HDRP Time Of Day - Lighting, Weather & Clouds

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Did you ever create a great outdoors scene in Unity, but were let down by the lighting?

Lighting can be one of the biggest challenges in the HD render pipeline - there are so many settings that influence the end result.

It is easy to take the wrong turn and end up with a completely misconfigured scene, especially under the dynamic conditions of a running day-and-night cycle. This just gets even more difficult when you add in clouds and weather as well.

But, when lighting and post fx is done right, it can transform a mediocre scene into something full of wonder and joy, and this is what HDRP Time Of Day can do for you!

HDRP Time of Day is a lighting system with day-and-night cycle, volumetric clouds and weather effects out of the box, and all managed from one convenient place.

It also contains a weather effects system that allow you to simulate the change in lighting that occur during snow, rainfall, sandstorms or your own custom weather effects.

Our dynamic lighting probe system allows you to use baked reflection probes in a dynamic day and night cycle to get a rich balanced depth to your scene which is difficult to achieve otherwise.

HDRP Time of Day is integrated with Gaia Pro 2021, and GTS - Glyph Terrain Shader so that weather effects are transparently replicated across your entire scene!

Features

HDRP Day and night cycle with light, sky and post processing adapting to the current time of day and weather.

Seamlessly tune the most important aspects of your HDRP lighting setup during the different times of day with curves and gradients.

Weather Effect System with Rain, Snow and Sand Storms - Extensible so you can add in your own weather effects. (Weather effects rendering on the terrain will require a compatible terrain shader, e.g. GTS)

Reflection Probe system to support a baked global reflection probes with changing lighting conditions.

Profile based - save your favorite settings to use them in other scenes / projects.

Fully compatible with native HDRP features / effects.

Night sky with stars and moon.

Local override volumes.

Supports Unity versions 2021.3 and up, including Unity 6!

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Release Notes

V1.2.3

Now compatible with Unity 6 Important: When running in Unity 6, please install the Unity 6 support package located inside the HDRP Time of Day folder. This will update the weather VFX graphs for Unity 6.
Changed lighting settings for demo scene to avoid issues with Unity 6
Fixed placement of the demo interior weather controllers in the demo scene

V1.2.2

Removed the assembly definition files, as they could cause cross-asset issues.

V1.2.1

Improved compatibility with Unity 2023.1 and 2023.2
Optimized weather shaders
Added "Darker Night" feature that lets you tweak select values to tune your scene towards "realistic" dark nights or brighter "video game" nights.
Bugfixes and smaller improvements

V1.2.0

Please note: This version requires a clean install due to script reorganization! If you have a previous version installed, please perform the following:

Remove the old Assets/Procedural Worlds/HDRP Time Of Day folder
Open Edit > Project Settings > Player and look for the "Scripting Defines" section. Remove the "HDRPTIMEOFDAY" scripting define and click "Apply"

Then install as usual. Should you have missed any of these steps earlier, you can perform them now to get a clean install. Please remember that when installing alongside Gaia, there is a menu entry under Window > Procedural Worlds > HDRP Time Of Day to remove old Gaia files as well.

2022.2 support. (Fixed compile errors; now uses volume blending for better performance when transitioning to a weather effect)
Assembly Definition Files can now be used more quickly due to script reorganization
Ray tracing improvements (More settings, better defaults, and using ray trace utilities to separate the code)
Ray Tracing Utils (Beta) Window that helps you optimize your prefabs for ray tracing use. (Open Window/Procedural Worlds/HDRP Time Of Day/Open Ray Tracing Utils…)
Ray tracing "Show in editor" option to disable ray tracing in the scene view.
Scene culling added. (Camera layer culling and shadow culling system)
Override volume improvements (Slight tweaks and performance improvements)
Added physical camera exposure. (Using the physical camera settings to control the lighting exposure in the scene instead of fixed values)
Added Cinemachine support. (Applies the physical exposure to all cinemachine cameras. You can enable this by going to camera settings in time of day and clicking Enable Cinemachine)
Improvements to weather transition.
API improvements.
Interior controller improvements. (Added a fog blend option that inverts the local volumetric fog based on the controller settings to help you hide fog inside the volume space)
Weather bug fixes. (Bug where the weather would not startup properly due to missing assigned vfx prefabs/objects)
Improved light probe generation (Added a new light probe volume to create probes within a volume space and have object avoidance)
Reflection probe system improvements. (Probe system now uses a transition system for blending so no changes in lighting are visible)
Additional Probes system (This system allows you to make interior probes assign a profile and control the global intensity to balance out interior lighting to make it darker. Can see samples in the demo scene)
Improved lighting when using probe system. (Probes blend better with the new lighting)
SSGI support in the reflection probe system for better lighting results when using SSGI.
New light sync component. (A component to sync lights up to switch on at night. This system also has a light and shadow culling system to optimize the performance)
Material sync system. (Allows you to change material settings such as like turning on emission material properties when it’s night time)
Underwater system: You can now connect audio reverb presets to a sea level
New Underwater system mode: Time Of Day, allows you to just set a sea level value)
Performance improvements.
Improved lighting at sunrise/sunset. (Lighting overview and defaults updated to improve the starting setup)
Added smart transition for auto exposure to help transition dark to light/light to dark when the sun goes down and the moon rises. This helps remove dark/pitch black transitions when the light source is on the horizon.
Setup improvements. (Fixed some bugs in the setup process that caused some issues)
Audio mixer support to the ambient audio. (Can now assign audio mixer to the ambient audio for better control and to apply effects)
Free camera updates and improvements. (Added a scroll to zoom in and out when not moving and holding RMB)
Demo scene updated with new systems.
A few more global multipliers added to the HDRP settings
Presets manager to load up different times of the day quickly.
Manual refresh menu item added to auto refresh the script defines to load/unload scripting defines related to time of day.

& many additional smaller fixes and improvements

V1.1.0

Improved installation alongside Gaia Pro 2021: If Gaia Pro 2021 is present in the project, HDRP TOD will now automatically remove the older, embedded version in Gaia - it is not required to delete files manually anymore.
Removed Gradient Sky option (never used).
Space rotation (Rotates the star field slowly to give a more dynamic effect).
Improved weather transition fade in/out (If weather fx is stopped mid-way).
Improved execution performance when processing TOD.
Editor UX cleanup.
Interior controllers, manage weather particle effects using AABox for collisions setup to get more realistic visuals.
Added multi blend stages to interior controllers (Enables collisions in the blend bounds then changing audio reverb in the main bounds area).
Added priority for interior controllers.
Fixed shader manager get sand albedo was getting snow instead.
Weather fx improvements.
Cloud layer now gets applied correctly during weather transitions.
Fixed bug when weather fx finished the transition the clouds would pop and go dark.
Fixed camera settings not being applied.
Added TOD shader variants asset.
Fixed some on-import compile errors.
Start/stop button added to debug UI.
Removed legacy systems code form the core system (Code cleanup).
HDRPTimeOfDayProfile.CopySettings now copies all the settings correctly.
Slight improvements to ‘Automatic Exposure’ mode.
Reflection probe system improvements when weather is transitioning in/out.
Applying shader settings during weather fx improved and optimized.
Optimized HDRPTimeOfDayComponentType (Moved the update follow transform part of this script to HDRPTimeOfDayTransformTracker) This removes 7 update calls and just now uses only 1.
Added some more default settings to the default profile allowing users to customize the default setup of time of day.
LitWeather shader now support alpha clipping.
Improved GTS support.
Demo scene for override volumes and interior controllers added.