Inside Unreal: From Ants to Outer Space - May 28

Unfortunatly it look like this sky/atmosphere system is made for daytime only.
Ok you could blend a starry sky texture with the atmospheric sky but the atmosphreic system won’t use it. Stars are not affecting the atmosphere and the skylight is pitch black

Add a skylight with bounces. You have to adjust it to dim at night, and bounce more light during daytime.
The athmosphere has basically next to nothing to do with lighting.
On earth starlight intensity doesn’t really affect athmosphere coloring all that much. The full moon on the other hand does. If you are trying to replicate this you need a secondary light, set the the proper orientation/light value.
Keep in mind that the additional light can be made to Not affect the athmosphere (so that you don’t get a red hue when the moon sets).
Always disable the moon light completely if the sun is up - you never want to have 2 directional lights interact…

What’s that?

So what is scattering !?

The skylight component. Look it up.

You don’t really get that - mie or otherwise - from stars when looking At earth or From earth.
At earth, because the sun is obviously brighter.
From earth, Mostly becuase finding a strip of sky clear enouh of other lights in our day and age is basically impossible. Even with a camera you barely get halos around stars. the halo would be the scattering. If you put a thin enough cloud in front you would get a different effect. But even in that case, you can’t really expect any engine to simulate this on its own without you instructing it to (by creating a cloud layer and matching the star brightness on top of it or doing something similar).

There’s nothing about “bounce” in the skylight component
The new system we’re talking here only capture “SkyAtmosphre”, “VolumetricCloud Component” and “Sky domes with Sky material” light
At night, SkyAtmosphere is black so the Skylight doesn’t capture any light.
Volumetric clouds don’t receive light, so they’re black and don’t add light to the Skylight
Sky dome with Sky material replace the background, it needs to be opaque and unlit so you can’t make it invisible with daytime

And I don’t think you realize how, when you’re far away from city lights, stars can brighten ground, clouds and aerial perspective. And I’m only speaking about realistic earth night, not more fantasy or other planets sky.
It’s still a work in progress as the video is about render dev branch with 4.26 features so maybe they will work on nights later.

the skylight component IS bounce light.
It works just fine currently and the skylight is featured and explained within the original video itself, along with the info that .26 will allow to recapture with no performance cost.

I heard the new volumetric clouds are on the dev-render branch of the github. Anyone knows where it is exactly? I found volumetric plugin but this is different I think

EDIT: ok apparently you have to download and install the whole dev-rendering version of the engine to get it, you can’t just grab a plugin

What about gravity?

Why there is a constant yearly practice to NOT share the learning example/demo projects and its materials?

Hi Angel, when the examples aren’t shared it’s usually because of restrictions on the licensing terms of the assets that was used to build the demo.

The whole point of learning and example projects (for one real and serious indie developer) is the possibility to test and feel by own the project, not only to watch videos.
Moreover- why use copyrighted restricted materials in the learning examples???

Can you share the M_VolumetricCloudMaster, MI_VolumetricClouds and MI_VolumetricClouds_Experiment? Thank you

Would love to take a peek inside some of those Materials. Sjoerd does explain what most of them do, but there’s a lot of “I just do this” for sake of brevity and I can tell by the size of the graph that there’s a *lot *going on there that we don’t get to see. I need to be able to dig in and go node by node to gain the proper understanding, myself. That’s how I learn.

Any chance we could get those Materials shared with us? So not the project with all the Marketplace assets, but a stripped-down version so we can take a look at what Sjoerd did?

I managed to recreate the Material from looking at stills in the video. One catch: Sjoerd never shows us exactly what’s going on with those star cubemaps that he’s blending together, so I’m not sure what he did there. In my version, I only use a single cubemap for the starry sky.

It’s a Material in the Material Domain of Post Process (see Details panel under the Material category when you select the main output node).
Here’s the imgur album:

And here’s s showcase vid:

2 Likes

my volumetric clouds don’t do anything like the vid. they don’t block the sun, don’t cast shadows, and don’t look nearly as realistic as the vid.

why is that? am I doing something wrong?

Same boat :joy: Will try again more tomorrow…

This project is not a learning example - It was produced to highlight our new features, and the livestream on the topic was to dive deeper into how it was made. Many of these features are still experimental and we generally don’t produce learning sample projects until the features are production ready. Expect example projects in the future showcasing how to use Water and Volumetric Clouds.

1 Like

That would be great. Currently the potential seems to be there but how to fully style them and use them for best look is lacking.

How does the Material Parameter for blending work that’s at the end of your Material Blueprint before it gets plugged into the Emissive Colour input? Also, are you using a SkySphere with the material expressions from the Sky Atmosphere as inputs, or are you just using the default Sky Atmosphere?

Hi there! Reply comes a full year later… hope it’s still of some use to someone. It’s been a while since I posted that, but if I recall correctly, I’m just trying to replicate exactly what Sjoerd does in the video to the best of my ability from lokoing at screenshots of the video and listening to what he’s saying – so for any explanation / “what is this doing?” type questions, I hope the video shows you what you need to know. :see_no_evil:

That project I replicated this in is old and on another computer now, sorry…