Hi everyone,
I’m learning Unreal Engine 5 and would like to create a simple day and night cycle. I’ve seen some tutorials online but they’re either outdated or too complex.
Can someone guide me on how to set up a basic day/night system using Blueprints? I just want the sun to move across the sky and the lighting to change accordingly.
Any help or beginner-friendly resources would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance!
Hi, I’m not an expert, but this is a really simple way to animate the sun based on some time. It would probably be better to use a Timeline instead of Event Tick. In the screenshots, you can see the entire simple logic: there are two variables — Sun Reference, which is set to a Directional Light Object Reference, and CycleSpeed, a float. Both instances are editable. Then, you just place the Blueprint into the level, set the Sun Reference to your current Directional Light in the level, and set the CycleSpeed (10 is too low). Otherwise, it smoothly changes day and night with equal length.
Personally I’d suggest using the built in sun position tool.
You can follow that guide but just change the widget part to a looping timeline updating the hours from 0 to 24.
The new DaySequence plugin might be interesting for you to look at:
Look online to some of the old UE4.27 videos. there are some that demonstrates this and the basic methods still work. However Although most like to do it on their own; get a copy of the Ultra Dynamic Sky plugin… it is 100% worth owning in your inventory of tools. This plugin manages the movement and much much more it even includes a weather system.
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Agreed with the above, came here to hawk Ultra Dynamic Sky.
To the OP, it’s all the same stuff you get in Unreal that he uses, he saves you a lot of time packing things up and hooking them all together so they run in sync, that you can then just pick ‘cloudy’ or ‘foggy’ and have them all be configurable for the entire weather-state.
It’s a real time-saver and well worth the price. And not anything that you could do on your own but he does it for you.