Hello Unreal Engine, Hello forums.
I’m coming from unity3d, and started experimenting with unreal engine. Loving it so far.
I’m only in experimenting phase so far, and I’m trying to create a day/night cycle using blueprints. I wanted to use the BP_Sky_Sphere out of the box to create cycle, however I’ve noticed that it does not update the sky colors on rotation change of my directional light source; and I’m needing to press “refresh material” every time I want to see a change. Is ther any way to see the changes directly in editor (when changing the directional light position with hand) without needing to play or siulate?
thanks.
Hey -
Directly there is not, because the light itself is not a part of the Blueprints. The Refresh Material option is actually forcing the blueprint to re-read the information. You could go in and actually add some nodes into the construction script or even add the light itself to the components and get a more responsive skybox.
Thank You
Have a look at the following thread, and download thier sample project, it allows you to change the sky colors based on time of day, and is a great example for how to add these to your projects:
And the demo project download can be found here:
I have used it myself in the past, and is a great starting point for making your own system, or even just uses the example itself. The demo is fully functional (only missing a moon. Does include horizon/zenith/cloud/SunColor LinearColor curves that can change colors over a set amount of time and easy to tweak), so you can migrate the assets over to your project and go from there. Hope you find it useful! 
Thank you very much for the replies, I’ll be playing around more