Description
Value
Weather Maker is many assets in one. Weather, sky, water, volumetric clouds, light and fog, lightning, ambient sound and more. You could spend 300 USD or more buying the pieces individually and then spend a few months integrating them together, or you could just get Weather Maker and have everything already integrated. AAA games, indie games, prototypes and apps are all a great fit for Weather Maker.
Scriptable Render Pipeline
Weather Maker supports Lightweight Render Pipeline (2019.1 Unity or newer with LWRP 5.X) and Standard Pipeline (2017.4 Unity or newer). Please see instructions in the readme.txt file on how to turn on Lightweight Render Pipeline.
Performance
Weather Maker has been tuned for years for maximum performance. Whether on the bleeding edge of desktop GPU or VR or even mobile, Weather Maker will run smoothly. Weather Maker adapts to the Unity quality level to ensure maximum FPS.
Volumetric Clouds
Using state of the art shaders and performance techniques, volumetric clouds look beautiful and won’t bog down your frame rate. Rolling, whispy and epic clouds react to ambient, directional lights and lightning for that AAA look and feel. Even cubemaps and water reflection show the clouds effortlessly. Cloud probes allow easy access to cloud density for any Transform component (and run on the GPU!). To top it off, you can fly-through the clouds and god rays are built into the clouds.
Atmosphere and Sky
Weather Maker contains an industry standard, BSD licensed physically based sky and atomspheric scattering solution. Atmospheric scattering and sky sphere blend seamlessly with your scene, producing a gorgeous planet curve at the far plane. The sky sphere can render many texture types including night sky with rotation, along with day and dawn/dusk textures. No cube map is needed, just one 2D texture. Performance is superb. All of this is configurable.
Weather Effects
Weather effects include rain, snow, hail and sleet. Collision with scene is optional. Particle systems are lit properly by all lights in your scene. All weather effects fade cleanly both visual and audio to ensure a life-like and smooth experience. Wind is bundled as well and affects particles and trees. Sound dampening prefabs are provided to handle cases where the player goes inside. Animated puddles on ground available too. Null zones ensure that weather stays away from indoor areas.
Weather API Integration
Weather Maker integrates with open weather map out of the box, but it’s super easy to create your own weather api provider.
Aurora Borealis / Northern Lights
Spice up your night sky with the beautiful aurora borealis. Customize colors, shape, detail, height, animation and much more. The aurora renders smoothly around your planet, even from space!
Weather Zones
Easily attach a weather profile to a collider and create a weather zone. As the player moves into the zone, weather changes randomly to the profile for that zone. Add null zones with a box collider (with rotation and scale) to block precipitation, fog, etc. from showing in a certain area (building, cave, etc.). Or just activate the global weather zone for instant random weather with one click! Integrates great with vegetation studio pro biomes.
Day/Night Cycle
Weather Maker contains a fully functional day and night cycle. Ambient light, directional light, shadows, latitude, longitude, planet axis and more are configurable. Sun and moon position is accurate to the date and time. Stars rotate during the night with just a single night texture. No cubemap needed.
Water
Water is built right in. For the price of other water only assets, you get Weather Maker with water! Drop a dynamic water prefab in your scene and get one draw call full light support. Performance is perfect, even on VR and mobile! Weather Maker has the only water on the asset store that renders reflections in VR in multi-pass and single pass stereo. Underwater mode with water fog is supported and looks great with the new post processing stack. Waves, caustics, shore-line, water profiles, tesselation and auto water height map give you the best water in the asset store.
Volumetric Fog and Lights
Weather Maker fog is a full screen effect that has been tuned to run on the lowest end devices. No branching and ray-tracing and one draw call and the fog still looks amazing. A fog box and sphere prefab is also included. Volumetric light is supported for point, spot, area and directional lights as well. The main directional light (sun) even has a volumetric shadow option! Other assets use slightly mad volumetric lighting which kills performance, but not Weather Maker. Fog + volumetric lights in ONE draw call!
VR, AR & Mobile Ready!
Weather Maker is fully VR/AR ready and has been tested with HTC Vive on Windows 10. Performance on mobile is great, but may require tuning some settings. One asset for desktop, VR/AR and mobile and performance is superb.
Color and Rendering Formats
Weather Maker supports HDR, non-HDR, Linear, Gamma, Deferred and Forward Rendering. No matter how you use it, Weather Maker just works.
Sound Manager
Weather Maker manages ambient and other sounds for you. All sounds fade in and out seamlessly and can run at different times of day (sunrise / sunset, dawn/dusk, or a specific hour range). You can create sounds zones throughout your scene or put one on top of your player for global sounds. Examples are provided and include crickets and owls at night, birds in the morning and general day ambient sounds.
Networking
Mirror networking is built in out of the box. Weather profiles and time of day are synced automatically. This can easily be disabled if you need a custom solution.
Lightning
Thunder and lightning – Weather Maker comes bundled with a piece of Procedural Lightning to give you the best storm lightning on the Asset Store.
Weather Maker is Integrated With:
• Crest Ocean
• PlayMaker
• Vegetation Studio Pro
• Mirror Networking
• uMMORPG
• AQUAS: Water/River Set
• UBER – Standard Shader Ultra
• RTP (Relief Terrain Pack)
• CTS (Complete Terrain Shader)
• WAPI (World Manager API)
Weather Maker is Compatible With:
• Aura 2
Support
I’m dedicated to making this the best sky and weather system, not just in the Asset Store but on the planet. I respond to emails and do my best to fix bugs and do feature requests. Please don’t hesitate to contact me.
Contact Me
I’m Jeff Johnson, creator of Weather Maker. Please send me your feedback and bug reports to support@digitalruby.com
Requirements / Known Issues
– Weather Maker requires Unity 2017.4 or newer. Ensure you are using Unity hub with the latest minor version of your Unity version.
– Weather Maker requires texture array support.
– Weather Maker does not yet support HDRP.
– Weather Maker is NOT supported on gles 2.0, WebGL, Android VR and DirectX 9.0 or older.
– Weather Maker does NOT support OpenGL on MAC and iOS. Metal is required.
– Weather Maker does not support multi-pass VR due to Unity and SteamVR bugs.
– Clouds don’t play nice with depth buffer. New Unity shuriken particle system clouds will, and are coming ‘when they are ready’. This will also improve flythrough to not require temporal AA or blur.
– Weather Maker requires one license per human using the asset in the Unity editor.
