Will this system make it possible to have dynamic night & day lighting, with complete darkness at nighttime?
While trying to recreate a true dark night scene (using the default night/day system) I noticed a lot of other people also have trouble achieving this with dynamic lighting, it would definitely be a good selling point.
What I wanted to say is to gradually increase the weather conditions when getting closer to a certain point. Lets say it is always raining at place A in the world. Then, the closer you are to place A, the darker you turn the clouds and eventually start and increase the rain. A world where you need different weather conditions should be huge by itself already, so it would only make sense to not “see” the border of the cloud rains. Same goes for other weather conditions.
I mean, just think about it, when you halt time and go to a place where it snows, then the snow does not start at a certain border. The weather changes gradually until eventually leading to downfalls of snowflakes. Manipulating the weather depending on the distance to a certain spot will most likely create the same illusion.
Thanks for your awesome feedback! 
This system does indeed have dynamic day & night cycling, with parameters to set how dark you want your night lighting to get.
Aaaahhhh I see what you mean now. I was thinking that for perspective from outside “exclusion zones” for you to see gaps in the global weather effects to show localized weather effects in those zones, when (if I’m correct) you’re talking about changing the overall settings of the system when the player enters/approaches a trigger volume? That’s very straightforward, I can absolutely implement that before release I’d still like to take a stab at the visibly localized weather effects (for things like multiplayer) but for single-player, the trigger-volume can work perfectly, I can include stuff like transition time so that the user can set how long it takes to “fade in” those zone-specific settings.
Thanks for your feedback and patience haha, sorry I totally misunderstood.
That is totally fine 
Also, its true, this would not work in multiplayer since the weather effect is not really localized as you said. I did not even consider multiplayer Yeah, one wont be able to see weather conditions from outside hmm, I guess that will still be a lot of work But in case “localized weather conditions” is more performance costly, would you provide this single-player solution as well for people who dont need multiplayer support?
Oh absolutely, I’ll be doing the single-player solution discussed above out of the gate, and then I’ll start looking into the visibly localized/multiplayer version after release. Regardless of performance between the two I’ll more than likely just keep both as options.
Multiplayer version of such system would be great ofcourse, however it wouldnt be a deal breaker if only singleplayer is made. For exampple if certain player gets rain and other players only has cloudy sky it wouldnt really ruin the gameplay, unless the rain itself is part of gameplay gather component in large way. If its only considered in regards to visuals then it should be fine. For example if system uses seasons then generally players would have at least similar weather even on multiplayer gameplay. But sure yeh, implementing proper mp version would create more cohesive environment.
4.13 PREVIEW iS OUT START TESTING MAN!!! NO SLEEP FOR YOU 
lol
I know I saw I’m stoked!!!
Hey guys, I’m still plugging away at some final polish, but I have a fun little video to share. A friend of mine let me play around with his Vive, and I ran a very quick test to see how it plays with Orbit, saw a solid 90fps in the template VR project in the 4.13 preview. While this is a good sign, it’s not necessarily representative of the final product, as it’s not including particle effects or material functions, which I did not have time to test. That being said, I’m definitely shooting for the same, if not better performance on release day, to allow for VR developers to utilize this system.
Thanks for your support!
AWESOMESAUCE Now I want a rift just to walk around in the rain in VR lol
I re-worked the weather cover material function, shaved off over 60% of the instruction count, while also adding gradient+noise masking to the edges of covered areas. I’m very happy with these results, couldn’t not share.
Do puddles form on the ground when it rains or appear after it rains?
Both! As the ground gets wetter, puddles form and expand, until the ground as a whole is covered. Then as it dries, puddles reshape from the overall ground cover, then shrink and fade away.
On the release, please, make it compatible with 4.12 :o
I’ll certainly try to
Also: Simulated Cloud Shadows
This looks absolutely amazing! Definitely a day one purchase for me, especially if you give all this stuff away for only $20.00 USD. I do have a couple of quick questions though:
I need to place objects (sun, stars, planets et cetera) behind the sky/atmosphere layer. In my current setup, I simply set the material of the sky sphere to additive, which has exactly the effect I need. Is it possible to do the same thing with “Orbit”? Or would it be possible to disable the sky from orbit to replace it with a custom skysphere?
On the screenshots and videos you posted so far, the clouds look like thin slices with little variation on the z-axis. I imagine this might be due to performance reasons, since adding more volume to them likely increases the rendering cost. Still, does your setup allow to tweak the clouds for a bit more vertical depth? Something around these lines.
On your sunset/sunrise screenshot, the clouds look very dark. I would expect at least the contours of the clouds to be lit in an orange light from the sun. Do the clouds receive lighting at all, or is their color determined differently? If so, is it customizable to achieve this kind of effect?
Thanks!
And, again, incredible work. 
Yes, though independent control of things like like atmosphere color changes based on sun angle would need to be programmed on your end, either via blueprints or C++, whichever you use, unfortunately I wouldn’t be able to set something so open-ended up to work automatically with automated settings.
You can, to some degree; the clouds use slice-based volumetrics. The amount of slices you have increases the “resolution” so to speak, of the clouds over their z-scale, though that naturally increases render costs. It’s definitely possible to find a nice balance between the two, and to tweak how much shape falloff there is over z-height, as those parameters are exposed from the get-go.
This kind of applies to my answer above as well; everything that I’ve put together is all customizable, and as such could look quite different on the users end. That being said, looking back on my sunset cloud shots, I’m unhappy with how I set up the color curves, and am going to be revisiting them prior to release, so the default curves will be looking a bit better than what I’ve posted previously, and those curves, along with pretty much everything else in the system, are customizable, fairly easily
Thanks for your interest, let me know if you have any more questions!
I’ve created something similar like this weather system for myself, but it impacts performance alot … My sky/weather system drops FPS from 200+ to 110 on 1080p@maxed out settings (epic & full resolution scale) after packing a game.
Does this here perform any better? 
Thanks for the reply, sounds like I’ll have everything I need.
I’m looking forward to the release!
I haven’t tried packaging a project with this system yet, I’ll try it shortly and post results.
Awesome, thank you again for your support!
