Sky Creator

It also works for me in 5.2, thank you!

The plugin looks amazing. Iā€™m also interested by Octane render for UE, so Iā€™m going to ask it : does it work with Octane ? Is there a way to hack things together, or is it completely unsupported ?

Iā€™m not familiar with Octane yet but from what I understand you have to deal with lighting and materials in a different way, so a complete weather system is probably not going to work ā€˜plug and playā€™.

Hi! I really donā€™t know anything about Octane Render. Have never tried it, sorry. Probably needs additional modifications to the assets of the plugin.

Hi Dmitry,

Iā€™d like to start off by saying this is an excellent plugin and I am currently stress testing it to ensure it will work in our new game.

My question is about the light transition settings. It seems that during the transition, the sun fades out on surfaces but does not fade out in the atmosphere at the same rate. While this is mostly fine with a very low sun value (10 lux), if the sun is set to a realistic value (100,000 lux), the sky remains extremely bright causing havoc with auto-exposure.

Is it possible to have the sun fade out on the atmosphere at the same rate as it does on surfaces? This would provide a nice, smooth drop in exposure as the sun sets. We canā€™t find where this is happening in the source code.

Thanks in advance!

Hi! Iā€™ll look it through. Having both always illuminating the atmosphere is kinda by design, but yeah it might not look as good with high intensity values. If thereā€™s something to be fixed, Iā€™ll add it to my todo list.

Hi Dmitry,

I understand how and why this was setup the way it was. However, I do see an alternate approach that could cover the shadow switch without the need to separate surface and atmospheric light.

Transition Start Sun Angle
The main idea is that the sun should start dimming slowly, from the highest point in the sky on both surfaces and the atmosphere at the same time. This would tie together TSSA with Sun Elevation so the sun would reach 100,000 lux at 1pm and begin to dim slowly over time. This could also where the moon has slowly dimmed to 0 lux.

Transition Sun End Angle
This is where the Sun would reach 0 lux, well below the horizon based off the SUN DUSK OFFSET TIME (or whatever the natural angle of the sun would be about an hour to an hour and a half below the horizon. By this point the moon has reached itā€™s max 0.1 lux.

Transition Sun Middle Angle (Shadow Switch Only)
This is where the shadow switch would take place BELOW the horizon.

At this point, the sun would be far enough below the horizon that it would no longer be affecting surfaces above the horizon, so the shadows could safely be switched off on the sun. However, it would still be brighter than the moon on the environment, so auto-exposure would not yet be low enough to expose for the moon (which would still be fading on), hiding the shadow switch.

The much more intense value of the sun and the slower transition of intensity would allow for auto exposure to drop from 15EV to -5EV much more smoothly.

-Alex

That is actually a really great idea! Iā€™m currently working on a hotfix update, but what youā€™re proposing might end in a first patch. Thanks!

@Dmitry_Karpukhin Hi! Recently purchased Sky Creator for company and as we do mostly car renders I was wondering if it is possible to change direction of rain streaks? They always going on Z down, but when car drives obviously it is not looking properly. Is is possible to somehow quickly edit rain streaks MF to be able to change angle direction?
Thanks!

  • Post Processed

Hello! I see, that is not what is supported out of the box, seems like some kind of modification is needed, but thereā€™s a possibility that youā€™ll need to change not the material function, but the niagara simulation instead. I imagine, youā€™ll need 2 separate simulations for the car front and the sides, also the velocity of the object should be considered. Currently in Sky Creator the rain streaks simulation is made for static objects primarily. Iā€™m not really aware yet how itā€™s made in car sim games, but thatā€™s probably what youā€™re looking for.

Hey, thanks for your response! Regarding rain drops it looks fine in renders, motion blur makes it right direction. I was talking more of materials function.
I have automotive material pack for carpaint and coatings. I added SkyCreator MF FX to all materials. Works good. Looks gorgeous. But. it only goes down on car body. (pic 1)


Is there an option to rotate the direction and make it move like on Pic2?

Cheers!
-Post Processed

You may not need the whole Material FX function in this case - you can take ā€œRT_SC_RainStreaksā€ render target in "SkyCreatorPlugin\Content\Textures\MaterialFX" and use it however you like - make a custom triplanar, rotate it and so on.