Fast Stylized Procedural Sky

Hello, I would like to introduce you one month of my work that will be available on the store very soon :slight_smile:

Fast Stylized Procedural Sky is a unique dynamic sky material and advanced weather system that is perfectly balanced between quality and efficiency. Designed and optimized specially for** Mobile**, **Virtual Reality **and stylized PC/Console games.

**Showcase: **

Features:

  • Over 40 parameters to customize sky - hardness, density, distortion, shadow, color, scattering color, moving speed, lightness, ambient and much more.
  • GPU friendly works efficient even on VR Mobile platform. (LESS than 140 instructions! and ONLY 3 texture samplers used!) Small memory usage and fast loading.
  • Clouds lighting with scattering and shadows changes depending on sun position.
  • Static background clouds and stars layer.
  • Configurable shiny sun and moon.
  • Atmospheric sky gradient with tilting in sun direction.
  • Customizable automatic clouds UV calculation.
  • Moon normal-mapping and lighting calculated based on relative sun and moon position.
  • Sky parameters loaded from curves/manual settings and blueprint functions.
  • Supported wind direction and clouds speed.
  • Smooth transitions between weather states based on preset system.
  • Material is based on the new unpublished before method for fast calculation of procedural clouds lighting. You will not find this solution anywhere else :slight_smile:

Feel free to ask questions :slight_smile:

Package is available now: Fast Stylized Procedural Sky in Blueprints - UE Marketplace

Excellent! Added to my wishlist :smiley:

Would it be possible to add stuff between cloud layer and background sky ? (mountains, additional planets, extra layer of hand painted clouds to scroll around, etc.)

Thanks! It is not supported by material right now but should be easy to add in future so I will put this feature on my list for next update :slight_smile:

It should be possible to add layer with mountains but I have to tweak shader to remove artifacts before I publish new version :slight_smile:

I’m really into this package. Looks like a nice job. I saw on your road map. “Scalable day and night duration” for me this is key. All of these day night cycle systems just do a 12 hour day night cycle. Even scaling it is a lot of realism. In my case that totally UNneeded, and infact I dont want it. I would image in a lot of games are the same way. What really is needed just 4 states. Daytime, Night transition,Night, Daytime transition. All of which could be called in games based on events, with some natural-ish transition. Since you are running it on a clock I’m betting its going to be hard to set that up. Still, if you could get that into your system I would buy it in a sec and I think others would love it too. I’m interested to hear if this is feasible.

GameMaster79 I’m going to add function to interpolate time of day to desired hour in some definied duration. It would be sufficient for your needs?

Meanwhile screen after my last changes:

Looking good :slight_smile:

Btw, does it work with forward rendering in desktop VR? (I assume if it works on mobile VR, it should, since mobile VR uses forward rendering)

Also wondering if it’s possible to make anime looking clouds in addition to what the system already offers:

https://www.imgbase.info/images/safe…d_lanscape.jpg

https://www.ihdimages.com/wp-content…lpapers_hd.jpg

https://i0.wp.com/recommendmeanime.c…16%2C459&ssl=1

[http://screenheaven.com/walls/art-de…-1920x1080.jpg

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/8e/b3/3a/8eb33aff0c49ee4c94b237421ddb621a.jpg](http://screenheaven.com/walls/art-design/makoto-shinkai-the-place-promised-596351-1920x1080.jpg)

Yes! It works fine with forward rendering. Sky is rendered as one skydome mesh with material that is Unlit and uses only emissive color as output.

I will think how to improve material to achieve anime clouds effect. Current state of this feature here:

Any chance this works on 4.17? I’m waiting to upgrade my project to 4.18 until a few other plugins are updated.

either way, looking forward to trying this sky system!

You have to add a way to choose your Exponential Fog, just like UDS does. This sky system looks amazing!

What you need to add:
-Skylight system with 2 options: 1. Recapture every X seconds periodically 2. Use specified cube map for “Fast Skylight” (just like in UDS)
-Ability to select Exponential Fog into the level, and make the fog match the sky/lighting color (just like in UDS)

i absolutely LOVE this system for being more centered for Mobile devices. Very excited about that.

Are the weather features Dynamic?

I’ve already implemented both of this features and it will be available in update to version 1.1. Probably tomorrow :slight_smile:
Weather is dynamic you can prepare your own weather preset and change from blueprint or by random.
I appreciate your feedback.

I’m going to check this :slight_smile:

Do you have day/night cycles in this project, @ ?

I am wondering because in my VR project I have to have stationary sky light and stationary directional light (I have to double check, but I think dynamic directional light was too performance taxing). Also, my directional light is inside a BP actor. I have it setup this way to achieve anime/toon shading in materials.

So I am wondering how your system (if you have it) would work with my setup.

Fast Stylized Procedural Sky v 1.1 Released New features:

  • Static landscape backgrounds interleaved with clouds (3 example backgrounds added to package).
  • Height fog interaction and sky light recapture frequency.
  • Sun eclipse and stars scintillation added.
  • Stars/Moon Brightness multipliers added.
  • Time control function (set time with transition duration and ease function). Interpolation function for weather transition added.
  • Presets can change scene lighting, it’s dark when cloudy weather is selected.

https://thumb.ibb.co/c3AiF6/landscape_04.jpghttps://thumb.ibb.co/ie2Vv6/landscape_03.jpghttps://thumb.ibb.co/jTvuNm/landscape_02.jpghttps://thumb.ibb.co/cub7a6/landscape_01.jpg

Nevermind - I was able to update my project to 4.18.1 and bought your sky package. Looking forward to integrating it into my game!

You should add stars that move and twinkle, to give you the illusion that the earth is spinning.

It’s already there :slight_smile:

Stars move
Parameter External->WorldRotationSpeed

**Stars twinkle **
Open material intsance M_DefaultSky and change flag: Use Stars Scintillation = True
This option is activated by static switch because costs additional calculations on material that some users dont need :slight_smile:

I’m happy to introduce you new version of Fast Stylized Procedural Sky](Fast Stylized Procedural Sky in Blueprints - UE Marketplace).

** What is new in v1.2 ]**

  • clouds casting shadow on ground
  • supported change between skysphere/skydome
  • 10 aditional textures of clouds
  • lens flare (experimental)
  • additional moon movement
  • tone mapping added for Mobile OpenGL ES 2.0 (Mobile sky looks same like on PC)

I’ve spend some time on preparing new sceneries to present capabilities of this system:

Version 1.2 is already waiting for review and should be available soon :slight_smile:

I just bought your package, and I have to say I am very impressed and happy with it. I have found a bug I haven’t yet been able to track down yet:

  • If you use MI_DefaultSky (with the parent M_BaseSky) the WindForceScale and Wind Force seem to work just fine.
  • If you use M_DefaultSky (with the parent M_DynamicSky) ground shadows seem to obey the WindForceScale/Wind Force but the actual clouds barely move

This is true both in the editor and running the game. I have created a blank project with just your package included, put BP_FastStylizedProceduralSky in the level, deleted the default BP_SkySphere. There is nothing else in my project.

The odd thing is I can see in the blueprint that it multiples WindForce and weather stuff together and sets it into “Final Layer Speed” “Final Layer Scale”…the sets them into LayerScale, LayerPosition and LayerSpeed.

Wait in typing this up I have found the bug: the parent material M_DynamicSky is using material parameters for LayerScale, LayerPosition, LayerSpeed instead of the Material Parameter Collection values. Changing the material to look like the attached image makes it work just fine.

thank you,
jeff

You probably updated the sky and now there is little mess with renamed assets:
I’ve changed name of “M_DefaultSky” into “IM_Default” to stay consistent with Assets Naming Convention - Epic. M_DefaultSky Should not exist in project anymore.

I’ve started to use parameters collections in new version and old parameters are not updated anymore that is why old material is incorrect.

Best way to fix this is to remove package from project and download current version of sky again.
If you created any presets or day-night curves you can copy them before this operation and paste to your project. It should work fine.

I had to do a lot of changes to implement new features. I’m sorry for any inconvenience this may cause. I will try to be more clever with future updates :slight_smile: