[1.1.2][1-1-2] May 13-2016 EnvironmentalVisualEnhancements

[Blacks]

Some nice shader what can give you some idea

Lens flare what influence cloud colour
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XtS3DD

Sunrise, sunset
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XsBXDc

FakeVolumetricClouds
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XlsXzN

Weather, noise, volumetric cloud
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4dsXWn

Procedural, noise, volumetric
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/MdfGRX

Fly over volumetric clouds
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/Mt2XDD

Combustible Clouds
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/MscXRH

Cheers

Edited June 3, 2016 by Blacks

[pingopete]

19 hours ago, Blacks said:

Some nice shader what can give you some idea

Lens flare what influence cloud colour
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XtS3DD

Sunrise, sunset
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XsBXDc

FakeVolumetricClouds
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XlsXzN

Weather, noise, volumetric cloud
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4dsXWn

Procedural, noise, volumetric
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/MdfGRX

Fly over volumetric clouds
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/Mt2XDD

Combustible Clouds
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/MscXRH

Cheers

That's nice, now is this possible in unity/ksp?

[Blacks]

1 hour ago, pingopete said:

That's nice, now is this possible in unity/ksp?

Shadertoy site i found when i was digging in http://forum.unity3d.com/forums/shaders.16/ searching how other do similar thing what are use in KSP, in theory yes all of that it can be implement in unity & most cod is public, some are copywright protected some are free, but it depend by rbray, blackrack or squad team if then can use or not, me i am just sharing info what can be use like a guide, reference point ... in practice for sure is not a easy task

[jsimmons]

Hi rbray89

    I pulled your latest pre-release tag to try it out and so far its pretty awesome. I only see one small issues. Using Kopernicus I replaced the terrain texture and it blends with the city textures which results in this. Is their any way to resolve this? Also I have a question about when clouds show up. Currently the clouds at the particle level are more dense that what appears from orbit. Basically from orbit the area will look clear but when I zoom in clouds with appear. Can you control at what alpha level clouds in the 2D layer is needed to make volumetric clouds appear at?

 

[pingopete]

On 6/4/2016 at 4:48 PM, Blacks said:

Shadertoy site i found when i was digging in http://forum.unity3d.com/forums/shaders.16/ searching how other do similar thing what are use in KSP, in theory yes all of that it can be implement in unity & most cod is public, some are copywright protected some are free, but it depend by rbray, blackrack or squad team if then can use or not, me i am just sharing info what can be use like a guide, reference point ... in practice for sure is not a easy task

Looks like we need a shader wizard..

[Drew Kerman]

is there a way to disable ground shadows until the transparency bug is fixed with the beacon lights and water tower light at KSC?

[Galenmacil]

While digging through my old screenshots from KSP 0.24, I found this one:

Spoiler

and this one:

Spoiler

Now, Is it me or EVE back then was looking better than it is currently looking with KSP 1.1.2? What do YOU think?

[Drew Kerman]

I think current EVE is looking a bit worse than previous EVE but I also think it's mainly due to some of the recent under-the-hood changes that still have a lot of polish left to be applied. I have no doubt it'll soon be looking way better than pre-v1 EVE. Keep up the good tech advancements @rbray89

[Silent1_87]

7 hours ago, Galenmacil said:

While digging through my old screenshots from KSP 0.24, I found this one:

  Hide contents

and this one:

  Hide contents

Now, Is it me or EVE back then was looking better than it is currently looking with KSP 1.1.2? What do YOU think?

omg back then i had a potato pc so i never experience this. is it 1.1.2 fault or EVE developers (no offense) 

[UnanimousCoward]

16 hours ago, Galenmacil said:

Now, Is it me or EVE back then was looking better than it is currently looking with KSP 1.1.2? What do YOU think?

Stock Visual Enhancements will sort that right out for you.

 

 

[Galenmacil]

Yes, the Visual Enhancements mod do help. But I just realized that, currently, the problem is we lack a cloud pack for the latest EVE in very high definition. The picture from 0.24 used a 8192x4096 resolution image. That's 32 MB (DDS compressed DXTc5) just for that cloud layer. I imported this DDS file and replaced the default one from Visual Enhancement (that was at 2048x1024) and here are the results:

That is with EVE, Planetshine and Scatterer. You can still see the blur on the other cloud layers from the "low resolution" files at 2048x1024 size.

So, that is it: To achieve incredible result we need very high texture quality, 8192x4096 or more. I believe the maximum for a single DX9 texture sheet is 16384x16384 (anyone correct me if I am wrong).

[Waz]

1 hour ago, Galenmacil said:

So, that is it: To achieve incredible result we need very high texture quality, 8192x4096 or more. I believe the maximum for a single DX9 texture sheet is 16384x16384 (anyone correct me if I am wrong).

Note that for higher resolutions, you may want to turn down the _UVNoiseScale (default 0.01) and _UVNoiseStrength (0.002) if the UV noise is distorting the higher resolution pixels too much. The main purpose of UVnoise is to turn pixelization at close zoom into cloudiness. (it's also used for cheap animation both on clouds and large-scale on gas giant atmospheres).

Edited June 9, 2016 by Waz

[theonegalen]

 

7 hours ago, Galenmacil said:

Yes, the Visual Enhancements mod do help. But I just realized that, currently, the problem is we lack a cloud pack for the latest EVE in very high definition. The picture from 0.24 used a 8192x4096 resolution image. That's 32 MB (DDS compressed DXTc5) just for that cloud layer. I imported this DDS file and replaced the default one from Visual Enhancement (that was at 2048x1024) and here are the results:

That is with EVE, Planetshine and Scatterer. You can still see the blur on the other cloud layers from the "low resolution" files at 2048x1024 size.

So, that is it: To achieve incredible result we need very high texture quality, 8192x4096 or more. I believe the maximum for a single DX9 texture sheet is 16384x16384 (anyone correct me if I am wrong).

Sure, it's gorgeous, but I'm pretty sure my computer would choke to death on three or four layers that size.

Edited June 9, 2016 by theonegalen

[Vaporized Steel]

I cant get the clouds to work.

The EVE and BoulderCo folders are present in my gamedata folder and I have 10x Kerbol installed. Scatterer also works fine. I tried to reinstall manually to make sure. Oh, and I use the 4096 textures for RSS.
I do something wrong because I already tried to reinstall the mods manually. Can anybody point out what I might be missing here.

Folders in Gamedata are: Squad, BoulderCo, DistantObject, EngineLight, EnvironmentalVisualEnhancements, Kopernicus, PlanetShine, RealSolar System, RSS-TExtures, Scatterer and Texture Replacer. All the newest Versions for V1.1.2

Edited June 9, 2016 by Vaporized Steel

[Colonel Cbplayer]

18 hours ago, Galenmacil said:

Yes, the Visual Enhancements mod do help. But I just realized that, currently, the problem is we lack a cloud pack for the latest EVE in very high definition. The picture from 0.24 used a 8192x4096 resolution image. That's 32 MB (DDS compressed DXTc5) just for that cloud layer. I imported this DDS file and replaced the default one from Visual Enhancement (that was at 2048x1024) and here are the results:

That is with EVE, Planetshine and Scatterer. You can still see the blur on the other cloud layers from the "low resolution" files at 2048x1024 size.

So, that is it: To achieve incredible result we need very high texture quality, 8192x4096 or more. I believe the maximum for a single DX9 texture sheet is 16384x16384 (anyone correct me if I am wrong).

Any chance you cloud tell me where I can get such a file?

[Vaporized Steel]

NVM, answer is in my own post as I missed out on installing RVE. Clouds are working now

[UnanimousCoward]

3 hours ago, cbplayer2012 said:

Any chance you cloud tell me where I can get such a file?

Complicated version: dig around in the old releases on rbray's github until you find a version with the file you're after. No idea which of the many releases listed there would be right, though.

Simple version: install Stock Visual Enhancements. The ultra-res version uses 4096x4096 textures, and they look great and run great on my machine.

[Waz]

Performance of Cloud Volume Layers is pretty poor, and I think the reason is that every CloudParticle is its own GameObject, MeshRenderer, etc.; with the default 4 subdivisions, this means 817 objects per cloud layer.

Looking at the code, I don't see why these particles can't be done just using Unity's built-in ParticleSystem.

I'd like to look into improving this, but I'd like to hear any gotchas of why it's done this way, or if anyone has actually profiled it and found the cause elsewhere.

[Tekener]

11 minutes ago, Waz said:

Performance of Cloud Volume Layers is pretty poor, and I think the reason is that every CloudParticle is its own GameObject, MeshRenderer, etc.; with the default 4 subdivisions, this means 817 objects per cloud layer.

Looking at the code, I don't see why these particles can't be done just using Unity's built-in ParticleSystem.

I'd like to look into improving this, but I'd like to hear any gotchas of why it's done this way, or if anyone has actually profiled it and found the cause elsewhere.

I am not into the coding, just always looked and played around with the textures and maps. But I don't think there is a real reason to do it by GameObjects other than maybe "it was easier to do it this way" or maybe Unity 4 didn't offered a good enough ParticleSystem.

In my eyes, if you can get it working directly with Unity, you'll be everbody's hero

[Proot]

If I'm not wrong, not much time ago Rbray changed some things to do EVE more compatible with Kopernicus. Probably this is just an undesired secondary effect.

Edited June 10, 2016 by Proot

[Tekener]

But using Particles instead of GameObjects internally in EVE shouldn't have an effect on Kopernicus, or?

[jsimmons]

10 hours ago, Vaporized Steel said:

I cant get the clouds to work.

The EVE and BoulderCo folders are present in my gamedata folder and I have 10x Kerbol installed. Scatterer also works fine. I tried to reinstall manually to make sure. Oh, and I use the 4096 textures for RSS.
I do something wrong because I already tried to reinstall the mods manually. Can anybody point out what I might be missing here.

Folders in Gamedata are: Squad, BoulderCo, DistantObject, EngineLight, EnvironmentalVisualEnhancements, Kopernicus, PlanetShine, RealSolar System, RSS-TExtures, Scatterer and Texture Replacer. All the newest Versions for V1.1.2

Are you using the latest EVE? Their was some problem with the newer EVE with the last 10xKerbol package. I have this fixed in the latest version but haven't released since I was waiting for an offical EVE release. Hmmm, perhaps I should do a release and make a note about using the pre-release

[Waz]

I've done some very quick testing, and switching to a built-in ParticleSystem makes a massive difference - a 5x speed up - volumetric clouds almost become free (on my rig, 55fps with no volumetric clouds, 35fps [10ms cost] with old code, 50fps [2ms cost] with new code). It's only a very rough test for now - I just wanted to confirm that I was looking in the right place. It doesn't orient the particles correctly at all - the CloudParticles constructor is horribly cryptic in its intentions, so I can't work out what the particle shader wants as input. It might even be completely unrepresentative of a final solution, but it does indicate that the cost is in the 817 GameObjects, not the actual rendering of the particles. Unfortunately, in a few hours I'm going traveling for a month, so I won't be able to pursue this further until I get back.

[Tekener]

8 hours ago, Waz said:

I've done some very quick testing, and switching to a built-in ParticleSystem makes a massive difference - a 5x speed up - volumetric clouds almost become free (on my rig, 55fps with no volumetric clouds, 35fps [10ms cost] with old code, 50fps [2ms cost] with new code). It's only a very rough test for now - I just wanted to confirm that I was looking in the right place. It doesn't orient the particles correctly at all - the CloudParticles constructor is horribly cryptic in its intentions, so I can't work out what the particle shader wants as input. It might even be completely unrepresentative of a final solution, but it does indicate that the cost is in the 817 GameObjects, not the actual rendering of the particles. Unfortunately, in a few hours I'm going traveling for a month, so I won't be able to pursue this further until I get back.

This is already an amazing difference, as it would mean that we can extend the volumetric clouds visibility much further with a good computer.

KSP has lived years without particle clouds, I'm sure it can wait a couple of weeks more  

[Moggiog]

Hey, I can't seem to get this mod to work. I've checked the files at least five times, nothing happens. No clouds, no nothing. Although I fear this isn't just this mod, as other mods don't work either.

 

Here's my log. https://www.dropbox.com/s/gddr39f5zn2xu2c/output_log.txt?dl=0