Creating skies for UE4 inside of Maya?
polycounter lvl 6
How do I get started on making my own sky for my game in UE4 from scratch? I made a model by just creating a sphere in Maya and removing the bottom half of it and extruding the bottom edge to down. How do I UV the model or make a sky texture? I want to be able to have dynamic clouds and sunlight in UE4? I'm clueless on this. I can't find any good resources at all on this.
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I have checked from the test levels. They seem to use a sphere with a texture and emissive to it. I don't know how to make it have a weather system or day/night cycle. I don't know how to make the textures as well. I'm clueless on this.
Afaik the UE4 implementation also paints the sky atmosphere itself too on it (sky color), which makes it indeed difficult to make a dynamic day/night cycle.
In Cryengine the Sky Atmosphere/color is procedural and the cloud dome is just transparent/colorless clouds who are layered on top of it. So for a dynamic cycle you can just adjust the procedural atmosphere over time (like it is in reality) and maybe adjust the cloud dome shading slightly.
I'm sure sth similar is possible in UE4.
In an ideal world all engines had the Horizon dawn zero cloud system
The sky hemisphere mesh should have 2 uvs. One for the atmosphere, and one for the other elements. The first uv would be a side view uv map, so the gradient would actually go from the top to the bottom. The second would be a top view relaxed uv map of the hemisphere mesh, for the star, could and other elements. Sun pos can be done with connecting it with the direction of the direction light, this need material parameters, light vector, and blueprints. Cloulds can be done in a few ways, you can use particles for volumetric effects, or simple texture samplers. The simple method would be done with multiple "noise maps" or it can be called cloud filter as its called in photoshop, and you would do "add"s, "power"ing, and "lerp"s to blend them with the atmosphere texture. Everything needs material parameters so the colors, opacities, etc can be changed via scripting.
Sorry, but I don't have visual example for these at the moment, but if you want, I can make one.
Weather is very difficult to do, you need to connect it with every exterior materials. If you are not so experiences with advanced materials, then I wouldn't recommend to even take a try. Anyways, here I have an example of a master material, that can work on angular objects with dynamic weather system.We used it every non organic objects.
[ame="
This can be used to make flowing rain on objects, and to give wet effect.
Another thing you can need inside a terrain material is a solution for wetness, puddles, raindrop ripples. This is also a bit difficult to do as you can't really use vertex colors in a terrain material, so you need masking based on something. A pre made puddle mask can work fine. Here is an experimental material that I made for the same project, it used vertex colors for this example, but you won't be able to do it with UE terrains.
[ame="
Also, when you use dynamic or manipulated weather, you need to connect it with the sky too, again, you need material parameters that you can control via scripting.
Also here are some other weather effects that you may want in such cases. This is a doc from Remember me:
https://seblagarde.wordpress.com/2012/12/27/water-drop-2a-dynamic-rain-and-its-effects/
As a close and short answer to the title of the thread, this topic is not really connected to the modeling package, its all about advanced materials inside the engine, and scripting.
If you don't want to figure it all out by yourself you could look into this for example [ame]
If you could give me a example sky mesh, material, and blueprint. That would be great! BTW, that vertex painting looks great!