Graduated (non-uniform) Day/Night Sky sphere

Development Character & Animation
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1

Hi,

Please could somebody tell me if it is possible to create a realistic sky sphere that transitions on daylight/sunset one side to night darker on the other? I understand that a sunset effect can be created in the provided BP-Skysphere but this results in the whole sky becoming ‘sunset’, which is obviously not how things appear in reality (when the sun sets in the west the sky in the east in gradually darkening to night)

As well as using it for this purpose I was hoping to imply differing weather conditions across a single world- e.g a clear day with an approaching storm. (I’m currently filling a large world with weather effects which is unsatisfactory). Would there be a way to create this in a custom sphere with a dark to light image/colour gradient spanning the sphere laterally? Would this potential solution hinge on a different UV from the provided sphere?

All of the spheres I have come across seem to exhibit the same attribute- so I’m wondering if this is something fundamental I’m not understanding? I am using UE4 solely for cinematics and animation, so perhaps this unified sphere provides advantages in a game scenarios that I’m not aware of but it causes problems with realistic cinematics.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated!

2

Go check out the skies on the marketplace.

I bet if you email their authors, they will tell you whether or not they implemented that. If so, you can buy and just use it, or buy it and see how they did it and adapt it to your own project.

3

Hi,

Thanks for your reply. As far as I can see none of the available market place packs have this, nor does the community ocean project, which is the most complex TOD/weather skysphere I’ve seen. They use a falloff between the top of the sphere and the horizon, combined with a panning cloud material. I would like a falloff across the hemisphere east to west.

4

Since this is more of a learning discussion than a “this is broken” discussion, you may want to cross-post over on the forums in the Content Creation or Rendering section.