Sup everyone.
So I’ve been unpacking Unreal’s default sky material and rebuilding it into something more realistic and useable. This is a bit of a work in progress, But I’ve been rendering out custom skydomes and steadily working over the blueprint and material setup Which is sorta working and sorta not. I sorta get where they’re coming from and once you use actual skydomes with proper alphas and everything their techniques are pretty fantastic. So I expanded them… But… I’m running into some issues with the way the material is handling emission values and black points. Or dark points, which is that they become see through. So you can have a texture that has these great brooding dark clouds, and the material just puts out the brighter bits and treats the dark areas as transparent. Which is cool, coz when you layer different clouds and alphas it makes every skydome texture incredibly versatile.
And if you do what I’ve done, you can get everything flowing and moving and blending, which is one of my goals, clouds that blend over time and change shape. So you never see the same thing twice. Without needing to animate.
Nonetheless being able to blend in a dark option that pulls the darker bits of clouds in would be nice. I haven’t figured how to do that yet. So if anyone has any ideas. I’d love to hear them. Take a look at the sky material that comes default, if you can figure out what’s controlling this particular bit, let me know.
Gonna need to implement a new skydome that allows me to pull in more localised flat clouds that can go overhead as everything’s spinning around the pole. Can’t be helped because of the rendering method I used to make the textures, but that can be sorted easy enough.
Lighting is also janky. Some wierd saturation shifts, and improper highlighting, and in some cases emission burnout.
My goal is to make a sky material that’s highly dynamic and simulates lighting and mood conditions really well but is also very realistic. I’m also building it to have a few variables that majorly change the look and feel, so you just have a sorta mojo dial that you twiddle till something cool comes out. The cloud styling coming from the interaction between the alpha layers and cloud sets.
I’ll have a video up later to show more in depth, but here’s a few screenshots. Many of these come from the same sets of cloud textures. I can get wildly different looks just by changing the opacity for instance. And everything moves and blends over time.
I can make an African sun. 
