The prototype I'm presenting here is a work in progress for a fully dynamic and procedural skybox. I have roughly a month of solo work in this project. Most of it has been made from scratch, or salvaged from the standard skybox blueprint.
​
Goals:
We are creating a highly dynamic skybox, that is made accessible and customizable for our artists.
I have been working on a day/night cycle that needs to suit both design and art needs, as well as being optimized enough to run entirely dynamically. I started from the standard unreal skybox, and reused some of the ideas of another former skybox I worked on: https://orthrusstudios.com/2018/03/14/creating-the-day-night-cycle-in-distant-kingdoms/
The artists iterate on 3 gradients for the sky: one for the full day, one for the full night, and one for the dawn, that get blended depending on the sun position. They also have control over the time it gets to blend. There are 3 lights following the same logic: a sun light, a moon light and the sky (or fill) light. Those are entirely customizable for each time of the day.
The clouds are made in Houdini, using a HDA created specifically for this. This HDA references a mesh, turns it into a cloud, and then render as a black and white texture ready for the skybox. We are going to want a lot of clouds with more fantasy or imposing shapes, so this allows for fast iteration and creative control.
The planets are entirely influenced by the sun color as well. They are more or less place holders for the moment.
​
Technologies:
As stated earlier, I have been using mainly Houdini, Unreal and Photoshop so far. We are going to start using substance designer as well soon (for the planets and the stars).
On Unreal, I am working with a regular material pipeline (material functions, master materials, material instances). I reworked the Raymarching heightmap function created by Ryan Brucks to adapt it to our needs (this is what we are using for our clouds). I am also using global material parameters to quickly make changes on all the elements.
Everything else is controlled by a blueprint, that is in charge of the synchronization of all the day/ night cycle elements. The artist just have to drop this single blueprint with everything preset in it to have a full sky with all the most important options accessible and organised in it.
​