Instant Projected Weather will be released at the end of 2021.
This is a decal based, projected weather system for unreal 4 and
5.
We plan to release a massive update in the future. Its main features are:
World normal and material normal seamless mixing.
Controllable, realistic dispersion model for precipitation.
Realistic modeling of precipitation
Setting of arbitrary water and dry or snow and dry conditions.
An update is expected in the first half of March, those who buy the first version will get it for free.
The math and logic part is ready after some optimization and will be released.
You can follow the development progress in this forum.
We welcome your suggestions for improving the system!
If you want to use the new Unreal Engine 5 version, turn off the dbuffer decal in the project settings.
It seems that the decal settings have not yet been completely finalized by Epic engineers, but dbuffer “true” is the default value when opening a project.
I’m having a little issue with snow in particular. I have a scene with Street lights and Electric wires. Those wires by example are high enough that snow should not be obfuscated on the street.
I see there’s a Height setting but it applies to Far Distance decals.
Any way to have close decals applying only on objects at a certain height or looking at collisions on a different channel ?
Yes!
We know the problem. The cameras are looking perpendicular to the map.
Although the scattering will be much more controllable in the next version, we will also add the possibility to zoom out objects in the next version.
You will get this for free in the first half of March.
I like the feature to be able to rule out some objects like this tree in your video. Neat option. But on a larger scale, if in my city street i have tons of Electric poles and wires, it can be difficult to manage.
Don’t know how this can be possible but if the occlusion is let see say, 10 meters above the ground, can we set a threshold where above this value, snow can accumulate under the object ?
I know not easy problem to solve but thanks to take time to listen to your customers and looking at way to enhance it. Very appreciated.
This more a hack than a complete solution but I’ve been able to achieve what i wanted by changing the Z offset. in this case…when set to a height lower than the pole and the cube on the left, the decal doesn’t occlude.
I know it may be causing some issues on interiors with ceiling higher than the treshold. But it’s a start.
In the next version, there will be no need to exclude power lines and similar narrow objects from the camera’s detection range, because the inward and outward dispersion of precipitation will be adjustable.
This is a very delicate adjustment. But it is likely that a power line is thinner than the wall of a building, so with minimal inward scattering the trace will disappear.
Please see the following picture where you can see the snow has been sprayed under the railing. However, with sufficient wall thickness, it still does not appear in the building.
Regardless, we appreciate your suggestion because it could be used in a dense, wooded area, for example. We will look into this.
Keep in mind, however, that the height of the z-axis of the worldspace can currently be checked from the character position foot.
In hillier places, however, this would not work.
There are two options here if you want to set a height break line.
1, we shoot one ray per camera towards the ground and use this to set the height of the tile cameras. However, this could give undesirable results depending on the higher degree of unevenness of the ground.
2, we obtain the exact elevation data of the landscape, subtract it from the existing data and adjust the boundary value based on it. Somewhat like this, it is an easy calculation:
Here we only have to consider in the future how much extra load this will put on the system as a whole.
Thank you very much for your suggestion, because we need to look at all aspects to create a system that can be used in as wide a field as possible! Often we look too closely at a problem and miss some obvious solutions.
Every suggestion helps, just keep moving forward!
I’m having an issue with sky light not affecting snow. The snow at night still very bright is not being affected whatever Intensity i set the sky. I some personal snow decals I’m using in combination without IPW and they’re reacting as expected.
I tried to play with pretty much all the settings but can get expected results.
The emissive value should be kept as low as possible. For this version I used a stain sticker.
So you have to decrease the emissive value as the light decreases, then the snow will be darker.
In version two I try to reduce this dependency. Emissive lighting will not be needed for snow, although snow can still be very bright in some cases.
I’m currently working on adjusting these values, but I also need a dimming system to avoid excessive contrast in dark scenes.
Sorry for the delay in replying, my email account for some reason did not flag me with your question.
You can also try to play with the specular and colour value of the decal material. But the update is really not far away. There these problems are already fixed.
Of course, there will probably be other items to fix there too, but we’ll go with it.
maybe can you let us know here when you send the update to Epic ? just the Epic Launcher sucks at giving us update. Sometimes it takes a little while or if you deleted the content from the launcher, there’s no way to find out if it was updated ( unless I’m missing something)
Of course!
I will post it here on the forum and on the marketplace site.
We plan to release it in about a week, if the various tests are done by then and the code cleanup is finished.
A lot of the elements can only be set now using a hands-on approach, to give users a good starting point for setting values. This is time-consuming. We are also hopeful that we will no longer have to deal with unexpected artifacts popping up on the various test tracks that need to be fixed.
The update will be released under 4.27, 4.26 is not affected. Because it will be a version change, a lot of old values will be broken, so those who are using V1 and don’t have the need for V2 will still have access to the 4.26 branch.
Yes.
I am in the process of cleaning the code. There have been some delays due to other deadlines, but I plan to submit IPW V2 to EPIC this weekend.
Perhaps, I’d like to make a timeline for the demo, showing how the precipitation is formed. I think this could be useful for many people. But it might be added after the next update, because I want to make a calendar system for the program.
