Day and Night Cycle

[Monkey-666]

Hi II Patch or Mastur Betor, whatever you wanna call yourself :P

I followed your tutorial a while back and i got some pretty damn good results. Ive experimented with all kinds of stuff and taken a look at UDK's template maps and the day and night map to come up with some good ideas. Ive got lots of values set-up in matinee, such as varying sun light colour (Morning, Midday, Afternoon) and varying light brightness. The light is completely off for nighttime and turns on gradually during the sunrise and visa versa for sunset. Ive added bloom scale, fog density and all kinds of jazz, and im quite happy with the way i have it setup no. I even set my animation to be 24 seconds long so i can stretch it out to be 24 hours with minimal calculation

The only things that ive been struggling with are as follows, and i was wondering if you or anyone could help shed some light

The exponential height fog obviously affects the skydome. Causing the night sky to not be as dark as i was it to be, or be controlable as i would like. Obviously i could turn down fog at night via matinee but that doesnt really have the effect i want. So, not sure what to do there really.

The next thing thats bothering me is the colour gradient from the horizon. In the material in your tut and the one ive made, the gradient simply goes up and down. I was wondering if there was some way can make a radial gradient, so the surrounding area was the horizon colour and the centre was the sky colour. Also, im unable to figure out how to control the colour of this via matinee.

And last, but not least. I was thinking about the moon problem. Obviously due to only being able to have 1 dominant light, i could instead use a texture that doesnt tile that simply pans itself across the skydome. It could have a lerped or added transparency which adds (or removes even) a part of the moon so you could set the moon phase. All of which could be controlled by matinee. To me it sounds like it should be possible to make the moon this way, but im new and i could be missing something completely. I just wondered if anyone would be able to explain a good way to do it. Although i fear i may have just explaned it myself. Anyway, im thinking the moon doesnt need to cast light as such, it could be plugged into the missive and turn the ammount up to emit bloom maybe?

Im not sure, just an idea anyway, if you or anyone has any ideas on what to do, that would be awesome.

Im currently working on a very large sorta landmass using lots of streaming levels. When im a bit happier with what i have i will upload some videos and such

Thanks alot people, and cheers for the help so far

[Kalman11]

Hi!
I've got some problem:
I'm using the 2010 January release (my PC can't run newer), and
1. There's no DominantDirectionalLightMovable, only DominantDirectionalLight (I've got installed 2010 March release too, but it doesn't include it)
2. Float Material Parameter doesn't have Material Slot

[Kalman11]

Never mind, I downloaded the 2010 April, it runs on my PC and it has everything I need (DominantDirectionalLightMovable and Float Material Parameter)

[rowan_moss]

This is an awesome tutorial! I'll definitely be trying this out. Cheers!!

[XilenceX]

This is an awesome tutorial! I'll definitely be trying this out. Cheers!!

yeah same here seems like a perfect exercise for an atmospher+immersion module I have to do at university.

[PrawnSkunk]

Thanks, def trying this out

[Richardv07]

Firstly, let me say, thank you for the great tutorial. I never could've gotten anything done otherwise.

So I managed to get a moon going as well as the sun, but I had a couple questions.

First off, when I adjust brightness in matinee, my moon becomes see-through. Is there any way to reduce the light coming from the dominant directional light without having that fading issue?

Secondly, what would be the best way of approaching using an image for your moon as in Skyrim?

Example

I'm not a big fan of the big spotlight look for my moon and would like to have something more detailed.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[Icemopper]

Is there a way to control the rising and setting of the sun with a keypress? Say I want to fast forward the motion of the sun by hitting U and reverse the motion by hitting I. Is there a way to do that?

All in all, this was a very helpful tutorial, It helped me do more than I thought I could do in such a short amount of time.

EDIT: I may have just figured it out. Never mind! I'll report back with more info once I've finished it.

EDIT 2: Yep! I added a Key/Button Pressed toggle for the keys U, I, and K, with U making it play, I making it reverse, and K making it stop. Very cool!

[joshua.fontany]

Cool, that's a nice addition to this setup. Good idea.