Procedural Worlds Skies, HDRP and Gaia Pro 2021

[mroshaw]

Hello!

Just a quick question: HDRP support for "Procedural World Skies" has been "coming soon" to Gaia Pro 2021 for about as long as I've owned it! Is it coming soon, and is it coming to Gaia Pro 2021?

I read something the other day about Gaia Pro 2022, and am rather hoping I don't miss the boat on full HDRP skies and weather in this current iteration. Especially as it was "coming soon" to 2021 when I bought it last year.

Thanks again for your thoughts!

[Peter]

Hi there, please note that we have a preview of the HDRP sky system out already for a while. You can find it in the Gaia Advanced tab under "Gaia Runtime", and it requires Unity 2021.2 to function. It features the new volumetric clouds of HDRP, you can see those briefly in action at the beginning and the end of this video:
 

We should be able to put this state of the sky system out of preview within the Gaia 2021 release cycle still.
The development of the sky system was a bit troubled / delayed in so far that originally we did have our procedural worlds sky with our own clouds & weather system, but which would cause issues in every new major HDRP version since the tech kept changing all the time. When we learned that unity would add a "physically based sky system" to HDRP we put the development on that on hold to not re-invent the wheel with our own proprietary stuff.
At the beginning we landed in a dead end, because the physically based sky system arrived but had one major drawback which was extreme performance issues when you would change the position of the light source (sun / moon)...which is kinda bad if you want to develop a day / night cycle. So we could not continue on that until that was resolved / the sky system was more stable.
This was the reason why the overall development took longer than anticipated and the "coming soon" was a bit optimistic, but we were not able to foresee that at the time we put that there.

[Luis]

Currently the clouds are rendering behind the ocean. Is there a a workaround for this?

Also is there any documentation (even if WIP) for the settings in the "Procedural World Skies"?

[Bryan]

6 hours ago, Luis said:

Currently the clouds are rendering behind the ocean. Is there a a workaround for this?

Also is there any documentation (even if WIP) for the settings in the "Procedural World Skies"?

This seems like a rendering / layer order issue on the camera I would check here.