Stylized Dynamic Sky & Weather System

Stylized dynamic sky system with customizable, colors, clouds, time of day, weather, and more!

A stylized dynamic sky pack with tons of customization and designed for maximum performance. Multiple ready-to-go sky blueprint presets are included to get you up and running quickly and to showcase just how flexible the system is!

This Unreal Engine 5 asset is a stylized sky combined with a complete day night cycle and time of day functionality. Color curves allow for beautiful gradients, glow, and fog. Build your skybox colors for each period of the day. Create your cloudscape from many provided cloud layers or build your own. Includes multiple ready-to-go preset skies. Drag and drop these into your scene and you're ready to go!

WEATHER UPDATE (2024-05-10)

I have just released a free update to the sky system that adds the first iteration of weather! The weather will now change between clear skies, overcast, rain, and thunderstorms. You can control many parameters about this system or disable it entirely!

SOUNDS UPDATE (2024-08-28)

Due to popular demand, I have added sound effects for ambience and weather events, such as wind and lightning! Check out the showcase above. I also finally got the Set Weather function working during runtime, as well as a smooth weather and time of day warping. There's also a more user-friendly clock time and improved wind lines!

The pack does not include any landscapes, trees, or other ground foliage. Only the skies, lighting, and sky-related effects are included.

FAQ

Does it work with all environments?

They should! I tested and calibrated them with my other stylized assets, but there's nothing specific to my environments. Included are certain material functions you can hook up to your assets to control the look during different time periods, such as lowering emission of stylized foliage at night.

Is there weather? Overcast, rain, snow?

I decided not to make this a full weather system... yet. My goal was really to make a better looking vibrant stylized sky that still had animation and worked for a full day/night cycle. It is however something very much on my mind and it's possible I may update this in the future. In fact, I had kind of started on the overcast and rain a bit already.

Does the sky system utilize Lumen?

It is not using Lumen. I imagine it would work with Lumen, but I find Lumen is currently high performance and I've designed the asset to be optimized and high performance.

Is the pack replicated for multiplayer?

I have not set up anything specific for multiplayer, but the blueprint code is fairly minimal and organized and should be easy to adapt to your needs.

Is the performance good? Can I improve the performance?

One of the primary goals of all my assets is to create stylized art that looks good while also optimized for best performance. As such, the sky uses a lot of tricks and cheats, is 2D instead of 3D volumetric, and other things to make it more optimized. However, there are still expensive shaders to get all the features in. You can view the documentation for more info on disabling certain features if you want even better performance.

Technical Details

Features:

• Seven ready-to-go preset sky blueprints
• Day/night cycle
• Weather system
• Sound effects
• 2D customizable cloudscapes
• Cloud flow, animation, and evolution
• Cloud lighting reacts with sun and moon
• Fully dynamic time of day system
• Material functions to easily integrate with other assets
• Stylized post process for better fog and sun gradients
• Moon phases demo
• Shooting star and meteor shower VFX
• Rain, lightning, wind system
• Faked cloud shadows
• Dozens of sample textures for sun, moon, and clouds

Number of Unique Meshes: 4

Number of Materials and Material Instances: 15 materials, 49 instances, 6 functions, 84 curves

Number of Textures: 99

Texture Resolutions: Up to 8k

Supported Development Platforms:

Windows: Yes

Mac: Yes