Creating Weather with a day/night Cycle HELP

[Wisdomcube2000]

Ok, so I'm nearly done with adding weather to my day/night cycle, but I just hit a bit of a roadblock that has me confused atm. I've got the day/night cycle working via matinee, and I was planning to use matinee again to do the weather system as well. Though I'm having some trouble merging them successfully atm. I've got the sky to fade in the storm clouds no problem, but the things that the day/night cycle use seem to be fighting from time to time over which is dominant. Not to mention there is noticeable snapping to/from the rain settings...

I'm starting to doubt whether this will work, so I figured I'd come here and see if anyone else has any ideas. Like how would you make a running day/night clear sky matinee turn itself into a day/night rainy one, can you add the variable changes that two matinee's effect?

Thanks in advance

[Wisdomcube2000]

****, no one have a clue/suggestion yet? I'd really like to figure this out soon if possible (I want to get this part finished, I'm so close lol).

[Omar007]

Haven't really done anything with that but you can check out the NightAndDay map that comes with the UDK (Content/Maps/Showcases). It has a day/night cycle as well as rain and whatnot.
AFAIK everything there is done with Matinee/Kismet

[udkap]

I don't know how you made the cycle, could you explain in more details? This is how i would do it:

The UDK preview levels use a sphere with a special material as a sky, I would take the same concept and apply a material that has day on one side night on the other and sunrise/sunset between them. With kismet and matinee you could make the sphere rotate in the right way, thus creating the illusion of a basic day/night cycle.

I would make clouds as a particle effect system. Spawning and moving horizontal so they look like real clouds.

For the rain I would have to make the sky darker, this can be archived by changing the material from kismet (with a VecotParametar node and matinee). The same setup can be used to change the could color to something darker. For the rain drops I would use a particle system to simulate the impact and for the drops in air i would make plane meshes, apply a rain texture and animate them with matinee.

That is how I would do it, i don't know your configuration. Can you tell me a bid more?

[Wisdomcube2000]

I don't know how you made the cycle, could you explain in more details? This is how i would do it:

The UDK preview levels use a sphere with a special material as a sky, I would take the same concept and apply a material that has day on one side night on the other and sunrise/sunset between them. With kismet and matinee you could make the sphere rotate in the right way, thus creating the illusion of a basic day/night cycle.

I would make clouds as a particle effect system. Spawning and moving horizontal so they look like real clouds.

For the rain I would have to make the sky darker, this can be archived by changing the material from kismet (with a VecotParametar node and matinee). The same setup can be used to change the could color to something darker. For the rain drops I would use a particle system to simulate the impact and for the drops in air i would make plane meshes, apply a rain texture and animate them with matinee.

That is how I would do it, i don't know your configuration. Can you tell me a bid more?

I have a sky dome (Sphere cut in half), it has a simulated lighting effect with the Sun/Moon, and swaps in stars at night while fading out some of the clouds, and it changes between cloudy/normal with the use of a cloud texture that I have mapped to a parameter. Then I used the material to adjust it's settings via parameters in kismet/matinee.

I wanted to do a separate matinee for the storms and such, but because the day/night cycle is constantly changing, I can't get the baseline settings to line up, so I end up with some ugly snapping to/from the rain settings. I'm already going to use a particle system for the rain, but you think the clouds would be better served by a particle system as well? I thought about the same idea, but figured it would be too costly (fps wise) in the long run.

[udkap]

Why would it be costly? If you make the cloud particles move slow, with a low spawn rate, and a long life time it wont have a big effect on the fps rate, that is if you use a low res texture which you can given the fact that they are to far away for the player to notice their quality. And you can use a bid of both, the texture and the particle system, that way the clouds would be more dynamic, but not very demanding.

[Wisdomcube2000]

Why would it be costly? If you make the cloud particles move slow, with a low spawn rate, and a long life time it wont have a big effect on the fps rate, that is if you use a low res texture which you can given the fact that they are to far away for the player to notice their quality. And you can use a bid of both, the texture and the particle system, that way the clouds would be more dynamic, but not very demanding.

I just figured it would, I guess. My knowledge of particle systems is a bit lacking to be honest lol. That's certainly something I'm going to have to look into now if my old cloud setup proves to difficult to get working.

That said I've got this setup soo close to working, so I really want to know if it was possible to do additive matinee effects, and if so, then how?

[Wisdomcube2000]

Hey I got it working now, had to reorganize how I had the material setup, and things really came together now. Both matinee's seem to be co-operating for the most part too
I'll have to post a video of it in action later today, I'm really impressed with how it turned out! Yay lol.

[Wisdomcube2000]

Using my material, I was able to blend in storm cloud effects for my day/night cycle. It also manipulates the fog on the level as well. Still need to do the Kismet settings for the sound effects/wind, and add in the actual rain itself though. Will also do some thunder/lightning effects as well after all that. Also might still keep an eye out for a better storm texture I can use, as the one currently in there is just a free lower res sample from some site I found.

But so far, the biggest hurdles are finally over lol, and I'm really enjoying how it's turning out.

[Wisdomcube2000]

Question, how would I adjust wind speed in kismet? Can't seem to find what I need lol.

edit
nvm found I could use matinee for that.

[Wisdomcube2000]

Getting better now, since I added some more effects to help blend things in. Still need to do a quick lightning + thunder effect before I call this setup done for the most part. Had some odd issues when trying to playback the video I uploaded, but it seems to be working now...but yeah let me know if anything is bugging out still lol. As I still have to set it to 720p otherwise it just goes all mute/black screen on me :/

Another thing is it now has 3 types of weather, Clear, Rain, and Cloudy. Could be cool to do little variations for different effects and such, just to help add to the variety of the world. All three types of weather are also randomized, for the sake of immersion, though this leads to me waiting around 10mins to see all three. I start getting annoyed at the 5 or so min mark I believe lol.

[Wisdomcube2000]

Oh dear, I appear to have made a massive mistake, on my quest to get lightning working I noticed that things were shaded when they really had no reason to be (Lightning wouldn't work right either). Then after a bit of looking, I noticed my skydome was casting shadows...so time to redo all the lighting again! lol, I really feel like an idiot atm

[Wisdomcube2000]

Very WIP video of the storm effects part 2. Still needs some work, but the progress is welcome after my last slip up

[sebluer]

@wisdomcube2000 you must make tutorial on that thunderstorm and are you able to randomize weather?