Weather Maker - Volumetric Clouds and Weather System for Unity

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Overview

Weather Maker is the most complete weather, water, day/night cycle, volumetric cloud/fog/light, terrain overlay and sky system for Unity. With both 2D and 3D modes, Weather Maker is the last asset you will need for weather, sky and more in your Unity app or game. Full C# source code and shader code is provided! Just drop a prefab in your scene and it's ready to go! Weather Maker will save you thousands of hours of development time.

Rendering and Pipeline support

Weather Maker supports Standard (Unity 2019.4 or newer) and URP 11-13 or newer (URP on Unity 2021 only) pipelines, along with VR/AR (VR/AR in standard pipeline only). Color spaces of HDR, non-HDR, Linear, Gamma are supported. Deferred and Forward Rendering paths are also supported. No matter how you use it, Weather Maker just works. The one exception is alpha or beta Unity. I don't support those.

Value

Weather Maker is many assets in one. Weather, sky, day/night cycle, 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.

Performance

Weather Maker has been tuned for years for maximum performance. Weather Maker adapts to the Unity quality level to ensure maximum FPS. Performance profiles allow customization of various Weather Maker effects for custom solutions.

Floating Point Origin Offset

Weather Maker contains an easy to use floating point origin offset solution. For flight simulators or large worlds, you can pick a distance which will reset the camera position back to 0,0,0. When the camera exceeds this distance from the origin (0,0,0), Weather Maker will trigger a callback event. Weather Maker has an option to re-position all the root game objects for you, or you can do it yourself in the callback event. A cumulative offset is provided that you can use in any shaders that rely on world positions to generate noise. The current offset is also provided in case you need it to re-position game objects or do other logic.

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. Clouds play nice with the depth buffer and can receive cascade shadow map shadows.

Atmosphere and Sky

Weather Maker contains an industry standard, BSD licensed physically based sky and volumetric atomspheric scattering solution. The atmospheric scattering and sky sphere blend seamlessly with your scene, producing a gorgeous planet curve at the far plane, just make sure your camera has a large 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 for each. 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 Maker does not use a texture lookup for the aurora, it is all done in a procedural shader, ensuring a life-like and natural look - without impacting performance. No other asset provides a 100% procedural aurora borealis nor one as configurable.

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. Drop a dynamic water prefab in your scene and get one draw call full light support. Performance is great, even on mobile! 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!

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:

• Wet Stuff
• Crest Ocean - Standard Pipeline
• PlayMaker
• Vegetation Studio Pro
• Mega Splat
• Micro Splat
• Mirror Networking
• uMMORPG
• UBER - Standard Shader Ultra
• RTP (Relief Terrain Pack)
• WAPI (World Manager API)

Weather Maker is Compatible With:

• Aura 2

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Titles using Weather Maker:

• Acclimate
• Monks: Succession
• Nightvision
• Angle Wars
• Tales of Glory
• Before the Dawn
• Country Cottage (Winter Edition)

Please email me if you have a title to add.

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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.

View the documentation / readme.txt here: View Readme.txt

Contact Me

I'm Jeff Johnson, creator of Weather Maker. Please send feedback or support requests to [email protected].

Requirements / Known Issues

- Weather Maker requires Unity 2019.4 or newer. Ensure you are using Unity hub with the latest minor version of your Unity version.

- URP requires Unity 2021. Unity 2022 is not supported yet. URP deferred requires URP 12 or newer. URP VR not supported.

- Weather Maker does NOT support WebGL, OpenGL, OpenGL ES or DirectX 9.0.

- Weather Maker requires texture array support.

- Weather Maker requires one license per human using the asset in the Unity editor.