The hotfix 1.2d was released today. Note that to see the clouds when in editor you need to check DevelopmentMode at the BP_CloudscapeSeasons blueprint. Even if not checked when you run in editor you will see clouds. Also at the store page there is a link for the Config folder to be overwritten when you want to run the Demo Maps only, they are not important to overwrite on your own project.
Update for UE4.22 been released was sent today! You need to update your UE4.22 project in order to work, since there were changes in the engine which will prevent the older releases to operate properly.
PS: It is up!
Spring Sales Event is up and Cloudscape Seasons are at 20% discount. Grab it now, because next update with lots of features it will get base price raised!
Hey, I’ve been using your clouds for some time and they are really impressive. However, I have a few issues. I am working with the newest version on UE4 4.21. On the two photos, you can see the same location but rotated 180 degrees. When you look at the sun the clouds are illuminated nicely, but when you turn around everything turns dark. Is there a way to control this? The second question is about VR. Do you think that a scene above clouds like on the photos can run smoothly on 2080Ti?
@kubapie The Clouds block the sunlight and this is the reason why it is dark when you look at the opposite side (it is meant to be this way). The material takes into account the directional light’s angle (the one acting as Sun). If you want to have that portion illuminated the same, then you need to provide different lights as follow:
a) make sure you have 1 directional light (lets call this light_hack) set at BP_CloudscapeSeasons and that it is positioned 90 degrees in relation to the ground
b) make sure you have 1 directional light (lets call this sunlight) set at BP_SkySeasons
c) make sure to use the same light in “b” set at BP_TheSun
This directional light in “a” should do the trick, but you will need to find a way to turn it off when you don’t need it anymore based on “b” angle maybe. Probably you will need to carefully adjust the intensities on “a” and “b”, and also at BP_SkySeasons you will need to adjust the sunlight intensity in the material applied in the sky dome.
As for the question regarding performance in VR, if the directional lights are static lights you might have the extra performance you need. Is this urgent by the way? The next update will bring an extra performance that will very fit your VR needs too (we cut off 5 ms on the rendering time, approx 28% more performance), but we are still working on it as fast as we can, but we decided to release a great amount of work at once, so is taking more time for tweaking.
PS: the performance gains are real even if using 4K coverage textures.
@NilsonLima Thank you for the tip. It works much better now. It would be best for me if you released it in the second half of April. Do you think it is possible?
I hope we can do it, it is just taking more time than we expected, but I am afraid that even if we can release at that time frame, the amount of new resources to learn might take an added extra time you won’t have. We just condensed into one single update the amount of features previously planned for a year long of development… mainly because we want to finish it and then focus on the Ocean asset we have been working on for a year now.
Just a sneak peak of what is coming… we will release more videos on the progress on each feature we tweaked and QAed.
Since there are plenty of new users for the asset, the basic tutorial video was not synchronized enough with the current asset functionality and those users are having a hard time to follow up with the videos, then I have made a replacement video updated to the release 1.2d. Don’t get disappointed yet, we are diligently working on the release 1.5 and more new stuff are coming. (it is just a year worth of new features to be delivered at once)
Another progress video for release 1.5 - part 2/4 - Rain / Stylized / Evolution Orchestrator
While we advance in the wrapping up on the changes for the release 1.5, follow the current performance measurements we got with a GTX 1080 (no TI) running with Scalability settings at Epic, except Foliage and Shadow which were set at Medium, and main directional light as Sunlight as dynamic (movable):
4k - 42 FPS
1440p - 69 FPS
1080p - 105 FPS
We will add in the next video (part 3/4) these measurements and showing off the stylized environments, snow, extra rain things, some extra cloud shapes! Don’t miss the video!
We tried another optimization using Blue Noise, after trying it the correct way it didn’t give the most performance expected (another big texture lookup took out the advantage), but after using it as a mask at the overall coverage texture + the settings from the tests above we got:
4k - 46 FPS
1440p - 86 FPS
1080p - 128 FPS
the Blue Noise texture used was a 2k texture, so maybe do another test with a 4k texture and see how it changes the performance. It might worth later implement an automatic performance adjustment based on the current usage and resolution x camera’s position and movement speed while 4k got only 9% improvement, the other resolutions got 20%+ improvement and since the idea is to not render all pixels for the clouds, seems interesting, up to the point it start changing the aspect of the clouds.
The new set of features are still in tweaking phase and I am sure all will be pleased. The Tornado effect and the demo level we made for it is breathtaking!
We will have a new PDF as documentation inside the package and 10 videos focusing in the following:
01 - Quick setup and general features
02 - Using the material sets and performance sets
03 - New Cloud types & Modeling clouds and choosing where they will appear (also using Photoshop/Krita)
04 - Custom cloud shapes (featuring a heart shape cloud)
05 - Cartoon and stylized clouds
06 - Tornado effect, wind and debris (Tornado is fully volumetric)
07 - Rain with Lightning & Thunder and Snow (6 types of rain intensities and 6 types of snow intensities, all done with particle systems)
08 - Auxiliary materials for wet ground, water droplets and streaks at glass, water ripples, snow accumulation, polar lights, rainbow (for both rain and snow specific cases) etc
09 - Package auxiliary blueprints: mask for rain and snow blockers, evolution orchestrator and mesh volume texture renderer.
10 - Showcasing all maps and the free features built-in
I will also add an extra video some time after the update launch with a step-by-step tutorial on how the Tornado effect was made.
Currently we are finishing the tweaking and starting the tests of all features in DX11, DX12, Vulkan and OpenGL. This update will go all the way from UE4.17 to UE4.22 this time, but there is a chance in the future we will make a choice of updating on the most recent releases only in case of new improvements using specific new features like Volume Textures, Blueprint Utility, etc.
Id like also to thank for the support for the last few months which has been great in terms of sales! Cheers!
Check out the new working in progress videos for the release 1.5 in the final stages of development and tests.
video part 1/4:
video part 2/4: UE4 - Cloudscape Seasons 1.5 - Progress 2/4 - YouTube
video part 3/4: UE4 - Cloudscape Seasons 1.5 - Progress 3/4 - YouTube
video part 4/4:
Update 1.5 expected to release at first half of August 2019.
After the release we will focus on other projects to get back to this one and continue on the update 2.0 mentioned at the end of the last video. The update 2.0 will require UE4.21 for the new planned features and they can’t be made in earlier releases.
Very problematic bug in UE4.23 which happens when Raytracing is Enabled. Currently it affects several of our projects and probably several projects in the UE4 Marketplace. Cloudscape Seasons is one of the projects affected, since the material fails to compile there won’t be any clouds. The tracker issue is this one: Unreal Engine Issues and Bug Tracker (UE-77601)
The devs marked this issue with UE4.23 (and 4.24) as having a fix for the release of UE4.23, which is expected since is a regression bug because a new feature (Raytracing) being introduced. The fix is not present in the preview 3, so we still need to wait.
Just in case it is not fixed, we have a workaround we can do which is bring the Noise Node code inside the materials, which will require tests to see if will affect performance or not, and this would be a required step since the Marketplace user interface will require that any asset update be marked for 4.23 aswel, so we can’t submit with a bug.
Another video added showing the release 1.5
While doing some tests with release 1.5 on the supported UE4 releases:
- 4.17: new features OK, optimizations OK
- 4.18: new features OK, optimizations OK
- 4.19: new features OK, optimizations 3/4 OK
- 4.20: new features 9/10 OK, optimizations 3/4 OK
- 4.21: new features 8/10 OK, optimizations 2/4 OK
- 4.22: new features 7/10 OK, optimizations 2/4 OK
- 4.23: new features 7/10 OK, optimizations 1/4 OK - an issue is said to be fixed for next preview and final release: Unreal Engine Issues and Bug Tracker (UE-77601)
so, we are diligently working on fixes and workarounds for the found issues at 4.19, 4.20, 4.21, 4.22 and 4.23. First, we will try to make the fixes and workarounds specific for each release and propagate to the later releases, second, we will see if these fixes and workarounds works fine if present in earlier releases, ensuring every release user has exactly the same code running, which reduces the work in case of upgrading project with newer releases.
With the new preview 5 for the UE4.23 the issue Unreal Engine Issues and Bug Tracker (UE-77601) is confirmed by me to be fixed, so not affecting Cloudscape Seasons anymore.
Just made a video about the asset (release 1.2d) behavior with Realtime Raytracing that you can watch here:
And the final touches and tests for the release 1.5 progress:
- 4.17: new features OK, optimizations OK
- 4.18: new features OK, optimizations OK
- 4.19: new features OK, optimizations 3/4 OK
- 4.20: new features 10/10 OK, optimizations 3/4 OK
- 4.21: new features 9/10 OK, optimizations 3/4 OK
- 4.22: new features 8/10 OK, optimizations 2/4 OK
- 4.23: new features 8/10 OK, optimizations 1/4 OK
The asset is at 30% discount at UE4 Marketplace and will last for few days. Don’t miss the opportunity.