Smart Lights
Smart Lights is a production-ready Unreal Engine plugin for driving Point Lights, Spot Lights, and Rect Lights with a flexible Time of Day workflow.
Instead of building custom lighting logic from scratch, SmartLights gives you a complete system for animating light behavior over a 24-hour cycle using curves, reusable presets, built-in scheduled events, custom events, and Blueprint-friendly controls.
The plugin includes dedicated Smart Lights actors, a global Time Of Day Subsystem, project-level settings, per-level overrides, editor preview tools, and example content to help you get started quickly.
Smart Lights is designed for artists, level designers, and technical users who want a fast and practical way to create dynamic lighting transitions such as morning, midday, sunset, night, interior light activation, cinematic lighting changes, or gameplay-driven time shifts.
What you can do with SmartLights
Drive light properties over time using curves, reuse setups through presets, trigger day-phase and lighting events automatically, preview the result in the editor, control the timeline through Blueprint, and integrate selected properties with Sequencer when you need direct animation control.
This makes SmartLights useful for:
day / night lighting setups
interior and exterior lighting transitions
stylized or cinematic lighting changes
gameplay events tied to time progression
quick prototyping of time-based lighting logic
reusable lighting setups across multiple levels
Key features
Dedicated Smart Light actors
SL Point Light
SL Spot Light
SL Rect Light
Time Of Day Subsystem
Global 0–24 hour time flow
Internal runtime clock
External time control support
Blueprint access for setting, adding, starting, and stopping time
Curve-driven light behavior
Animate supported light properties across the day
Use runtime curves directly on actors
Create smooth day-to-night transitions without custom code
Preset workflow
Reusable light preset assets
Per-property preset overrides
Faster setup for large scenes and repeated light styles
Built-in scheduled events
Midnight
Day
Sunrise
Midday
Sunset
Evening
Night
Turn On Lights
Turn Off Lights
Custom scheduled events
Define your own event IDs, hours, and tags
Query event state in Blueprint
Trigger gameplay or environment logic from time-based milestones
Static Time mode
Useful for baked or fixed-time scenarios
Lets lights evaluate at a chosen local time instead of relying on runtime progression
Sequencer support
Selected light properties can be animated through actor-level Sequencer tracks
SmartLights can release Sequencer ownership and return control to plugin logic
Editor-focused workflow
Custom editor UI
Time preview tools
Project settings and per-level override workflow
Example setup included for learning and testing
Networking support for time synchronization
Includes time sync proxy logic for networked projects
Included content
Runtime plugin module
Editor plugin module
Smart Point / Spot / Rect light actors
Time Of Day controller and subsystem
Example Blueprints
Example presets
Showcase level
Showcase sequence
Ideal for
SmartLights is a strong fit for projects that need a clean, reusable, and designer-friendly way to control light behavior over time without building a custom time-of-day lighting framework from the ground up.
It works especially well for:
stylized games
realistic environments
horror scenes
architectural visualization
cinematic levels
prototypes and small teams that want fast results
Technical notes
Includes C++ runtime and editor modules
Supports Point, Spot, and Rect Smart Lights
Example content is included to demonstrate the workflow
Focused on lighting control and time-based behavior, not a full sky/weather system