a peek at the HDRP team’s eye candy goodness.
Regarding the volumetric thing I’m struggling with it. The 32x32x32 texture I can use is barely useful. What is your opinion on that? Is it a mistake my end?
I am able to generate a 3D noise texture of course, but when there’s only 32 pixels to play with along a given axis it seems regulated to just falloff style patterns or blobs.
It’s my dream to have wispy and intriguing rolling and tumbling fluid like fog, perhaps by sampling and adding together two scrolling 3D textures, or some other thing I haven’t worked out. That wonderful yet mysterious look you certainly do know what I am talking about as a fellow enthusiast from what I saw earlier!
I doubt you have done anything wrong. There really hasnt been much communication from the team about volumetric fog in HDRP, so I’m not really sure. Emphasis seems to have been placed on performance, and having a density texture atlas so that multiple different density volumes can be used in a scene in an efficient manner. But I dont know what their use case scenario was that gave acceptable results at such a low resolution.
The reason my customised/hacked experiment didnt suffer from the 32x32x32 resolution is that I pretty much bypassed the entire texture atlas system and just had it read from the higher resolution 3D rendertexture that my system was already outputting.
I am a bit out of date though, and they reworked the system quite a bit since I did my hack. For example it seems they since added support for using different mipmap levels of the texture, but I am pretty ignorant about mipmapping in general so I dont really understand the implications of this.
I dont know if they have another plan for this stuff in the future, I kind of expect that if HDRP eventually settles down with things still in this sort of state, someone else will offer alternatives for this part of the system. It would also be nice if, for example, when the VFX particle system for HDRP is out, there was a way to use particles to influence volumetric density.
This stuff is largely a consequence of the volumetric system doing its work at a lower resolution in order not to kill performance. There are currently 2 different resolution options available, but the way to activate the higher resolution mode varies depending on what version you are using. eg as I mentioned earlier today, the current github master now has a simple way to enable the higher resolution mode via HDRP pipeline asset settings. I havent tried that yet, but I will. If you are using a version that does not include todays latest changes (eg a package manager version), then you have to edit two files to enable the higher res mode:
com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition/HDRP/ShaderConfig.cs
Change it so that VolumetricLightingPreset = 2
(1 is the default)
com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition/HDRP/ShaderConfig.cs.hlsl
Change it so that #define SHADEROPTIONS_VOLUMETRIC_LIGHTING_PRESET (2)
(again, 1 is the default)
I was making these changes back when I had my own copy of the pipeline code, whereas with package manager version you wil probably need to change these files in the central package manager cache, and so you may also have to deal with issues relating to whether these files are read-only on your system.
Both these files have to be set to the same value, and shaders will then recompile, otherwise the system will break. And as mentioned above, they have made this much easier to do in very latest master version, you just have to tick an option called ‘increaseResolutionOfVolumetrics’.
There may be other ways in which they can deal with artefacts around the source position of lights when used with volumetric system. I know I have seen similar artefacts with spotlights etc when used in engines other than Unity, and I think they maybe implemented a few tricks to improve things. And as I’ve been saying lately, I am a bit out of date so for all I know Unity might have done some work on this themselves recently. There are limits to these systems though, various tradeoffs between quality and performance, so I dont really know what the best results possible might be.
I just got done giving the latest github version a try. The convenient setting to use higher quality volumetric mode does indeed seem to work as expected Also as expected, it makes a notable different to the spotlight artefacts you mentioned.
Just for the benefit of anyone reading this thread in future, who may not be keeping up to date with the HDRP changelog, the above setting was included in package manager HDRP version 2.0.5-preview.
Hey guys! I’ve been working with volumetric fog for a while, and I’ start having this problem, there’s a square in play view that does not render the fog when game it’s running, does anyone know how to solve it ?
Note that all the volumetric system is still quite new and not finalized
For the moment the density volumes are additive only. Your use case of having a global fog with a “hole” inside for indoor space is a good example to implement subtractive volumes.
Could you explain more how you did this setup ? Or maybe even better, share your scene ?
Hi all,
could someone provide a scene file with a local volumic light setup? For some reason it’s not working in build 2018.0.0f2 with HDRP. Also tryed AURA … but it’s not working with HDRP. How do you get a normal Spotlight with local volumic control?
Thanks a lot!
I know … i tried to follow the infos up at the top, but for some reason I couldn’t get it to work … this is why I asked if someone could provide an easy setup exapmle. Thx
Simple question: How can we use both Volumetric & Exponential fog alongside each other in one scene?!
The Atmospheric Scattering in Book of the Dead was exactly doing this where we had full volumetric lighting going on blended with controllable fog to simulate aerial perspective for further viewing distances at the same time.
Also tried to blend 2 Scene Settings, one global and one local but I don’t think that’s possible! Also tried Density Maps to try to override the global Scene Settings and get Volumetric Fog from the second Scene Settings but that does not work either. So is it possible to have some sort of local Scene Settings blended with another one?
I thought that you can have 2 Scene Settings sitting on a scene both global and both with the same priority and then blend them together using Weight parameter! The Weight parameter is being applied based on height of the whole scene, is that correct?
I dont think its supported yet. There is a branch on github where some work to implement a mixed mode that supports both these fog types was done in June, but I havent seen any signs that this work was finished and merged into a main branch (though I might have missed something).
This is not something I have investigated for myself, but I never presumed this sort of global blending would work at all, I suspect thats not been part of the plan at all at this stage but again this is just speculation on my part, sorry.
I am really the wrong person to ask, because I’ve only used a single global volume so far.
But certainly I expect local volume settings to do something, but thats not the same as expecting that a blend of 2 very different sets of settings can be achieved in the same location.