Fast Stylized Procedural Sky

[ImaginaryBlend]

@speedpacer

What are your recommendations on getting a realistic day/night cycle? I can’t seem to get the sun and moon to sync up correctly. It seems like it was working as expected when I first purchased this and checked it out a while ago, either in 4.18 or before your patch, but I think World Rotation was different? I remember after slowing down the cloud speed, I had to also slow down the world rotation, but that’s set to 0 with World Rotation Speed at 1.0 by default now. I don’t remember what it was before.

Just checked “World Rotation Speed”… and it is not working correctly in current version When I was changing blueprint for on replication I have moved code related to World Rotation Speed and forgotten to connect DeltaTime after that. The fix should be available soon as version 4.2.

What do you mean by ‘sync up correctly’ in the realistic model of sun/moon on earth these two astronomical bodies are not synced together. The Moon makes a complete orbit around Earth with respect to the fixed stars about once every 27.3 days and realist movement of this Moon is really complicated. I’ve tried to implement realistic model but it didn’t work very well for games so decided to implement the simplified model.

@speedpacer

What’s happening is after the sun goes down, the moon just sort of appears out of nowhere and when it goes down, the terrain fills up with these crazy flickering lines and shiny/wet looking spots until the light completely passes over the terrain.

Show me some screenshot or video it will be easier to understand and fix this.
Remember that the Moon is not appearing from anywhere, when the atmosphere is dark you can see the light from the sun reflected by The Moon - it’s closest to a realistic model I could get.

@speedpacer

Then after the next sundown, the moon doesn’t appear at all. I’ve spent several hours of trial and error and playing around with the moon rotation speed/angles but nothing seems to produce a typical day/night cycle. The angle seems strange no matter what I try too like it’s following a normal angle until it gets close to the terrain and then sort of turns and starts skimming along the edge.

Probably you can’t see the Moon because you set it by MoonChangeSpeed and Moon moved to the opposite side of earth near the sun and it is invisible.

@speedpacer

I increased the Time Speed Change so I wouldn’t have to wait so long to watch it and I know I’ll need to change the Moon Change Speed again when I bump that back down to something more realistic. Is there a good formula to use to get all of these settings to compliment one another, to achieve a realistic Earth-like day/night cycle?

I see the problem now.

In version 4.2 i’ve added small change for you. After the update setup your blueprint like this:

1. Set Time of the day at midnight (0:00)
2. Set up where the Moon should be positioned at midnight
3. Set rotation speed MoonRotationSpeed
   MoonRotationSpeed.x - can be anything because it is the horizontal movement, the moon will never disappear.
   MoonRotationSpeed.y - degrees per day, if you want full cycle day/night then setup 360’ degrees.
   MoonRotationSpeed.z - degrees per day, if you want full cycle day/night then setup 360’ degrees.
4. Set Time of Day back as you need.

In version 4.2 you will be able to force visible moon always on the sky by using MoonOverHorizon= true but for me, it is a temporary solution.

@speedpacer

Also, can you recommend a good way of manually switching between weather presets from C++ while still retaining the Weather Change Duration?

You can use delegates or implement an interface that will change whatever you want.
You can use SetWeatherPresetByIndex or SetWeatherPresetExternal to change the preset - if you don’t need to change time duration then set transition time parameter to -1 (in version 4.2).

I believe the new version of Fast Stylized Procedural Sky will fix problems related to moon direction. I’ve sent you link to the new version in PM, please check if everything works like you wish.

Instead of moving Actor every frame just use AttachToActor with disabled relative rotation.