I’ve made a custom moon mesh that is just a static mesh really far out, textured to look like a moon. My problem is when the clouds float by they’re behind the moon. Since they are part of the sky sphere I can’t just move stuff around. Is there a way I could get a new skysphere with just clouds and move it in front of the moon?
Make custom clouds that behave differently?
Any help appreciated.
The clouds are mapped to a sphere, that’s why you can’t use that. You can, however, manipulate the skysphere blueprint to blend in a texture of the moon that is behind the clouds.
That is the first approach I took when making my moon. I ended up using an actor bp instead in the end as it fit my game’s needs much better.
I’m working up to making weather and sky stuff so if I could just remove the clouds and have dynamic ones instead that is also a solution if you know any good tuts on that stuff.
I ended up having to make two sky spheres. One that had clouds and nothing else and one that had the sky textures. Then scale the textured one to be larger and have a space in between them is where I set my moon actor.
Make sure you don’t change the default engine sky if you take this approach. Copy and paste then edit it.
@mrtuey - How would you do this? I have the same problem. I was able to get around it some with the moons by putting them higher in the sky where they don’t go behind clouds, or making them partially transparent, but now I am trying to put in the rings of Saturn, and neither of those tricks I used will work for that…
A trick I used for this problem is to make the moon largely transparent (like 20% opacity), and it looks pretty decent. I did this in Planetary Settlers for IO, in Jupiter’s sky. While the moon is actually in front of the clouds, it looks like the clouds are in front of it due to the transparency of the moon. It would still be better to have the clouds actually be in front of the moon though…
Alternate method: Make the sky color partially transparent and place the moon outside the skysphere. I ended up making a copy of the skysphere, and a copy of the material it uses toward the beginning of the skysphere blueprint (do not edit the original). I edited the material that is used in the “Create Dynamic Material Instance” node. I changed the material from “Opaque” to “Translucent”, and put a wire from the opacity of “Overall Color” into “Opacity”. I then changed the Overall Color opacity to 20%, and the whole skysphere became translucent. Now you can see through it to objects behind as desired.
I ended up having to make two sky spheres. One that had clouds and nothing else and one that had the sky textures. Then scale the textured one to be larger and have a space in between them is where I set my moon actor.
Make sure you don’t change the default engine sky if you take this approach. Copy and paste then edit it.