-----
INTRODUCTION
-----
Hello! Thank you for purchasing Ultra Dynamic Sky!
This document will cover all the basics of setting up and using UDS, but if you have any questions or run into any problems not covered here, please email me at support@ultradynamicsky.com
Also, there are tooltips for just about every setting on the sky and weather, so if you're confused about what something does, hover over it for a specific explanation.
-----
SKY SETUP
-----
-----
ADDING ULTRA DYNAMIC SKY TO YOUR LEVEL
-----
First, make sure you've removed any existing sky and cleared the following out of your level:
- Directional Lights
- Sky Light
- Exponential Height Fog
- Sky Atmosphere
- Volumetric Cloud
With all of these removed, if there is still some ambient light present, that probably means there's still static light left over in the level's lightmaps, so run a lighting build (from the Build dropdown on the main toolbar) to clear that out.
Drag the Ultra Dynamic Sky actor into your scene from the Blueprints folder. You should see the sky with its default configuration of daytime lighting with volumetric clouds.
Typically you should place UDS at ground level. If you want to change the height of the clouds, use Bottom Altitude in the Volumetric Clouds category instead of moving the actor.
Note, depending on the context, the editor may need to compile shaders for UDS before all of its features become visible. The editor should indicate this is happening, and it can potentially take a while depending on your system specs.
-----
BASIC CONTROLS
-----
When you select UDS in your level, the details panel will show the UDS settings, starting with the Basic Controls category.
The main things to note in Basic Controls are:
- Time of Day is the main control for time on UDS, and by default will determine the position of the sun and the moon.
- Sky Mode, Color Mode, Project Mode, and Feature Level, which broadly determine the features and behavior of UDS. See the sections below for information about each.
- Cloud Coverage and Fog, which determine how cloudy the sky is and how foggy the scene will be. Note, if Ultra Dynamic Weather also exists in your level, these values are controlled as part of the weather state, from UDW.
- Simple adjustments like Saturation, Contrast, Overall Intensity, and Night Brightness. These can be used for basic visual tweaks of the sky and lighting.
- Lighting Brightness values for Day, Dawn/Dusk, and Night. These can be used to art direct the lighting intensity on the scene, relative to the brightness of the sky colors.
- Dusk Time and Dawn Time determine the Time of Day values where the sun will cross the horizon. Note, these values won't be used if the sun is using Simulate Real Sun. For more information about the Simulation features, see the section on Simulation.
-----
SKY MODE
-----
In Basic Controls on UDS, there is a setting called Sky Mode. This mainly controls the type of clouds (or volumetric aurora) in use. Here is a quick explanation of each option:
1. Volumetric Clouds - Enabled by default, this sky mode uses a field of full 3D clouds. This can offer the most realistic visuals, but at a performance cost that may be too much for some projects/platforms.
2. Static Clouds - Designed to mimic the look of the volumetric clouds but as a static cloud texture. Much lower performance cost than volumetric clouds.
3. 2D Dynamic Clouds - Dynamic clouds drawn using panning 2D textures.
4. No Clouds - This mode uses no dynamic clouds at all.
5. Volumetric Aurora - Sacrifices clouds to render full 3D aurora effects. Adjustable using the settings in the Aurora category.
6. Space - For scenes set in outer space, with no planet/ground beneath the viewer. Disables all clouds, atmosphere, sky coloring, leaving only sun, moon and stars.
-----
COLOR MODE
-----
The next setting in Basic Controls, called Color Mode, determines where the colors for the sky come from.
1. Sky Atmosphere - The system will use unreal's sky atmosphere rendering system to imitate correct atmospheric scattering. The settings for this can be further adjusted from the Sky Atmosphere category.
2. Simplified Color - Determines colors in simpler ways, by sampling an atmospheric scattering LUT volume texture for the sun and moon, along with adjustable color values. Cheaper on the material level than the sky atmosphere, and more directly customizable. The color values used by Simplified Color can be changed from the Simplified Color category.
-----
PROJECT MODE
-----
The third top level Mode setting in Basic Controls is Project Mode. This setting determines how the system will behave at runtime. There are two options for Project Mode:
1. Game / Real-time enables runtime optimizations which spread out calculations on UDS. It's intended for games or any kind of project where real-time performance is needed.
2. Cinematic / Offline disables these optimizations, so that everything dynamic on the sky will update fully every frame. It also increases many quality settings automatically at runtime, to maximize render quality. It's intended for rendering movies or stills, or any project where real-time performance is not needed.
-----
FEATURE LEVEL
-----
Feature Level is a setting in Basic Controls on UDS. This should be set to match the targeted rendering feature level for your project. For example, if you're building for the mobile renderer, you should be sure to change Feature Level over to Mobile.
Feature Level will be used by the system to correct for limitations of the selected level. For example, if mobile is selected, incompatible Sky Modes like Volumetric Clouds and Volumetric Aurora will be replaced with compatible modes. The modes used as replacements are exposed to the user in the Mobile category.
If you are building your project for devices across multiple feature levels, you can have UDS set its feature level based on the Platform Name on startup. The option for that is found in the Mobile category.
-----
CLOUDS
-----
-----
VOLUMETRIC CLOUDS
-----
The Volumetric Clouds category is where you'll find the settings for adjusting the appearance of the volumetric cloud layer. Here are some of the key settings and what they do:
- Volumetric Cloud Rendering Mode is what determines how the engine will render the volumetric clouds to the screen. (It's a control for the renderer cvar r.volumetricrendertarget.mode, exposed through the UDS details for convenience) The modes are named after what aspects of rendering they prioritize. This setting has performance implications, and each mode has different strengths and weaknesses. See the tooltips for the modes for an explanation of each.
- Bottom Altitude is what sets how high the cloud layer is in the level. It's recommended to use this option instead of moving the UDS actor, as Bottom Altitude will adjust only the cloud layer, and won't have unintended effects on atmosphere and fog.
- Volumetric Clouds Scale is what you should adjust if you want to scale the entire cloud field uniformly.
- The View Sample Scale settings are what control the amount of samples used to render the clouds. If they're looking too noisy, you can increase this setting to resolve the clouds better, at a performance cost.
- In the Second Cloud Layer dropdown, Two Layers can be enabled to add a second layer of clouds above the first, offset in a handful of ways using the Layer 2 settings. Note that a second layer will increase the cost of cloud rendering very significantly.
If you want to directly control volumetric cloud coverage in specific parts of your level, like to make a specific area around a mountain free of clouds for example, you should use the Volumetric Cloud Painter utility. There is a section specifically on the Volumetric Cloud Painter further down in this document.
For more advanced control over cloud shaping, a tool is included for authoring the Cloud Profile LUT texture UDS clouds sample for their shape. That tool is the Cloud Profile Authoring Tool. You can run it from the Ultra Dynamic Sky dropdown on the level editor toolbar, or run the editor utility found in Blueprints/Tools.
-----
2D DYNAMIC CLOUDS
-----
In the 2D Dynamic Clouds category, you'll find all the settings relating to the look of the 2D clouds, from softness and shading effects to the noise texture used to generate the clouds.
When adjusting the 2D Dynamic Clouds, understand that the clouds are a material effect which exists on the sky sphere, so they do not exist in the 3D space of the level. Settings like Cloud Height are just a control of the fake perspective distortion that exists in the sky material.
Also note, in the advanced dropdown of the 2D Dynamic Clouds category, you'll find settings to adjust the distribution of the clouds, to make them have more coverage around the horizon or reduce coverage around the moon for example.
-----
STATIC CLOUDS
-----
Static Clouds is a sky mode which renders clouds in a simple, performance friendly way, as a static texture. This texture has different lighting angles packed into it to allow the clouds to approximate a simple lighting effect as the sun and moon change orientation.
The Static Clouds category has a few settings for changing out the texture used by the static clouds, and controlling its rotation.
There are three static clouds textures included, but you can also create your own custom ones using a special editor utility. The Static Clouds Authoring Tool can render the volumetric clouds on UDS to create a new static clouds texture. Run this tool from the Ultra Dynamic Sky dropdown on the level editor toolbar, or by running the editor utility found in Blueprints/Tools.
-----
CLOUD MOVEMENT
-----
The Cloud Movement category contains the settings for how volumetric clouds and 2D dynamic clouds will move. You can adjust Cloud Speed and Cloud Direction from here. Note that Cloud Direction will be controlled entirely by UDW if UDW exists in the level, using its wind direction.
Cloud Phase is particularly useful when Cloud Speed is set to 0. When clouds are still, you can use Cloud Phase to fine tune an exact formation of clouds you like.
Randomize Cloud Formation On Run will start the game with a randomized cloud formation every time, independent of the other movement settings.
Clouds Move With Time of Day is useful for situations where the speed of time can change, to keep cloud movement in sync with time during a short time lapse for example.
-----
CLOUD WISPS
-----
Cloud Wisps are the layer of static, wispy high altitude clouds, which are rendered on the sky behind every sky mode (except Space). You can find the settings for adjusting the appearance of them in the Cloud Wisps category.
The cloud wisps work by sampling a grayscale texture and using that to apply a cloud wisp color, which changes with time of day. The opacity of that color is scaled using the Cloud Wisps Opacity settings, one of which is used when Cloud Coverage is low, and one is used when coverage is high.
The texture can be replaced with a custom one with the Cloud Wisps Texture setting. Again, this should be a grayscale texture, as only the R channel will be sampled, to apply the cloud wisps color to the sky.
-----
LIGHTING
-----
-----
LIGHT COMPONENTS
-----
UDS has light components for the directional lights and sky light. The component used for each will be determined by the settings in their respective categories (Sun, Moon, and Sky Light), and in the case of the sky light, the Sky Light Mode setting.
Note that while it's possible to have UDS reference a light actor for the sun, moon or sky light, instead of using the built in component, this is not recommended in any situation except those which specifically require a light actor. For example third party assets or plugins may occasionally require a light actor reference. This is really the only situation it should be necessary to use an actor instead of the built in components.
If you do have to use light actors in place of the components, note these additional steps:
- For the directional lights, there is a setting on the component called "Cloud Scattered Luminance Scale" which controls how the lights affect the clouds. This isn't something exposed to blueprint control, so UDS cannot apply it to your light actor itself. You'll need to copy the value for Clouds Scattered Luminance Scale from the Sun or Moon component on UDS to your directional light actor.
- Similarly, on a sky light there is a setting called Source Type which UDS cannot control, but needs to be set in accordance with UDS' Sky Light Mode setting. For "Cubemap with Dynamic Color Tinting" and "Custom Cubemap", make sure the Source Type on your sky light actor is Specified Cubemap. For the sky light mode called Capture Based, make sure the source type is set to Captured Scene.
-----
SUN AND MOON DIRECTIONAL LIGHTS
-----
The directional light components on UDS are called Sun and Moon. Several settings on the directional lights will be controlled by the blueprint, such as light color, intensity, cast shadows, and light source angle. But the rest will be left open for you to edit directly on the component. To do this, just select UDS and find the Sun or Moon in the component list at the top of the details panel. On selecting one, you will see its directional light component settings, the same as the ones on a directional light actor.
The exposed settings for UDS' control of the directional lights can be found in their respective categories in the UDS details: Sun and Moon. Settings which affect both together can be found in the Directional Light category.
For information about the positioning and movement of the sun and moon, and their appearance in the sky, see the Sun and Moon section below.
-----
CLOUD SHADOWS
-----
Cloud Shadows will be applied to the directional lights by default, and are compatible with all sky modes, including the ones without clouds. They can be disabled from the Cloud Shadows category.
The Cloud Shadows category is also where you can adjust the intensity and softness of the shadows with cloud coverage. By default, cloud shadows fully occlude the directional light in high coverage, but only partially in low coverage. From here you can also adjust how much directional light is shadowed when Fog or Dust Amount is high.
If the sky mode is volumetric clouds, then the cloud shadows will be accurate to the 3D layer, so that every cloud in the layer casts its own correct shadow on the scene. For the other sky modes, since they don't have clouds which exist in 3D space to cast direct shadows, the speed and scale of the shadows texture is determined by 2D Cloud Shadows Speed and 2D Cloud Shadows Scale.
-----
SKY LIGHT
-----
In the Sky Light category, Sky Light Mode determines the source of the sky light cubemap and how its intensity and color will be controlled by UDS.
These are the Sky Light Modes and how they work:
1. Capture Based - The sky light will generate a cubemap by capturing the sky. By default, this method uses the real time capture option, which UDS exposes to a setting in the Sky Light category.
2. Custom Cubemap - A simple static cubemap texture, set using the Sky Light Cubemap option below.
3. Cubemap with Dynamic Color Tinting - This method uses a flat gray cubemap and tints it dynamically with the fog color to align well with the time of day. This option is good for performance in projects with dynamic time of day, as the ambient light is dynamic without requiring recapturing, and supports all platforms.
You can also use the Sky Light Color Multiplier settings to tint the color differently based on Time of Day. Note that these color multipliers can also be set to values higher than 1 and this will scale the light intensity proportionally at that time.
-----
EXPOSURE
-----
By default, UDS applies auto exposure settings. Auto exposure is what allows the brightness of the image to adapt to the light level of the scene automatically. Some features in Unreal Engine occasionally refer to auto exposure as "eye adaptation".
These auto exposure settings can be adjusted, or disabled, from the Exposure category.
When Apply Exposure Settings is enabled, UDS will control these specific settings for exposure:
- Exposure Compensation Curve, which pushes image brightness higher or lower based on the general level of light in the image.
- Exposure Compensation, controlled on UDS by the Exposure Bias settings for different time and weather scenarios. This can allow you to specifically make nighttime exposure brighter, or cloudy exposure darker, for example.
- Metering Mode, exposed as Exposure Metering Mode. This controls if auto exposure is applied, and which type. You can change UDS' exposure settings to Manual as well. This would disable auto exposure, but still allow using the exposure bias settings.
- MinEV100 and MaxEV100, which control the range of brightness that auto exposure will try to adapt to. This is controlled on UDS with the Exposure Brightness Range setting.
If you're trying to fine tune auto exposure behavior with these settings and/or the additional exposure settings in a post process volume or camera, I'd recommend using the viewport view mode found in Show > Visualize > HDR(Eye Adaptation) to see exactly what auto exposure is doing behind the scenes.
-----
USING STATIC/STATIONARY LIGHTING
-----
UDS' default configuration uses all movable lights, but it supports static lighting as well.
To make any of UDS' lights static or stationary, find its mobility setting, in the UDS details. These are found in the lights' respective categories, so Sun, Moon, and Sky Light. Make sure you set the mobility from the exposed setting, and not on the light component itself.
Once you've built the level's lighting, you will still be able to make some changes to the sky settings, but note that any settings which alter the lights or move them around will break the lighting build and you'll have to build again. Also note that if your sun light is set to be static/stationary, Time of Day will not be able to change at runtime.
-----
TIME
-----
-----
SETTING UP A DAY/NIGHT CYCLE
-----
If you want Time of Day to move forward on its own at runtime, to create a day/night cycle, the place to set that up is the Animate Time of Day category.
If Animate Time of Day is enabled there, time will move forward when the level is running. The speed of time will be determined by Day Length and Night Length. These values are in minutes and represent the real time that will pass between sunrise and sunset and vice versa.
Note, if you have Simulate Real Sun enabled in the Simulation category, the speed time moves is determined by Simulation Speed there, not Day Length and Night Length. For more info about the simulation features, see the Simulation section in these docs.
-----
CONTROLLING TIME OF DAY
-----
Change the Time of Day property in Basic Controls to adjust the time of day the system will start with. You can also enable an option to start with a random time, from the Animate Time of Day category.
For directly controlling Time of Day at runtime, there are several ways you can do that:
- Simply setting Time of Day on UDS at runtime will instantly change the time directly.
- You can call the functions called "Set Time with Time Code" or "Set Date and Time" to use common time/date structures to set the time with hours/minutes values.
- You can call the function "Transition Time of Day", to start the time animating to a target value over a specified duration. This is useful if you want to have time pass quickly to a particular point.
-----
GETTING AND DISPLAYING TIME OF DAY
-----
To get Time of Day from UDS, there are several ways you can sample the time in various formats.
- "Get Time of Day" outputs the float value of Time of Day directly, from 0-2400.
- "Get Time Code" will output a Time Code structure, with hours/minutes/seconds values.
- "Get Date Time" will output a Date Time structure, with the time in hours/minutes/seconds as well as the simulation date.
- "Is It Daytime?" will output a boolean which is true if the sun is up. If rather than the specific time you just need to know if it's day or not, this function is the one to use.
For displaying the time on screen in a simple way, UDS comes with two clock widgets. These can be found in the widget designer palette in the Ultra Dynamic Sky Widgets category.
-----
SUN AND MOON
-----
-----
ADJUSTING SUN AND MOON MOVEMENT
-----
By default (without using the Simulation settings covered elsewhere in this document) the Sun and Moon's position in the sky with time will be derived using the following settings found in both the Sun and Moon categories:
- Yaw (Sun Yaw and Moon Yaw) - This controls the yaw of the sun or moon's circular path. In other words, the direction that it will set/rise. It's a value in degrees, rotating the path clockwise.
- Pitch (Sun Pitch and Moon Pitch) - This pitches the path, so that the sun or moon's highest position in the sky will be lower, angled away from the zenith. It's also a value in degrees, with 0 meaning the sun/moon would go all the way to the top of the sky at its peak.
- Vertical Offset (Sun Vertical Offset and Moon Vertical Offset) - This value can be positive or negative, to push the position of the sun or moon higher or lower, irrespective of the time.
- The moon specifically also has a setting for Moon Orbit Offset which controls how the moon is offset from the sun in time. A value of 0 will have the moon's path be the opposite of the sun's, rising at night and going down during the day.
Again, it's important to note all of these values will be ignored if you're using the Simulation instead. See the section in these docs on the Simulation features for more information on how to control that.
-----
MANUALLY POSITIONING THE SUN AND MOON
-----
It is possible to disconnect the sun or moon's position from time, and place them completely manually.
To do this, check Manually Position Sun Target in the Sun category, or Manually Position Moon Target, in the Moon category.
With that turned on, find the blue diamond shaped widget labeled Sun Target or Moon Target, visible on the UDS actor when it's selected. Select that widget and move it to adjust the position of the sun or moon.
The direction of the sun/moon will be determined by the direction from the UDS actor to the position of that target widget.
-----
SUN APPEARANCE
-----
The Sun category is where you'll find all the settings specifically for adjusting the appearance of the sun in the sky.
The sun is rendered as a simple radial gradient, so it has settings for scale, softness, color, and intensity.
Sun Scale will also be used to derive the correct light source angle of the sun directional light, so the softness of the shadows and size of specular highlights will be correct for the sun's size in the sky. You can scale it relative to that calculated value with Sun Source Angle Scale.
The sun also has Solar Eclipse settings, to adjust what happens when the moon, or an object in the Space Layer, goes in front of the sun.
-----
MOON APPEARANCE AND PHASE
-----
The Moon category is where you'll find all the settings specifically for the appearance and phase of the moon.
By default, the moon supports rendering moon phases, which can be adjusted with the Moon Phase setting. You can also enable an option in the Moon category to have moon phase change over time. Note that if using Simulate Real Moon, the moon phase will be set by the simulation.
You can change out the moon texture as well from the moon category, but note that there are two textures for that. The one called Moon Texture is the RGB color and alpha channel of the moon. The one called Moon Phase Normal is an RGB texture containing the local normal of the moon, for rendering moon phases. If you want to replace the moon with a texture that doesn't require moon phases, you can disable phase rendering entirely with the setting Render Moon Phases.
-----
FOG
-----
-----
FOG DENSITY
-----
The Fog Density category on UDS is where variables like Cloud Coverage and Fog are used to determine the density, height falloff, and start distance of the exponential height fog layer.
Density is how thick/opaque the fog will be with distance from the camera. Height Falloff is how quickly fog density dissipates above the height of the fog component.
For density, there is a base value, and then values added to density for Cloud Coverage, Fog, and Dust Amount.
For height falloff, there is a base value, and then falloff values for a cloudy, foggy, and dusty state, which are used directly, not added together.
The start distance of the fog is derived from the density, using a value for start distance at low density, and a density value where start distance will be reduced to 0, to allow fog right next to the camera.
-----
FOG COLOR
-----
The Fog Color category is where the settings for the color of the height fog are, but how they're used by UDS depends heavily on the project setting "Support Sky Atmosphere Affecting Height Fog".
This setting should typically be enabled by default in new projects, and I would recommend leaving it enabled, as it derives colors for fog directly from the sky atmosphere, and this usually produces good, desired results. If this project setting is on, only some of the Fog Color settings on UDS will be used by the fog during most circumstances, as the sky atmosphere will be used for fog color directly instead.
If you want more direct control over fog color on its own however, you might try disabling that project setting, to allow the fog to always use the Fog Color settings alone to determine fog colors.
Note, you can disregard everything above if you are using the Simplified Color option for Color Mode, as the sky atmosphere is not enabled at all in that mode. If Simplified Color is selected, all the Fog Color settings will be used by the fog.
-----
VOLUMETRIC FOG
-----
Volumetric Fog is a rendering feature in Unreal Engine which can render more advanced fog nearby the camera, which receives and scatters light from local light sources and can vary its color and extinction using volumetric materials or particles placed in the level.
The settings for enabling this on UDS are found in its Volumetric Fog category.
The basic settings for enabling volumetric fog and adjusting its overall extinction and the distance it renders from the camera are found at the top of the category. You'll also find settings for the sun and moon's Volumetric Scattering Intensity here, which scales how much each light source lights up the volumetric fog.
**
Global Volumetric Material
Also in the Volumetric Fog category is the option to render the Global Volumetric Material, which if enabled will allow some simple global controls of extinction and color. The global volumetric material has the following features, each of which can be enabled/adjusted from here in the Volumetric Fog category:
- Texture based 3D noise applied to the fog extinction, to add some variation to the fog.
- The ability to mask the volumetric fog using the Weather Mask brush system. See the weather section of this readme for information about that toolset.
- Ground fog, which adds additional fog extinction in the air directly above distance fields. This requires the project setting to generate mesh distance fields to be enabled.
- Specific fog extinction and albedo can be applied beneath the water level. The water level is controlled from the Water category.
-----
DUST
-----
Ultra Dynamic Sky has a Dust category, which can be used to imitate the air being full of dust/smoke/other particulates.
Dust Amount is used to affect the fog density, height falloff, and fog color. The color used for fog color when Dust Amount is 1 is the Dust Color setting. The settings specific to how dust affects density are in the Fog Density category.
Note, if Ultra Dynamic Weather is in the level, the weather state there will take control of the Dust Amount value on UDS.
-----
SKY COLOR
-----
-----
SKY ATMOSPHERE
-----
If Color Mode is set to Sky Atmosphere, then the main controls of sky color will be found in the Sky Atmosphere category. Here are some of the key settings:
- The Rayleigh Scattering settings are what chiefly determine the main color of the sky. It can be adjusted for day, night, and dawn/dusk individually.
- The Sunset/Sunrise and Twilight values control the Absorption setting on the sky atmosphere component. This can be used to make stronger colored sunsets for example, or alter the tone of twilight.
- Sky Atmosphere Overcast Luminance will scale the intensity of all sky colors whenever the Cloud Coverage is high.
-----
SIMPLIFIED COLOR
-----
If Color Mode is set to Simplified Color, then the main controls of sky color will be found in the Simplified Color category. Here are some of they key settings:
- The color variables in Simplified Color control the base sky color, as well as the light and dark color of the 2D Dynamic Clouds and Static Clouds. (For control of volumetric cloud color, see the Volumetric Cloud category.)
- The Directional Intensity float curve controls how much the intensity of the directional light is dimmed down as it nears the horizon.
- The Directional Light Scattering color curve controls how the directional light color is filtered as it nears the horizon.
- The Sun and Moon atmosphere LUT textures are used by the sky material to derive atmospheric colors from camera vector and the orientation of the sun/moon light. They are volume textures authored in a pretty involved process to closely match sky atmosphere colors by default. If you want to modify them at all, I would recommend just doing color transforms to the included textures.
-----
SIMULATION
-----
-----
SIMULATION OF REAL WORLD SUN, MOON AND STARS
-----
UDS has features to position the sun, moon and stars using real world coordinates and date. These options are found in the Simulation category.
To enable them, just check Simulate Real Sun, Simulate Real Moon, and Simulate Real Stars. Each of these can also be enabled individually as needed.
- Simulate Real Sun and Simulate Real Moon simply override the default logic for the positioning of the sun and moon. All of the settings for positioning/path in the Sun and Moon categories will be overridden (except for Manually Position, which takes priority over the Simulation). Simulate Real Moon also controls Moon Phase.
- Simulate Real Stars will change what texture is used for the stars. By default a simple tiling stars texture is used. With Simulate Real Stars enabled, a 360 degree star map will be used instead. Both of these texture settings are exposed to be changed out in the Stars category.
The simulated location is determined using the Latitude and Longitude values. Also make sure to set the Time Zone to the correct UTC offset for the location, so that Time of Day will be interpreted correctly as local to this location. You can also select a city preset, which will apply latitude, longitude, time zone, and daylight savings settings in one step.
The year, month and day control the date of the simulation. At runtime, the date will increment forward every night at midnight, like you would expect.
North Yaw can be adjusted to change what world space direction corresponds to north in the simulation. It's a value in degrees, rotating the simulation clockwise. By default, north is toward positive X.
**
Notes on the Simulation Accuracy
Because the complete versions of the appropriate astronomical algorithms would be very expensive to calculate with blueprint math, what I've created here is my own approximation. It leaves out complicating nuances such as the eccentricity of the earth's orbit, or the irregularity of the earth's shape. That said, I've done a lot of back and forth testing, and my approximations of the sun's position were never more than a little over a degree off from the results given by the complete algorithm, and that deviation is a worst case scenario. Typically the deviation was only in fractions of a
degree. Again, based on my own tests. You may find edge cases where the deviation is worse. Still, I think the accuracy of the sun is sufficient for almost all practical applications.
The accuracy of the Moon's position is more variable than the sun's. The Moon's orbit is calibrated using it's position in 2017. So, any date within several decades of that should be generally accurate. At the very least, the moon should generally appear in the correct constellation and have the right phase.
-----
CONTROLLING TIME OF THE SIMULATION
-----
If Simulate Real Sun is enabled, Time of Day will behave differently in some ways to suit the needs of the simulation. Also the simulation has some specific features which interpret or change how time is handled.
- If Animate Time of Day is enabled, the speed of time will not be determined by Day Length and Night Length. Instead, it will be determined by Simulation Speed, in the Simulation category. This value scales the speed of time, with 1 being roughly realistic speed.
- Options for daylight savings time can be found in the Simulation category. If enabled, Time of Day will be interpreted with DST within the range of the year set by the DST start and end times in the advanced dropdown of the Simulation category.
- Use System Time, in the Simulation category, will set the Time of Day and date values using the UTC time from the system clock, offset by the selected Time Zone. This feature can also be used without making use of any of the Simulation features.
-----
CINEMATICS AND RENDERING
-----
-----
ANIMATING UDS WITH SEQUENCER
-----
Here are some tips for animating the sky using sequencer.
Keyframing Time of Day
To animate Time of Day directly, you should disable the Animate Time of Day setting on UDS, and keyframe the Time of Day variable. When animating with the Time of Day variable, it's okay to go past 2400. The system will understand this and proceed forward in time with a new day.
Keyframing Cloud Coverage or Fog
To animate the cloudiness or fogginess, you can keyframe the Cloud Coverage or Fog variables on UDS, but only if you don't have an Ultra Dynamic Weather actor in your scene. If you do, you should keyframe the Cloud Coverage and Fog variables on UDW instead, using its manual weather state. (See the sequencer section in Weather for more info about animating weather state on UDW)
Keyframing Cloud Movement
To directly animate cloud movement, first set Cloud Speed to 0. Disable "Randomize Cloud Formation on Run" and "Clouds Move with Time of Day" as well. Then in sequencer, animate using the Cloud Phase variable. This will allow you to directly control cloud movement in a way that will play back the same way every time.
Keyframing Other Variables
Not every variable on UDS is reapplied dynamically at runtime, in the way that would be needed to animate the value in a cinematic. Many are though, and all of the UDS variables that will work without additional steps are exposed to be keyframed.
If you want to try keyframing additional variables that are not exposed by default, you'll need to mark them as exposed. Open UDS in the blueprint editor, find the variable in the My Blueprint panel, and check Expose to Cinematics on its variable details.
Any variables you expose manually like that will probably not update with the keyframe at runtime, but you could try calling the relevant Static Properties function every frame of the animation, and that should work to force values to update.
For tips about animating weather, see the section about sequencer in the Weather section of the readme.
-----
RENDERING MOVIES
-----
When rendering out a sequence using the movie render queue, first make sure to change Project Mode on UDS to "Cinematic / Offline". This configures the sky for maximum quality at runtime, while also disabling many optimizations that are useful only in real-time rendering scenarios. If rendering a movie using the path tracer, see the section in this document on using UDS with the path tracer.
If your project does need real-time performance at runtime normally , be sure to turn Project Mode back to Game / Real-time after completing your movie render, or game performance will be severely compromised.
Note the Cinematic / Offline Mode category on UDS, which has additional settings to adjust how quality is affected when rendering in that mode.
-----
RENDERING WITH THE PATH TRACER
-----
If you turn on the Path Tracer in a scene with Ultra Dynamic Sky, you'll face some rendering limitations of the path tracer. The path tracer uses the sky light cube map as a replacement for native sky rendering.
Ultra Dynamic Sky has a setting specifically to adjust for these limitations as well as it can, to work acceptably as a background for path traced renders. Just enable the option "Adjust for Path Tracer" in the Cinematics / Offline Rendering category on UDS.
Also note the setting "Render Height Fog In Path Tracer Using Post Process" in the Fog Color category. This is enabled by default, and allows the path tracer to render an approximation of distant height fog, which the path tracer lacks native support for.
-----
LOOPING THE VOLUMETRIC CLOUD MOVEMENT
-----
If you need to make the volumetric clouds seamlessly loop, for rendering a looping movie for example, this is possible within some constraints.
The only way for the loop to occur is for the formation texture to make one full 0-1 cycle across its UVs. So the loop is necessarily quite long at a minimum with clouds moving at a normal speed.
To configure the clouds to loop seamlessly, follow these steps:
In the Cloud Movement category:
- Set Cloud Speed to 0. You'll be using the Cloud Phase variable to control time within the loop.
- Make sure Cloud Direction is set to be along a single axis (0, 90, 180, or 270)
- Set Formation Change Speed to 1. (Alternatively you could use 0.5, but the loop would need to be twice as long.)
In the Volumetric Clouds category:
- Set 3D Noise Scale to 1.
- Set Cloud Formation Texture Scale to 1.
- Set Macro Variation to 0.
- Set 3D Noise Vertical Movement to 0.
With this configuration, you can keyframe the Cloud Phase variable from 0-100 to create an animation of cloud movement that loops seamlessly. (If you used Formation Change Speed of 0.5, the loop would be from 0-200 instead.)
-----
CONTROLLING YOUR LEVEL WITH UDS
-----
-----
TURNING ON LIGHTS IN YOUR LEVEL AT NIGHT
-----
There is a special component included to help make a light which turns on and off at sunset/sunrise. It's the "Light Day-Night Toggle" component found in the Blueprints/Utilities folder.
Just add one of these components as a child of any light component on an actor.
When the level is played, the light's active state will be determined by if the sun is up or not. It will be on at night by default, but you can change that using a setting on the component.
By default the light will also animate its intensity as it powers on, to imitate some types of lamps. You can disable this or adjust it from the component's settings.
The state of the light can also be used to control a "Light Toggle" scalar parameter on an array of dynamic material instances. Just add a dynamic material instance to that array, and the parameter (from 0 to 1) will be set as the state of the light changes.
If you need to toggle lights which just exist as emissive color in materials (with no light component) there are material functions you can use for that instead of a blueprint approach. The functions "Day to Night Color" and "Day to Night Float" will switch between two inputs based on if the sun is up or down.
-----
TRIGGERING EVENTS AT SPECIFIC TIMES
-----
UDS has event dispatchers which are called at particular times, which your actors can use to perform actions at Sunset, Sunrise, Midnight, Hourly, Every Minute, or a Custom Time.
To use them, you'll first need to get a reference to the UDS actor in your blueprints. A simple way to do that is to use the shared function "Get Ultra Dynamic Sky". Then using that reference, you can bind events in your blueprint to the dispatchers. For example "Bind to Sunrise" or "Bind to Sunset". Once they're bound, these events will be called by UDS at the appropriate time.
Note the setting "Time Event Dispatcher Check Period" in the Animate Time of Day category. This sets how often these time events can potentially be called. By default events are checked for every second whenever Time of Day is actively changing.
Sunset and Sunrise
By default, the Sunset and Sunrise events will fire at the minute the sun crosses the horizon. But you can offset that time to suit your needs using the "Sunrise Event Offset" and "Sunset Event Offset" settings in the Animate Time of Day category.
Hourly
There are two hourly event dispatchers, both of which output the current hour as an integer when called. The difference is how they handle time of day being changed instantly. The "Hourly" event dispatcher will be called for every hour which is skipped over by an instant time change. The "Current Hour Changed" event dispatcher will only be called once, for the new current hour.
Every Minute
The Every Minute event works similarly to Current Hour Changed, outputting the current minute as an integer, from 0-59.
Custom Time
The Custom Time dispatcher won't be called at all by default. In the Animate Time of Day category, there is an empty float array called Custom Time Dispatchers. The dispatcher will be called for each value you add to this array, when Time of Day crosses that point at runtime.
When called, the dispatcher outputs the Array Index which caused the call. This way the logic you bind to the dispatcher can tell which of the Time of Day values in the array was just passed.
-----
SKY UTILITY MATERIAL FUNCTIONS
-----
UDS includes a few material functions to serve some basic utilities in materials, controlled by the state of the UDS blueprint automatically. These can be found by searching for them in the material palette, in any material.
Day to Night Float/Color
There are two functions, "Day to Night Float" and "Day to Night Color". These take in two values, and interpolate from one to the other based on if the sun is up or down. There are inputs to offset the threshold above or below the horizon, and widen or sharpen the range used for the transition.
Active Sun or Moon Vector
The function "Active Sun or Moon Vector" outputs a unit vector pointing in the direction of the sun light, when the sun is up, and in the direction of the moon light, when only the moon is up. A second 0-1 value is output which goes down to 0 at the moment the vector changes from one to the other, to help mask any effect which uses the vector.
-----
NIGHT SKY
-----
-----
STARS
-----
The Stars category has settings for adjusting the appearance and textures used for the stars in the sky material.
By default, the stars are mapped with a simple tiling texture. This can be replaced with the Tiling Stars texture variable.
If Simulate Real Stars is enabled in the Simulation category, a much higher res 360 degree star map will be used. This can be replaced with the Real Stars texture variable.
In the Stars category, you can also find settings for the stars color, intensity, and how much they imitate an atmospheric twinkling effect.
-----
AURORA
-----
UDS has two ways of rendering aurora effects in the sky, both adjustable from the Aurora category:
2D Aurora
This is the effect which will be present if you enable "Use Auroras" in the Aurora category, and the Sky Mode is not Volumetric Aurora and is one which is compatible with 2D aurora. These 2D Aurora effects are a simple shader effect drawn using textures in the sky material. You can find settings specific to the 2D aurora and the way they're drawn in the advanced dropdown of the Aurora category.
Volumetric Aurora
Volumetric Aurora can be selected as a sky mode in Basic Controls. This effect is rendered using a volumetric cloud component, so it's a full 3D effect which the camera can go into/above.
Both of these effects share most of the settings in the Aurora category, for colors and movement.
-----
SKY GLOW
-----
The Sky Glow category has options which add additional light to the night sky independent of the moon/sun.
Night Sky Glow adds uniform light to the sky material and subtly lights the volumetric clouds from above. The idea is to imitate the effect of ambient star light and general atmosphere glow, but it can be increased as needed to add additional minimum illumination to the night sky, to keep things from getting too dark without moonlight.
Light Pollution adds light to the sky material and softly illuminates volumetric clouds from below. This is to imitate the effect of city lighting on the atmosphere.
-----
ADDING PLANETS / MOONS / NEBULA USING THE SPACE LAYER
-----
UDS can render additional planets and moons, to the sky layer, correctly composited so they block stars, but are obscured behind clouds and aurora.
The place to do this is the Space Layer category on UDS. You can either manually add planets to the Planets / Moons array in that category, or you can start with one of the presets by selecting something for "Add Planet / Moon Preset".
Within the Planets / Moons array, you can customize the look and behavior of each planet.
All of the settings have tooltips, but here are a few key ones to note:
- Parent controls what the planet will move with. It can be parented to the sun, the moon, or it can be left unparented so it doesn't move, or could potentially be moved manually at runtime by manipulating the transform of the components in the Space Roots array on UDS.
- Relative Rotation rotates the orientation of the planet, relative to what it's been parented to.
- Scale sets the visual scale of the planet.
- The Terminator settings refer to the solar terminator, the line between the light and dark sides of the planet.
- The Light Vector controls where the light source determining the light/dark side of the planet will come from. The sun, the moon, or the custom vector.
- The Glow settings control an additional element, which renders a diffuse atmospheric glow around the planet. The brightness depends on how much of the lit side is facing the camera, and is scaled with the setting Space Glow Brightness in the Space Layer category.
The space layer draws these additional planets into the sky material using the dbuffer. So Dbuffer Decals should be enabled in your project (or Mobile DBuffer Decals for the mobile renderer), and need to be supported by the platform, for these planets/moons to be rendered.
Also in the Space Layer category, you'll find an option to enable a layer of Nebula, rendered into the sky material the same way as the planets/moons. This nebula effect is noise based, and has parameters exposed to adjust its noise settings, colors, and intensity.
-----
ADDITIONAL FEATURES
-----
-----
SUN LENS FLARE
-----
UDS has its own feature to apply a filmic lens flare to the sun specifically. Note that this is a completely separate effect from the image based lens flares built into the engine as a stock post processing effect.
To enable this lens flare, just check "Enable Sun Lens Flare" in the Lens Flare category, and select the Lens Flare Type you want.
It is possible to build your own custom lens flare type using this same setup. In the advanced dropdown of the Lens Flare category, see the option "Custom Lens Flare Parent Instance". To use this, create an instance of one of the existing lens flare material instances in Materials/Material_Instances/Lens_Flares. You can adjust the textures, colors, and mapping parameters of all the lens flare elements in your custom instance and use it with that exposed Custom parent instance setting.
-----
SKY MODIFIERS
-----
UDS has a framework for applying modifiers to the sky, which can affect a selection of float and color properties on UDS, as well as post process settings. These modifiers can be applied or removed at runtime, faded in and out, and layered on top of each other.
**
Creating Sky Modifier Assets
UDS Modifiers are data assets which you can author using the Sky Modifier Editor utility. You can access this from the Ultra Dynamic Sky dropdown on the level editor toolbar, or by running the editor utility asset in Blueprints/Tools.
In the Sky Modifier Editor, you can Open an existing UDS Modifier asset, or use New to create a new blank modifier. New modifier assets are placed in Blueprints/Sky_Modifiers, but after they're saved by the tool, you are free to move them anywhere else.
The Modifiable Sky Properties lists all the properties which the modifier system can take control of on UDS. To make the current modifier affect one of these, just edit the value exposed for it. If you want to remove that property override, click the checkbox next to the property to remove it from the modifier.
In Modifier Settings, you can also adjust the easing behavior used when fading the modifier in/out, as well as the max alpha this modifier will apply when interpolating to its override values. This is also where you can enable the option for the modifier to apply its own post process settings, and configure the settings it applies.
While you work in the Sky Modifier Editor, the current modifier will be previewed on UDS.
**
You can add a modifier to the sky configuration, to be used from level start, from the Modifiers category on UDS. You can also toggle the visibility of that modifier in the level editor.
At runtime, there are functions you can call on UDS to control modifiers:
Add Modifier
This function will add a modifier if it is not already present, and fade it in over the supplied fade in time, in seconds.
Remove Modifier
Similarly, this function will remove an existing applied modifier, and fade it out over the supplied fade out time.
Set Modifier State
This function will set the alpha of a modifier in a way that it will not change on its own. For example, you could use this function to manually make a modifier be controlled by an arbitrarily changing value, like the player's position in the level. Note, the modifier does not need to already be applied to call this function. If it's not, this function will add it automatically.
Clear Modifiers
Instantly clears out all applied modifiers at once.
Set Unmodified Property Values
The blueprint, when it starts up, saves all of its unmodified properties, for the modifiers to interpolate from/to as they are added and removed. If you need to, you can call this function again at runtime to resave the current applied properties to be the new unmodified state.
**
Time of Day Specific Modifiers
If you want a modifier to apply on its own within a specific Time of Day range, there is a feature for that as well. In the Sky Modifiers category, find the map called Time of Day Specific Modifiers.
Add a modifier to that map, and expand the dropdown to open the settings for its fade range. You can configure the modifier to fade in across any range of Time of Day values and fade out across another. You can have the fade in happen before or after the fade out, for cases where the modifier is applied overnight. Just make sure the end time for both fades is after the start time.
When applying a modifier automatically with time in this way, do not attempt to control it with the modifier control functions mentioned above, as they will conflict.
-----
INTERIOR ADJUSTMENTS
-----
UDS has a category called Interior Adjustments, which if enabled, you can use to adjust a few things like fog and light, based on how occluded the camera is by surrounding scene collision.
To use these settings, first check "Apply Interior Adjustments" in the Interior Adjustments category. Then, make your changes to the settings below, which modify various properties of the sky when inside an interior.
See the Player Occlusion category for the settings which define how the scene is queried to determine the occlusion value used by Interior Adjustments.
You can also place the UDS Occlusion Volume actor, found in Blueprints/Occlusion, to force specific spaces to be fully occluded and always apply the interior adjustments. Note the Occlusion Mode setting in the Player Occlusion category, which sets if occlusion is determined by the traces for collision, the occlusion volumes, or both.
-----
PLAYER OCCLUSION
-----
Player Occlusion is the name of a system on UDS which can actively monitor how occluded from the sky/weather the player camera/pawn is within interiors. In other words, how "inside" or "outside" the player is in relation to the scene collision around them.
The resulting occlusion values are utilized by features on the sky and weather:
- Interior Adjustments on UDS, which can adjust some sky properties based on occlusion.
- Sound Occlusion on UDW, which can quiet/muffle weather sounds when the player is occluded.
- Temperature calculation on UDW can optionally apply an interior temperature when occluded.
The Player Occlusion category on UDS contains the settings which define how occlusion values are determined. How much time each occlusion update takes, how many collision traces are used, what collision channel is traced against, etc.
To direct player occlusion values in specific spaces, you can place a UDS Occlusion Volume actor into your level.
-----
SCREEN SPACE LIGHT SHAFTS
-----
Light Shaft Bloom is an engine level rendering feature for directional light. It renders light rays/god rays as a cheap screen space effect, by sampling the rendered image for color and depth. For this reason, the effect only works when facing the light source. Also note that this effect has nothing to do with volumetric fog, which can achieve similar light rays but in an entirely different way.
The Screen Space Light Shafts category on UDS has settings to enable this effect on the directional lights for the sun and moon.
-----
PAINTING VOLUMETRIC CLOUD COVERAGE
-----
There are tools included for manually painting cloud coverage into the volumetric cloud layer. This painted coverage level is applied on top of the global Cloud Coverage value set on UDS (or by the weather state if UDW is present).
With UDS in the scene and Volumetric Clouds selected for its sky mode, run the Volumetric Cloud Painter from the Ultra Dynamic Sky dropdown on the level editor toolbar, or by running the editor utility asset in the Blueprints folder.
An actor called a UDS Cloud Paint Container is what holds the painting data this tool creates. When starting the painter, you can make a new container, or if your level already has one, open an existing one. You can have as many containers as you want in your level. See the section below about changing between them.
Here's a description of the various parts of the cloud painter interface and how to use them:
- The top bar is where you will adjust the brush used to paint cloud coverage. You can change the texture, strength, falloff, and brush spacing.
- The viewport in the cloud painter is where you will paint brush strokes onto the cloud layer. Left click to paint, right click to drag the viewport, middle mouse click and drag to zoom in and out (or use the buttons in the lower right). You can change between three view modes by clicking View in the lower left. You can also toggle the painting viewport locking the level viewport camera to the painting area, using the lock icon there.
- On the left of the viewport are the different paint and erase modes. You can paint three levels of cloud coverage, represented on the viewport as red, green, and blue. You can also erase existing painting (paint black).
- At the bottom of the tool is the button to Save to Textures. Make sure to press this to end your painting session and save your work. It will save the painted cells to texture files. It will put these into a subfolder called UDS_LevelData, in the folder where the level is located.
The painted cell textures are drawn into a cloud coverage render target on UDS. You can find the settings for the size and resolution of that target, and how its used, on UDS in the Volumetric Cloud Painting category.
Changing Between Multiple Cloud Paint Containers
If you have multiple cloud paint containers in your level, and you want to change which one is active, you should call the Activate and Deactivate functions on the actor. You can call this at runtime, or from the details panel in the editor.
-----
UNDERWATER CAUSTICS
-----
If your level has a global ocean/water level, below which you want to have light imitate the effect of caustic refraction, UDS has a feature for this.
In the Water category on UDS, you can enable "Render Water Caustics" which will apply a caustic effect to the sun and moon directional light below the height specified by Water Level.
The light will also fade down to 0 as the depth below the water reaches Deep Water Falloff, to imitate the effect of direct sunlight being completely occluded deep beneath the surface.
-----
VOLUMETRIC CLOUD LIGHT RAYS
-----
If in an overcast sky you use the Volumetric Cloud Painter to create a break in the cloud coverage, you will see an effect of light rays in the distance coming down through that hole in the coverage. That's a result of the Volumetric Cloud Light Rays, which are enabled by default, and can be adjusted in the category of the same name.
Note, the volumetric cloud light rays are a custom effect which renders rays using giant additive cards controlled by a niagara system. They aren't connected in any way to volumetric fog or screen space light shafts.
There are settings in the Volumetric Cloud Light Rays category to adjust the color and spacing of the ray cards, as well as enable "Individual Cloud Light Rays" which will try to cast rays through gaps in overall high coverage cloud formations, not just painted gaps in coverage. Note that this setting can potentially render many more ray cards, so it can have a more significant performance cost.
-----
POST PROCESSING
-----
If you want to apply post process settings which are applied dynamically depending on time or weather, UDS has a feature for that.
In the Post Processing category on UDS, you'll find an empty array called Post Process Components. If you add entries to this array, the system will create a post process component for each one.
Each entry has post process settings, where you can override and modify any post setting such as bloom settings, color grading, vignette, etc. Below the post processing settings are:
- Checkboxes to Enable/Disable this post process component based on the time of day. This will control the blend weight of the component, fading it in and out based on the current time.
- Checkboxes to mask the component with cloud coverage, fog, dust, or interior occlusion. For example, if you checked "Mask Blend Weight When Overcast", the post settings for this component would fade away as the sky becomes overcast.
- Checkboxes to mask the component if raining/snowing or not. This is dependent on the presence of UDW. If UDW isn't being used, these will have no effect.
By adding and customizing the entries in this array, you can create post processing settings which change for the time and weather's specific context.
-----
AMBIENT SOUNDS CONTROLLED BY TIME AND WEATHER
-----
If you want an ambient sound actor to adjust it's volume based on if it's day or night, or based on the weather state from Ultra Dynamic Weather, there's a class included for that.
It's called "AmbientSound-Time and Weather Controlled" and can be found in the Blueprints/Sound folder.
It's a child of the normal Ambient Sound class, so it works exactly the same. Just with additional logic to control the volume multiplier with time and weather.
At the top of the Sound category, you'll find the settings for this. There are volume multipliers for day and night, as well as ones for snowy/rainy/no weather. There's also a setting called Volume Multiplier Transition Time which controls how long it will take the volume multiplier to change when time/weather triggers a change.
Note, if you want a more fully featured environment soundscape system closely incorporated with time and weather, with sound occlusion, consider using the Environment Sound system on Ultra Dynamic Weather.
-----
ON SCREEN SKY CONTROLS
-----
If your project needs a simple on screen interface to give the user control of time and/or weather, UDS comes with a widget built to be a good quick and clean solution for that.
It's called UDS Onscreen Controls and it can be found in the widget designer palette in the Ultra Dynamic Sky Widgets category.
By default, all of its controls will be enabled, but you can use the exposed settings on the widget details to turn off the controls you don't need. For example, you could limit it to only Show Time Control, for a simple compact control for Time of Day.
There are also settings to control the time and date format displayed, and the weather presets available in the weather controls.
If you want to use the Onscreen Controls on a client in a multiplayer context, to control UDS/UDW state on the server, there is support for this. In your player controller class, add the UDS Client Controller component. Onscreen Controls will automatically use this from clients to replicate time/weather functions up to the server.
-----
MISCELLANEOUS
-----
-----
SAVING AND APPLYING CONFIGURATIONS
-----
It may be useful to save a full configuration of all the settings on UDS (or UDW) for reusing in other levels/projects, or applying at runtime with game events. You can do this using the Configuration Manager. Run the Configuration Manager from the Ultra Dynamic Sky dropdown on the level editor toolbar, or by running the editor utility directly, found in the Blueprints folder.
Using the Configuration Manager
In the configuration manager, you can select your existing saved configurations to apply to your UDS actor. And you can create new configurations using the save button in the bottom right, when no configuration is selected.
You will be prompted to name your new configuration and select a place to save it. You can either save to your project files, which will put the new config into the Ultra Dynamic Sky folder in your project. Or you can save to the engine content folder, which will put the config file into an Ultra Dynamic Sky folder there. If the config is saved in the project, it will be accessible only from this project. If the config is saved to the engine, it will be accessible by UDS in any project using that engine version.
The version number in the corner of the configuration thumbnails is the version of UDS that configuration was saved with. You can continue to use configurations saved with previous versions, but understand of course they won't contain data for variables/features added in later versions. So it may be in your interest to resave them so they contain complete data, depending on how you use them.
Applying a Configuration at Runtime
To apply a configuration to UDS or UDW at runtime, call the function "Apply Sky Configuration" on UDS, or "Apply Weather Configuration" on UDW. If you need to apply both sky and weather configs at once, I recommend applying the weather config first.
Configuration Overrides
You can also select a configuration asset on UDS or UDW to have the configuration of the actor be controlled directly by a reference to the config asset. This is useful in cases where you have UDS/UDW instances in multiple levels, and you want them to reference a shared configuration asset for their settings.
The override options are found in the advanced dropdown of the Basic Controls category on UDS and UDW.
Note of course that if a config asset is selected for the override, you won't be able to change any of the UDS/UDW settings, as they will be controlled by the override.
At runtime the override is applied on startup. Once the game is running, you can still work with the UDS/UDW variables as normal.
Pin a Configuration Button to the Editor Layout
If you have several configurations you need to swap between while working on a level, there is an editor utility to help with this. The Configuration Buttons utility can be found in the Ultra Dynamic Sky dropdown on the level editor toolbar.
In this compact editor panel, you can add configuration assets as buttons for quick access.
-----
SAVING THE SKY AND WEATHER STATE FOR SAVE DATA
-----
If you need to save the current state of UDS, and UDW as well if using it, for saving in save data or just preserving the state across a level load, there are functions on UDS to do that.
"Create UDS and UDW State for Saving" will package the state of both UDS and UDW into a single struct, which you can save with your save data. It contains all the variables for the time and current weather state.
"Apply Saved UDS and UDW State" will take in one of those saved state structs and apply it to UDS and UDW. This is to be used when loading a save or upon entering a new level.
-----
CONFIGURING FOR PERFORMANCE
-----
Here are some of the most performance relevant settings to take note of if you want to reduce the performance cost of the main UDS features.
Note this focuses on the cost of UDS' features, not general engine/renderer features which aren't specific to UDS. General UE resources on optimizing performance of engine features (dynamic shadows, global illumination, etc) will apply the same when using UDS.
Sky Mode
The most GPU performance relevant setting on the whole system is certainly Sky Mode. The most expensive option here is of course Volumetric Clouds. 2D Dynamic Clouds is significantly cheaper to render, and Static Clouds is somewhat cheaper still. No Clouds obviously has the most minimal cost (outside of the Space mode).
Color Mode
Color Mode can be changed to Simplified Color to reduce some of the sky rendering cost, by disabling the sky atmosphere, and using simpler material logic for the sky colors.
Project Mode
If real-time performance is at all required, make absolutely certain Project Mode is set to "Game / Real-Time". The Cinematic option is for offline rendering only, and applies quality settings at runtime which will severely impact performance.
Volumetric Clouds
Volumetric Cloud Rendering Mode - Has an effect on the cost of the cloud rendering. If looking to minimize the performance cost of the clouds on the GPU, make sure to use either of the modes which favor performance.
View Sample Scale and Shadow Sample Scale - Reducing these will lower the cost of the volumetric rendering, but can introduce noise and artifacts.
Max High Frequency Noise Levels - Increasing this above the default will increase cost of cloud rendering when close or zoomed into clouds, how much depending on the High Frequency Noise Distance Scale setting.
Two Layers - This option requires a much higher sample count for the volumetric clouds to resolve both layers, as wel as a slightly more complex volumetric material.
2D Dynamic Clouds
One Cloud Layer - Enabling this will reduce the cost of the sky shader somewhat with 2D clouds. Note that One Cloud Layer is already enabled on the material level at Low material quality.
Sky Light
Sky Light Mode can have some small effect on performance, due to the cost of real time sky light capture. To eliminate that cost, but still have the sky light adapt to changing time and weather, try using the mode called "Cubemap with Dynamic Color Tinting".
Volumetric Fog
Note that enabling volumetric fog has a very significant rendering cost. In addition, UDS' own option to enable its global volumetric material will increase that cost somewhat.
Volumetric Fog, being a rendering feature of the engine, gets its scalability settings from the Shadow Quality scalability group. Note that by default, the engine's scalability settings for Low and Medium quality disable volumetric fog entirely.
Miscellaneous Performance Tips
- Almost all of UDS' materials respond in some way to global material quality level, reducing material complexity when using Low or Medium quality materials.
- All of the lights on UDS are movable by default, but static or stationary lighting is always going to be a more performance friendly option if it can fit your project. See the entry in this document on static lighting for more info on setting that up with UDS' lights.
- By default, UDS and UDW will do their tick logic every other frame, above a default framerate threshold of 45. The option for this is Half Rate Tick, in the Scalability/Performance category. I would recommend leaving this enabled, but if you need the blueprints to tick every frame, you can disable it there. Potentially you could also lower the framerate threshold to let this optimization apply at 30fps, but note fast changes to lighting/sky properties will at that point be updating at only 15fps, and can be visibly stuttery.
- You can also set the Sky Mode to change on launch with the current Effects Quality set in the Game User Settings. For example, you could make it so that settings Medium and above use volumetric clouds, while Low will use static clouds. You can do this by enabling "Use Sky Mode Scalability Map" in the Scalability / Performance category, and adjusting the map.
- If you want to limit how often the directional lights on UDS update as they move, to reduce the frequency that cached directional shadows need updating, there are settings specifically for that. They are the Lights Update settings in the Directional Light category.
-----
CONSIDERATIONS FOR MOBILE
-----
If building for mobile devices, take note of a few settings in particular.
- Make certain you have changed the Feature Level setting in Basic Controls to match the feature level you are building for. For most mobile projects this will be the Mobile option. It's important this Feature Level setting is set properly so that the blueprint doesn't try to activate features which the device doesn't support, resulting in visual bugs or improper rendering.
- In the mobile category, there are additional settings which define what Feature Level does when it is set to mobile.
- In the mobile category, you can also find the Platform Feature Levels map, which can be used to determine feature level based on the platform name on startup.
-----
HOW TO UPDATE UDS
-----
You can check if there are updates available for UDS by going to the update history document, linked on the home page of this documentation utility.
UDS updates can be installed to your project without you losing your work with the assets. Still, I would recommend backing up or using version control before updating, so you can always roll back if anything does go wrong with an update process.
Understand, updating the UDS assets means overwriting them with the new versions. So any modifications you've made directly to the assets (like opening UDS in the blueprint editor and changing its blueprint logic for example) will be lost. Additional files you've created within the UDS folder, like Configuration assets or Sky Modifiers, will remain, since they won't be overwritten by anything.
Note, the Fab plugin cannot be used to update an asset pack already in your project. To update, you will need to use the Epic launcher.
How you update will depend on if UDS is still in its default location (Content/UltraDynamicSky).
If UDS is in its default location:
With UDS where the launcher expects it to be, you can do the update in one simple step.
Make sure your project is not open before updating.
In the launcher, find Ultra Dynamic Sky in the Fab library section, under the Library tab.
Select Add to Project on UDS and when it prompts you to overwrite the old files, allow it to do so.
If the launcher has any problem with adding or doesn't download the latest version, try selecting Remove Local Content on UDS and trying again. This will usually fix launcher issues like that.
If you have moved UDS to a different location in your project:
With UDS not in its default location, the process is more involved. You will have to perform the same move in another project and then copy it over manually, as the editor will have to adjust all the asset references within the folder to match where it is in the target project.
First, in your target project, run Update Redirector References on the UltraDynamicSky folder to ensure it isn't relying on redirectors. Close your target project.
From the launcher, add UDS to a blank project in the same engine version as your target project.
Open the blank project, and open the UDS demo map. Let it finish compiling shaders if it needs to. With the demo map still open, move the UltraDynamicSky folder to a directory which exactly matches where it is in the target project. Wait for the editor to finish the move, and then right click the entire Content folder and select Update Redirector References.
Close and open the UDS demo map to confirm the editor hasn't broken anything when moving files. If some things aren't visible like clouds, you may need to use the console command "Recompileshaders All" to fix for an engine bug with shader compilation after assets are moved.
Close the project, and make sure the target project isn't open either. From a file explorer, copy and paste the UltraDynamicSky folder from the blank project over to your target project, overwriting the old UltraDynamicSky folder.
Open the target project and the update should be applied cleanly.
**
After Installing an Update
With an update to UDS successfully installed, I would recommend reading the full change logs for any updates you got. You can find these in the Update History document linked on the home page of this utility. The change log will be the place where you'll find any info about work you may need to do in your project to support the new version.
-----
MODIFYING UDS BLUEPRINTS
-----
You may have a need to alter some blueprint logic within a UDS class or add your own. If this is needed, I recommend doing your modifications to a child of the class in question. That way your work is not lost when you need to update UDS.
To make a child of a blueprint class, just right click on the class in the content browser and select Create Child Blueprint Class.
In that child class, you can override individual functions to replace or add to their existing logic. For example, in a child of the UDS class, you might override the Current Sun Light Color function to replace the logic which determines the color of the sun light.
Some classes have empty functions which are just there for you to override in child classes. For example the Weather Override Volume has its Custom Volume Behavior function.
***
Ultra Dynamic Weather
***
-----
ULTRA DYNAMIC WEATHER
-----
Ultra Dynamic Weather can add rain, snow, dust, lightning, material effects and more to your scene. You can control the weather state in several different ways from random variation to directly calling a weather change.
This section of the readme will walk through setting up UDW in your level, controlling the weather state in various ways, adding material functions to your project's materials for dynamic weather effects, and more.
-----
WEATHER SETUP
-----
-----
ADDING ULTRA DYNAMIC WEATHER TO YOUR LEVEL
-----
To set up weather, first make sure you have an Ultra Dynamic Sky actor in your level. The weather system will not work without one. If you haven't used Ultra Dynamic Sky yet, you should get started with the Sky section of the documentation instead.
To add weather, simply drag an Ultra Dynamic Weather actor from the Blueprints folder into your scene. It will detect Ultra Dynamic Sky on its own and hook everything up.
By default, UDW will start with a manual weather state which matches the setup of Cloud Coverage and Fog you already have on UDS. You can select a preset using Weather in Basic Controls to quickly apply different weather types. See the entries below about Weather State for all the other ways weather can be controlled.
-----
BASIC CONTROLS
-----
In the details panel with Ultra Dynamic Weather selected, the Basic Controls category is where you can change the weather settings preset the system will display in the editor and start with when the level is played.
The variable Weather will allow you to select a weather settings preset. There are a number included like Rain, Partly Cloudy, Blizzard, etc.
Basic Controls is also where you can adjust the direction of the wind, which affects weather particles as well as cloud movement.
-----
WEATHER STATE
-----
-----
WHAT IS WEATHER STATE?
-----
Weather State refers to the set of values which determine the weather conditions on UDW. These are the values which comprise the weather state:
- Cloud Coverage
- Fog
- Wind Intensity
- Rain
- Snow
- Dust
- Thunder/Lightning
There's also the material state, which controls the state of the material effects specifically:
- Material Snow Coverage
- Material Wetness
- Material Dust Coverage
These are part of the weather state, but at runtime the visible material state is not always derived directly from the values in the weather state. You can read more about the specifics of this in the section on material effects.
-----
WHAT DETERMINES THE WEATHER STATE?
-----
The current active weather state can come from a number of different sources. Here are the places which can inform the current weather state:
- The weather settings preset selected for the Weather variable in Basic Controls.
- The Change Weather function, which transitions from the active weather state to a new preset over a specified amount of time.
- Random Weather Variation, which can change the weather periodically, with the probability of each weather preset affected by the current season.
- The Manual Weather State values, in the Manual Weather State category, used in place of the Weather variable when nothing is selected for it. Individual values from the manual weather state can also be applied as overrides, having an effect no matter what is currently contributing to the weather state.
- Weather Override Volumes. This is a separate actor which can be placed into the level to apply weather that is specific to a region of any shape.
- Radial Storms. This actor applies weather in a circular region, with its own additional effects to render the weather/clouds so they are visible from outside the storm.
See the entries specific to each of these for more information about how to make use of them.
-----
WEATHER SETTINGS PRESETS
-----
The Weather Settings Presets are the preconfigured weather states like Thunderstorm, Partly Cloudy, and Blizzard. They're used for the Weather variable in Basic Controls, as well as by the Change Weather function, Random Weather Variation, Weather Override Volumes, and Radial Storms.
You can find the included presets in Blueprints/Weather_Effects/Weather_Presets.
To make your own, a good way is to just duplicate one of the assets in that folder and adjust the settings in the new preset. Your new asset will be usable in all the same ways that the included presets are.
It's also possible to add additional blueprint logic into individual weather presets for custom effects. See the entry on Custom Weather Behavior for that.
-----
CHANGE WEATHER
-----
To trigger a change of the weather state at runtime, either instantly or over a period of time, the intended way to do that is to call the Change Weather function.
When Change Weather is called, it will immediately start transitioning to the new weather preset over the transition length.
When Change Weather is called, this new global weather state will be applied indefinitely, until another state change is called for.
-----
RANDOM WEATHER VARIATION
-----
Random Weather Variation can change the weather state periodically, selecting a new weather preset based on season and a set of probability maps. It's controlled from the Random Weather Variation category on UDW.
To enable Random Weather Variation, change the Random Weather Variation setting on UDW to select a timing mode. There are three timing modes: Random Interval, Daily, and Hourly. These determine when the random weather will change.
If Random Interval is the selected timing mode, Random Weather Change Interval controls the min and max of how long the system will hold on a given weather preset before picking a new random one to transition to.
If Hourly or Daily are selected for the timing mode, the random changes will happen based on the time that passes on Ultra Dynamic Sky. Random Weather Change Hour controls what point in the day the change will happen when using Daily mode.
Transition Length is the fraction of the interval between changes devoted to transitioning from the old weather to the new weather.
The maps of Weather Type Probabilities contain the weather presets and a corresponding probability value. This value is proportional to the rest of the values in the map. Meaning, if one type is set to 5 and the rest are set to 1, that type will be 5 times more likely to be picked. The map used will depend on the current season, controlled from the Season category.
"Begin Play Weather is Random" controls how the random weather will start when you play the level. If this is true, a starting random weather will be selected. If this is false, the weather will start with the same weather shown in the level editor, and change after the first interval has passed.
You can also apply a climate preset from here, which will use real world climate data to create probability maps which suit that climate, and also set the temperature ranges in the Temperature category.
You can use the Change Weather function at runtime to change from Random Weather Variation to a specific static preset. If you need to change back to the Random Weather Variation, call "Change to Random Weather Variation".
-----
SEASONS
-----
In the Season category, you'll find settings for how UDW determines the current season.
Season is a float from 0 to 4, representing the progression from each season to the next, starting with Spring. So for example, 0 is Spring, 0.5 is halfway between Spring and Summer, 2 is Autumn, etc. And 4 is Spring again, completing the cycle.
In the Season category, the Season Mode variable determines if the Season is derived from the Date on UDS (entered in Simulation category and incremented with each day that passes). Otherwise, the Season variable is left uncontrolled, for you to set from your own classes as needed for your project. You should do this by calling the Set Season function.
If deriving the season from the date, you can use the Season Day Offset to change what date will correspond to what season value. Also note the setting Meteorological Seasons, which sets if the seasons (at offset 0) will represent meteorological seasons or astronomical seasons.
If you want to sample the current season in your materials to make effects which respond to the changing season, there are two nodes for that. "Sample UDW Season" outputs the 0-1 values for each season. "Season Color Blend" takes in 4 color inputs and blends them based on the current season.
-----
MANUAL WEATHER STATE
-----
Much of the weather system is designed around the weather preset assets, to simplify controlling the weather state. But you can also control weather state's individual values without relying on preset assets. The way to do this is using the Manual Weather State.
To do this, first clear the Weather setting in Basic Controls, so no preset asset is selected. When this is the case, the Manual Weather State will be used instead. The Manual Weather State category below Basic Controls is the place where that manual state is controlled.
You can also use the Manual Weather State with the Change Weather function at runtime if needed. Just call Change Weather without a preset selected for its input, and the weather will transition to the manual state instead.
You can also apply individual overrides to the local weather state, using the manual state values. For example, if weather is coming from the Thunderstorm preset, you could set Manual Rain Override to true, and set the Manual Rain value to have direct control of the rain value, while still having the rest of the state come from the Thunderstorm preset.
-----
WEATHER OVERRIDE VOLUMES
-----
For large maps, it may be necessary to change weather state by region. You can do this by using a Weather Override Volume, an actor found in the Weather Effects folder in Blueprints.
To adjust the area affected by the volume, edit the points of the spline component. You can right click on a point on the spline to add new spline points. You can also scale the actor, but try to avoid non-uniform scaling.
Configuring weather on a WOV is designed to be similar in structure to how UDW's global weather state is controlled. You can select a weather preset for the WOV to use in its Basic Controls category, and you can enable Random Weather Variation as well, with unique probability maps. Note the specifics of Random Weather Variation timing/logic will come from the settings on UDW, in its Random Weather Variation category.
Here are some of the key settings on the Weather Override Volume:
- Transition Width controls how much space is devoted to transitioning from the outside weather state to the inside weather state. The transition is completely spatial, so ideally the transition width should be very high, to offer a smooth transition between states as the player crosses into the region. The default transition width is small to keep the initial size of the actor reasonable as a starting point. An ideal WOV would typically be much larger, with a larger transition width to match.
- Priority will determine the behavior when multiple volume actors overlap each other.
- The Temperature category contains the temperature ranges used by UDW when the player is inside the region.
- You can also apply a climate preset, and it will work the same as applying one to UDS, changing the probability maps and the WOV's temperature ranges.
The location used to query the WOV for its affect on weather is determined by the Control Point Location Source, in Basic Controls on UDW.
The Weather Override Volumes will, by default, draw their material state into a render target sampled by the weather material functions, so that for example a snowy region can appear snowy from outside, and from inside you can see the lack of snow coverage outside the region. This behavior can be disabled or adjusted on UDW, from the Weather Override Volumes category there.
Weather Override Volumes also have functions which can be called to change their state at runtime, similar to UDW. There is a Change Weather function, which will transition to a specific static weather preset. And there is Change to Random Weather Variation, which will transition over to random weather.
If you want to use a Weather Override Volume to change anything other than the weather state on UDW, that is possible. To do this, create a child of the Weather Override Volume class, and on that child override the function called "Custom Volume Behavior". This function is run from UDW when it uses the WOV to affect local weather. The Alpha input represents how much the player is inside the volume, from 0 to 1.
-----
RADIAL STORMS
-----
Another method of applying weather within a space is the Radial Storm actor.
A Radial Storm is a circular space, within which a single weather settings preset is applied. Radial Storms are limited to just this circular shape, unlike a Weather Override Volume which can be an arbitrary shape defined by a spline.
The unique benefit of a Radial Storm is that it can render its own local effects and draw its own local cloud coverage. This means when you're outside of the storm, you can see the storm in the distance, as a formation of clouds, with fog and obscured lightning underneath. Radial Storms are also built for their presence in the level to be dynamic. You can spawn one in at runtime and have it fade in and out, both in its effect on weather state and the visible effects. A Radial Storm can also move linearly across the level.
Note, the effects visible from outside of a Radial Storm are limited to the Volumetric Clouds sky mode on UDS. A Radial Storm can still be used with the other sky modes, but only as a way to affect weather state based on the player's position, like the Weather Override Volumes.
Radial Storms are named as such because their features are mainly intended for stormy weather. But note you can also use them to apply any weather conditions within the radial space, including calm/clear skies.
**
Radial Storm Spawning
On UDW, in the Radial Storm Spawning category, you'll find settings to enable periodic randomized spawning of Radial Storm actors during play. UDW will spawn radial storms one at a time, placing them and moving them so they will pass over the player's location. The weather preset the storms use can be determined by the current season, similar to Random Weather Variation.
**
The Radial Storm actor can also be spawned in manually or placed in the level directly. You don't need to rely on UDW's spawning logic if you don't want to. The functions on the Radial Storm actor for controlling it at runtime include:
Fade In Storm
Starts the storm fading, from 0 alpha up to 1, over the fade duration. You can call this after spawning a Radial Storm at runtime.
Fade Out Storm
Similar to the Fade In function, but fades the storm out over time, and destroys the actor at the end of the fade.
Move Storm Over Time
Call this function to have the storm move across the level, to a target position, over a duration. Optionally, this function can also fade out and destroy the actor at the end of the movement path.
-----
WEATHER ABOVE VOLUMETRIC CLOUDS
-----
If Volumetric Clouds is selected as the Sky Mode on UDS, by default UDW will apply adjustments to the weather state when the player goes above the cloud layer.
You can find the settings for this in the Weather Above Volumetric Clouds category on UDW. You can enable or disable the adjustments entirely, or change the multipliers for each weather value used when above the clouds.
-----
WEATHER EFFECTS
-----
-----
RAIN PARTICLES
-----
The Rain Particles category on UDW is where you can disable or adjust the effect of falling rain drops, controlled by the Rain value in the current weather state.
There are settings for the color and lighting intensities on the rain particles, as well as the max number of particles spawned around the camera. There are also settings for adjusting amount and appearance of the splash particles spawned against collision surfaces.
See the Shared Particle Settings category for settings which control particle collision and spawning behavior, shared by the other weather particle systems.
-----
SNOW PARTICLES
-----
The Snow Particles category on UDW is where you can toggle or adjust the effect of falling snow flakes, controlled by the Snow value in the current weather state.
There are settings to adjust the max number of snow particles spawned around the camera, as well as ambient light intensities, particle scale, and color.
See the Shared Particle Settings category for settings which control particle collision and spawning behavior, shared by the other weather particle systems.
-----
DUST PARTICLES
-----
The Dust Particles category on UDW is where you can toggle or adjust the effect of dust/sand particles moving through the air, controlled by the Dust value in the current weather state.
The are settings to control the scale, color, alpha, and max number of dust particles which can be spawned around the camera.
See the Shared Particle Settings category for settings which control particle collision and spawning behavior, shared by the other weather particle systems.
-----
WEATHER PARTICLE COLLISION
-----
The weather particles on UDW (rain, snow, dust) have a system of particle collision, so they can hit surfaces and stay out of interior spaces. This collision is enabled by default.
Collision is selected with the option Particle Collision Mode. There are three modes: Simple Collision, Distance Field Collision, and No Collision.
**
Simple Collision
Simple Collision mode uses line traces of the simple collision geometry of the level. The particles trace for one channel, selected with Weather Particle Collision Channel. That channel is Visibility by default.
The collision traces niagara particles use are queries, so you also need to make sure you have queries enabled on the collision response of your meshes.
Simple Collision uses various optimizations to minimize the number of collision queries it needs to do. GPU particles take a small number of valid particle paths and reuse them for an amount of time (That time is adjustable with CPU Particle Buffer Length). Even still, it can be a significant CPU cost. Consider Distance Field Collision if this cost is something you want to reduce.
**
Distance Field Collision
Distance Field Collision relies purely on GPU emitters, querying the global distance field for its collision. This method comes with upsides and downsides.
The main upside is reducing the performance cost on the CPU. Distance field sampling is entirely a GPU operation, and relatively cheap there.
The major downside of Distance Field Collision is its lack of flexibility. There is no way for a surface to block particles in this mode without also affecting distance field lighting. And vice versa: to make a mesh allow particles through, you have to disable its effect on distance field lighting.
Note that to make use of distance field collision, your project must be configured to generate mesh distance fields. Also the distance field collision will only work while the global distance field exists, so it won't if that is disabled by the engine scalability.
**
If you want to block a space from letting weather particles inside, without any meshes involved, you can use the UDS Occlusion Volume actor, which has a setting to make it block weather particles. Note this is only possible using the Simple Collision mode.
If you have a moving space you need to block particles where the latency of the particle collision is a problem, for example an interior of a vehicle driven by the player, there is a component you can use in that case. The Weather Particles Kill Sphere can be added to an actor to kill any weather particles inside the sphere with zero latency. Note that this is separate from collision, and is applied by the niagara system uniquely as part of its update process. For this reason, there can never be more than one kill sphere component active at a time. If you need to use them in multiple pla
ces, you will need to manage activating and deactivating them to ensure this.
-----
WEATHER PARTICLE SPAWNING
-----
When you move the camera around a level, the weather particles will appear to be spawning everywhere, but of course this is just the intended illusion. Weather particles spawn only in a volume around the camera location.
In the Shared Particle Settings category, you'll find settings to adjust the size and properties of that spawning area.
Max Spawn Distance and Spawn Distance Distribution control how far from the camera weather particles will spawn in the X and Y axes, and the distribution of particles within that range. Spawn Box Height controls how far above the camera the particles can spawn.
World Spawn Offset and Camera Forward Spawn Offset can be used to move the center of that spawning area relative to the camera position.
If you want the weather particles to spawn around a manual location instead of the camera location, you can. In the advanced dropdown of Shared Particle Settings, see the options for the Custom Weather Particle Camera Transform.
-----
LIGHTNING
-----
There are two types of lightning in UDW. Lightning Flashes and Obscured Lightning. Lightning Flashes are the big lightning bolts which can cast light into the scene and have a directly associated loud crash of thunder. Obscured Lightning is the idle particle effect which looks like flashes of lightning hidden in the cloud layer.
In the Lightning category, you can adjust the interval between Lightning Flashes and the frequency of Obscured Lightning. You can adjust or disable the directional light source for Lightning Flashes and the color of the lights and effects. If you're looking for settings relating to the thunder sound effects, those are in the Sound Effects category.
The amount of lightning of both types will scale with the Thunder/Lightning value of the current weather state.
Manually Spawn a Lightning Flash
If you need to manually trigger a Lightning Flash, you can do this. Call the function Flash Lightning on UDW to spawn a single flash. It has an input to enable a custom lightning location as well. Note that this is the position of the root of the lightning bolt, so it should be at cloud level. If Custom Target Location is a value other than 0, that will be the location the lightning bolt ends at.
Making Random Lightning Flashes Strike Specific Actors
There is some simple support for making the randomly spawned lightning flashes strike actors in the level.
To do this, add the blueprint interface "UDW_Lightning Strikable Actor Interface" to your actors. Supply it outputs for the interface function "Test for Potential Lightning Strike". This function should output whether the actor can currently be struck by lightning, and the world location where the strike will hit.
On UDW, in the Lightning category, toggle on the setting "Enable Lightning Flashes Striking Actors" to turn on the logic which checks the level for strikable actors.
The setting "Fraction Of Lightning Flashes Which Can Strike Actors" controls how many lightning flashes can potentially strike actors, if any are in range.
The blueprint interface also has a function "Struck by Lightning" which is called by UDW when the actor is struck. You could use it to spawn extra effects or perform game logic when the actor gets struck by lightning.
-----
MATERIAL EFFECTS
-----
-----
MATERIAL EFFECTS OVERVIEW
-----
Ultra Dynamic Weather can control material functions which make your materials respond to the weather's changing material state. Here are the material functions included:
- Surface Weather Effects - For adding wetness, snow, and dust to solid surfaces. Intended for things like props and scenery objects, but not large ground/landscape materials. Can also render animated dripping and droplets effects on wet surfaces.
- Dynamic Landscape Weather Effects - Can add both dynamic snow/dust coverage and wetness/puddles to ground materials, particularly landscape materials. The snow/dust and puddles can respond to interactions caused by a special component placed on moving objects.
- Glass Window Rain Drips - Intended for use on flat transparent glass surfaces. Renders falling water droplets which form in rain.
- Foliage Wind Movement - Outputs a world position offset which can deform a mesh using simple noise based animation, scaled by the current wind intensity. Intended for foliage models mainly.
- Water Surface Rain Ripples - Adds animated raindrop impacts to the normal of a water surface.
The behavior of the material state can be adjusted from the Material Effects category on UDW. A key setting here is "Simulate Changing Material State Over Time". If that's enabled, then at runtime the material state will change over time based on the weather. For example, as it snows, material snow coverage will slowly increase. The time over which this happens for each type of weather can be found in the Material Effects category as well.
If you instead disable Simulate Changing Material State Over Time, then the material state at runtime will come directly from the current weather state. So, for example, if you suddenly changed from Snow to Partly Cloudy, the material snow coverage would disappear instantly, because it's directly using the material snow coverage value from the Partly Cloudy weather state, which is 0.
-----
SURFACE WEATHER EFFECTS
-----
Surface Weather Effects is a material function which can make a solid surface appear wet and gather snow and dust coverage, as controlled by the current material state on UDW. It can also apply optional effects for dripping and small droplets on wet surfaces.
Surface Weather Effects is intended for props, architecture, and other solid scenery objects. It's not intended for expansive ground surfaces like landscapes. For that, I'd suggest using the Dynamic Landscape Weather Effects.
You can see an example of a material using Surface Weather Effects in the UDS demo map.
Setup
To add Surface Weather Effects to a material, search the material palette for Weather and select Surface Weather Effects.
You should typically place the function right at the end of your material graph, before the material result.
Surface Weather Effects uses a Material Attributes input and output. This is a pin which combines together all possible material attributes into one. If your material doesn't use one of these for its result, you can use Make Material Attributes and Break Material Attributes nodes to adjust for that.
Use Static Bool nodes to provide True or False inputs for Apply Wetness and Apply Snow / Dust. This tells the function which effects you want to be applied to the surface. For example, if your project will only ever need wet materials but not snow or dust, you could plug True into Apply Wetness and False into Apply Snow / Dust, to save on material complexity.
Note that by default the textures used for the effects will be mapped using world space coordinates. This is a good fit for static scenery/architecture. But if your material is going to be used on a moving object or a skeletal mesh, you should plug True into Local Space or For Skeletal Mesh, to configure the function for those cases.
Dripping and Droplets
To enable additional effects on wet surfaces, you can plug True into the Dripping and Droplets inputs.
Dripping enables an effect of rivulets of water moving down the surface where wet.
Droplets enables an effect of very small water droplets which cling to a smooth surface.
Both of these effects are influenced by Porosity. This input generally represents how porous/permeable the surface is. 0 would be a surface like car paint or smooth plastic. 1 would be something like rough concrete or sand. Without an input, Porosity will be derived from the input roughness.
Snow/Dust Coverage on Rotating Models
If you use the snow/dust coverage on a moving model, with Local Space or For Skeletal Mesh enabled, you'll notice the direction of the snow/dust coverage rotates with the model. This is because the local normal is what is used for effects in local space.
There is a component you can add to an actor which can correct for this. It's "Material Snow Dust Reorient". Add it as a child of the mesh, and on begin play add a dynamic material instance for the surface using the weather effects to the "Dynamic Material Instances" array on the component.
The component will periodically monitor the rotation of the model and if needed, start slowly reorienting the direction of the snow/dust coverage to face global up. The settings for the speeds and update periods for this are exposed on the component.
-----
DYNAMIC LANDSCAPE WEATHER EFFECTS
-----
Dynamic Landscape Weather Effects is a material function which can add dynamic snow and dust coverage and wetness/puddles to a landscape (or general ground meshes). The setup process is a little more involved than the basic weather effects functions. You can find a basic example of a material using DLWE in the UDS demo map.
Setup
In your material, search the material palette for Weather and select Dynamic Landscape Weather Effects V3.
Typically, you'll want to add the function in at the end of the material graph, right before the material result.
Dynamic Landscape Weather Effects V3 uses a material attributes pin for its input and output. This is a pin which combines together all attributes on a material into one. Route your material's attributes pin through the DLWE function before it gets to the material result.
If your material doesn't use a material attributes pin, you can use a Make Material Attributes and Break Material Attributes node before and after the DLWE function to use it in that context.
Plug static bool nodes into the Apply Snow/Dust and Apply Wetness/Puddles inputs, to enable the effects you need for your project. For example, if you only need puddles, but never snow/dust, you could plug True into Apply Wetness/Puddles and False into Apply Snow/Dust, to reduce the complexity of the material.
Interactions
Dynamic Landscape Weather Effects supports any kind of moving actor creating trails in the snow or dust and ripples in the puddles at runtime.
The way to do this is using the DLWE Interaction component. This is a scene component which you can parent to any moving component on an actor, or parent to a bone on a skeletal mesh.
For example, to make a character leave trails in snow with their feet, you would add a DLWE Interaction component for each foot, one parented to the left foot socket and one on the right foot socket.
A key setting on the DLWE Interaction component is the Size. This determines both how far from the component interaction effects will be caused, and how big those effects will be. The Size should match the general diameter of the object it represents.
The DLWE Interaction component also references a DLWE Interaction Settings asset, which contains the complete configuration of how the interaction component will behave and what effects it will use. You can use the default settings asset or create your own to configure the specifics of interaction behavior.
Render Target Area
The snow/dust trail interactions can only happen within the space around the player covered by the render target which the trails draw to. The scale of that area can be adjusted on UDW with the setting "Snow/ Dust Interaction Render Target Area".
The render target will dynamically recenter itself as your player pawn moves through the level. If you want this recentering to be based on a different location, you can do that. In UDW's Basic Controls, the setting is Control Point Location Source. This also affects how weather is changed by Weather Override Volumes. By default the player pawn location is used, and should be a good fit for most projects. But you can change this to use the player camera location, or to control it manually using a vector variable.
Nanite Tessellation
DLWE has support for using nanite tessellation for the snow/dust depth on nanite landscapes.
Make sure your project has nanite tessellation enabled. Then, you'll then need to enable it on your material. Check "Enable Tessellation". Make sure you have also enabled Nanite on your landscape actor and built its nanite mesh.
From the DLWE node in your material, plug a static bool of True into the input "For Nanite Tessellation". The inputs "Nanite Tessellation Magnitude" and "Nanite Tessellation Center" should be set to match your material's tessellation settings.
If you're setting up a landscape material without existing displacement, I recommend using a Magnitude of 1 and a Center of 0.
If you do have existing Displacement for the underlying surface, note the input "Displacement Input is World Scale". This determines how the displacement input is interpreted. By default it is true, which means the displacement input is a world scale value, scaled and offset by the function to maintain that world scale. If you already have your displacement working the way you want, you can plug False into "Displacement Input is World Scale" to keep the function from modifying it.
Blocking Interaction Effects with Physical Materials
It might be necessary to keep interaction sound effects and particles from happening on certain surfaces. For example if you have your own material logic masking the effect coverage. You can use physical materials to do this. Find the arrays on UDW, in the advanced dropdown of the DLWE category, called "Physical Materials Which Disable Snow/ Dust Sounds And Particles" and "Physical Materials Which Disable Puddle Sounds And Particles". Any phys mats in these arrays will be blocked from causing interaction effects.
Using DLWE on Non Landscape Meshes
The effects are designed primarily for landscapes, but you can use them on a static mesh as well. To tell UDW and the Interaction components what surfaces the components should respond to (other than landscape actors) you'll need to add physical materials to an array in the DLWE Interaction Settings asset selected on the interaction component. The array is called "Physical Materials which Enable DLWE Interactions on Non-Landscapes". Make sure your static meshes are using physmats in that array, and the DLWE Interaction components will respond to their collision as they do to landscapes.
Virtual Shadow Maps
If your project uses virtual shadow maps, be sure to address how the landscape material will affect shadow map caching. I would recommend setting the landscape's "Shadow Cache Invalidation Behavior" to Rigid, to keep the WPO and Pixel Depth Offset used for the snow depth from constantly invalidating shadows.
-----
GLASS WINDOW RAIN DRIPS
-----
Glass Window Rain Drips is a material function which can add refractive water droplets dripping down a thin glass surface like a window in response to rain on UDW. It is made to be used on translucent materials only.
Setup
To add Glass Window Rain Drips to your material, search the material palette for Weather and select Glass Window Rain Drips.
The material function modifies the Base Color and Opacity, and outputs Base Color, Emissive Color and Opacity. Only input what attributes your material is already using, but make sure to use all three of the outputs for your material result.
The UVs used for the drip textures will be simple world space position based UVs by default, but you can replace them using the UVs input. This is recommended if using the material on any kind of moving surface, as world space UVs will not move with the mesh.
-----
FOLIAGE WIND MOVEMENT
-----
Foliage Wind Movement is a material function which outputs world position offset to add simple noise based movement to a material, based on the wind intensity and direction on UDW. It's intended primarily for foliage models.
Note, if working with foliage models which have their own wind movement setup already, it may be a better and simpler option to just modify those existing wind effects to reference the state of UDW's wind instead. You can use the Sample UDW Wind function to get parameters for the wind state and use those values to replace the parameters used by the existing effects.
**
Wind Movement Overview
The movement generated by the function is split into three layers:
- Small Movement is a high frequency layer for features like leaves, grass blades, and the ends of branches.
- Medium Movement is a middle frequency layer made to affect larger features like whole branches.
- Large Movement is a low frequency swaying movement which bends the entire mesh with gusts of the wind.
All three are enabled by default, but they can be individually disabled using the Apply inputs on the function.
Masking Movement Layers
Each of the three movement layers has an input to mask the layer. This is a value from 0-1, multiplied over the strength of the movement layer.
Typically, foliage models are authored with vertex color channels for masking levels of movement like this, but there is no common standard for what channel will be used for what kind of information. If you're using foliage models you did not author yourself, you'll need to take a look at their vertex colors to get an idea of what each channel is used for and how you might apply them to masking the three movement layers.
The Small Movement layer is the only one where a mask input is required. The Medium and Large layers will try to generate a simple mask automatically if one isn't supplied, using position relative to the mesh's pivot, but this auto mask doesn't know anything about the structure of the specific model, so a vertex color channel authored for this kind of masking will always be better to use.
**
The inputs for each movement layer can be used to customize the movement logic used for each. When adding this function to a foliage master material, I'd recommend using parameters for some of these inputs, so you can toggle and adjust the layers used on material instances for specific models/types of foliage.
-----
WATER SURFACE RAIN RIPPLES
-----
Water Surface Rain Ripples is a material function which adds ripples to the normal of a water surface, based on the amount of rain on UDW.
Setup
To add Water Surface Rain Ripples to your material, search the material palette for Weather and select Water Surface Rain Ripples.
Typically you should put the function at the very end of the material graph, right before the material result. This function just modifies the normal attribute, so you should only need to give it your material's normal as an input and plug its normal output into the material result.
The two additional inputs can be used to scale the ripple effect texture, and adjust how intense it is in affecting the normal.
-----
CONTROLLING YOUR OWN MATERIAL EFFECTS WITH UDW
-----
You may have material logic of your own which you want to control in some way using the material state, season, or wind on UDW. There are material functions intended to help with this:
**
Sample UDW Material State
This function gets the values for material snow coverage, material dust coverage, and material wetness. It also applies the effects of Weather Override Volumes and the Weather Mask to these values, the same way the weather effects functions do by default.
Sample UDW Seasons
This function outputs a 0-1 value for each season. As the season value changes on UDW, each of these four values will peak at 1. The four values will always total 1. There is also a function, Season Color Blend, which will handle blending 4 color inputs using the current season.
Sample UDW Wind
This function outputs various values and vectors which describe the current state of the wind, both its direction and its intensity.
**
You can also reference the shared material parameter collection used by UDW directly if you want. That's found in the Materials/Weather folder, and it's called Ultra Dynamic Weather Parameters.
-----
MASKING MATERIAL EFFECT COVERAGE
-----
By default, the material effects for snow, dust and wetness will affect everywhere globally, across the whole scene. To mask the effects in specific spaces, they also sample from a weather mask render target, which is drawn using components of two classes.
You can either use the component classes (found in Blueprints/Weather_Effects/Components) directly in your own actor classes, or you can use the included actor classes which contain one of these components (found in Blueprints/Weather_Effects).
**
Weather Mask Brush
The Weather Mask Brush will draw a simple shape or a painted texture, selectable using the variable "Brush". The brush actor can also be scaled non-uniformly and rotated on the Z axis. Because the system works by drawing these shapes into a render target, the shapes are always projected straight up and down on the Z axis.
You can adjust how much each brush affects snow or wetness with the variables "Mask Wetness" and "Mask Snow/Dust". There is also an option, called "Cancel Masks Above". This affects the entire rectangle the brush occupies, disabling any brush masking above the height of the actor.
If you need more control over the brush shape, you can paint a texture which the mask brush will use instead of the simple brush shapes. To do this, open the editor utility called Weather Mask Brush Painter. You can find it in the Ultra Dynamic Sky dropdown on the level editor toolbar, or in the Blueprints/Tools folder. With the painter open, select a weather mask brush actor and click the button to start painting.
Right click to pan the painting area. Drag middle mouse to zoom. Click and drag with the left mouse to paint. See the settings on the top bar to adjust the painting brush and the value being painted.
When finished, make sure to click Save, for the painted mask to be saved to a texture asset. This asset will be put in a folder called UDS_LevelData, in the folder where the level is saved.
**
Weather Mask Projection Box
The Weather Mask Projection Box captures the meshes within the box, and uses those shapes to mask weather effects straight down. You can place a projection box around a complex structure like a building, and the shapes of the structure will occlude directly below.
Try to place the box so it encompasses only the region of mesh geometry which needs to occlude downward. For example, you might place the box so it only contains the roof of a house. Also try to make sure the width and length of the box is as small as it can be to fit the occluding objects inside, to eliminate wasted space and resolution of the resulting render target.
In the exposed settings for the projection box, you can adjust the amount snow/dust and wetness are masked, as well as how much the mask beneath the box is blurred when drawn into the mask target.
**
If you want any individual material or instance to ignore the weather mask actors, you can use the static switch parameters "Apply Weather Mask Brushes to Wetness" and "Apply Weather Mask Brushes to Snow" to disable the effects at the material level.
The effects of the mask will stop once they reach a certain distance from the camera. This is determined by the width of the render target they draw to for the masking. You can adjust that scale in the Weather Mask Target category on UDW.
If you need to fade the effect of a mask component over time, there is a function for this. On the Weather Mask Brush component or Weather Mask Projection Box component, call the function "Fade Mask Over Time". The fade will happen at 20 updates per second by default. This is determined by the setting Weather Mask Update Period on UDW.
-----
SOUND EFFECTS
-----
-----
WEATHER SOUND EFFECTS
-----
By default, Ultra Dynamic Weather has sound effects enabled for wind, rain and thunder. From the Sound Effects category, you can disable sound effects, or you can adjust the volume of each as well. The resulting volume of the sounds will scale with these settings as well as the current weather state.
If you need to adjust which sounds are turned on at runtime, I'd recommend leaving the sound effects enabled, and setting their exposed Volume variables at runtime. To toggle all the sound effects at runtime, you can call "Set Enable Weather Sound Effects".
The Sound Effects category is also where you can adjust how lightning's accompanying thunder sound is delayed from the visual effect. By default, the delay is very slight, but you can increase it to represent a realistic speed of sound delay using the setting Close Thunder Delay Per KM.
All of the UDW sound effects use a sound class called UDS_Weather. I would recommend adding this class as a child class in your project's Sound Effects sound class, so that weather sounds will be affected by mixes applied to general sound effects.
-----
SOUND OCCLUSION
-----
The sound effects on UDW are affected by a simple system of sound occlusion by default, which periodically sends out traces from the camera location and adjusts sound volume and low pass filter frequency (how muffled the sound is) if the player is in an enclosed space. This behavior can be disabled or adjusted from the Sound Occlusion category.
The Player Occlusion system on UDS is what handles querying the scene collision to calculate how occluded the sound should be. You can find the settings for how it calculates occlusion in the Player Occlusion category on UDS.
You can also place the UDS Occlusion Volume actor, found in Blueprints/Occlusion, to force specific spaces to be fully occluded and always attenuate weather sounds. Note the option in Player Occlusion for "Occlusion Sampling Mode" which affects if these volumes will be sampled.
Also note the component class called UDS Occlusion Portal. If any of these exist in the area around the occlusion sampling location, they will be traced against, and can negate occlusion if the trace is unobstructed. For example, you could have an occlusion portal component placed for an open door or window, allowing outside weather sound effects to enter the space in a more natural way.
If you want your own sound sources in the level to be affected by the volume attenuation of the sound occlusion, you can set them to use the sound class "UDS Outdoor Sound".
-----
ENVIRONMENT SOUND
-----
In addition to the weather sounds, UDW has a system for playing environment sounds. This would be for general ambient audio in the outdoor environment like birds, insects, city sounds, etc.
These environment sounds can be authored to respond to changes in time of day and weather. The environment sounds will also respond to the sound occlusion, which makes sounds muffled/quiet in interiors.
An environment sound asset can be selected in the Sound Effects category on UDW. There is an example included for forest ambience, but the system is built for you to author new ones with your own sounds.
**
Making an Environment Sound Asset
Environment Sounds exist as data assets, of the type UDS_Environment_Sound. You can make a new one by making a new data asset from the content browser and selecting that class.
The data asset mainly serves to point to the metasound source asset which is what will be played for this environment sound. It also has settings to scale the volume, and parameter overrides for the metasound source.
**
Making a Metasound Source Asset for Environment Sound
The metasound source asset you make for environment sound needs to be authored in some specific ways.
If you want your source to be affected by sound occlusion and four directional channel stereo panning, the output format must be 5.1. The six channels output are interpreted by the UDW weather sound mixer like this:
Front Left (0) - Directional audio from -X
Front Right (1) - Directional audio from +X
Front Center (2) - Directional audio from -Y
Low Frequency (3) - Directional audio from +Y
Side Left (4) - Global audio left channel
Side Right (5) - Global audio right channel
The directional audio is stereo panned based on the listener orientation, and is occluded based on directional occlusion. The global audio is used as stereo sound directly, and occluded by global occlusion.
The sound should also be configured to output to the audio bus used for weather sound. In Source settings, make sure Enable Bus Sends is true, and Enable Base Submix is disabled. Then add a Post-Effect Bus Send which outputs to the audio bus "UDS_Weather_AudioBus".
**
Controlling Your Metasound Source with Time/Weather
To have your metasound logic respond to the state of UDS and UDW, there are 5 input parameters it should have, which UDW will handle setting. Three integer parameters, called Time, Weather, and Wind. And also two time parameters called Weather Interp and Time Interp.
There are metasound nodes included called UDS_TimeWeather_VolumeManager and UDS_DayNight_VolumeManager. These take in the input parameters above and use them to output a changing volume value, using array inputs which define what the volume for a sound should be in different times/weathers/wind levels.
I'd recommend looking at included Forest Example metasound source to see how this is intended to be set up.
**
Controlling Environment Sounds at Runtime
Selecting an Environment Sound on UDW will set what sound is active on begin play. If you need to change the environment sound to another at runtime, you can by calling the function Change Environment Sound on UDW.
You can use this to start an environment sound when none is playing, change from an active one to another, or stop environment sounds by calling it with no environment sound asset selected.
-----
SAMPLING WEATHER
-----
-----
SAMPLING THE WEATHER STATE FROM UDW
-----
To sample the current weather state values from your own blueprint classes, there are functions you can use.
All of the weather state values can be individually sampled using Get functions in a blueprint function library. "Get Cloud Coverage", "Get Wind Intensity", etc.
You can also get the Local Weather State object in the same way or directly off of a UDW actor reference. This is a weather settings object which contains the current weather state used by the effects/sky.
If instead of specific weather state values, you need a simple description of the current state, like "Light Rain" or "Blizzard", you should call the function "Get Display Name for Current Weather".
-----
SAMPLING TEMPERATURE
-----
There is a function on UDW called "Get Current Temperature", which you can call to sample the current temperature in Fahrenheit or Celsius. This value is generated in a simple and predictable way where temperature is a product of weather and never the other way around. The settings for this are found in the Temperature category on UDW.
How Temperature is Calculated
- The system starts with a value of 0, and adds to it using all the values labeled Temperature Bias in the Temperature category. These values use factors like Time of Day and weather state to add or subtract from this starting value.
- The resulting value is then mapped from a range of -1 to 1 over to the Min and Max range for the current season.
- A slowly changing random value is added to the temperature value, scaled by the Randomize Temperature setting.
- If an option other than Global is selected for Sample Location when calling the function, location based effects will be applied as well. Temperature Volumes in the level will be sampled (see below), and Interior Temperature will be applied based on the amount the location is occluded by surrounding collision.
**
Note, if using Weather Override Volumes, these will apply their own temperature ranges while the player is inside them. You can adjust the temperature ranges it applies from the WOV's settings, or disable this behavior there.
**
Temperature Volumes
The actor class Temperature Volume, found in the Blueprints/Weather_Effects folder, can be placed in the level to have custom local effects on temperature. For example, you could place a Temperature Volume actor around a fire, with a positive Temperature Offset setting, and temperature sampled within the volume would be higher.
**
Show Temperature Onscreen
There is a widget included which can sample and display the current temperature from UDW on screen. The widget is "UDW Thermometer" and can be found in the widget designer in the Ultra Dynamic Sky Widgets category.
-----
CONTROLLING ACTORS WITH WEATHER
-----
-----
WEATHER EVENT DISPATCHERS
-----
UDW has event dispatchers which your classes can bind to trigger events based on changes to the weather state.
- Started Raining and Finished Raining, triggered based on the amount of rain in the weather state.
- Started Snowing and Finished Snowing, which is the same thing for snow.
- Dust/Sand Forming and Dust/Sand clearing, which is the same for dust.
- Getting Cloudy and Clouds Clearing, which is based on the cloud coverage in the weather state.
- Getting Foggy and Fog Clearing, based on the Fog value in the weather state.
- Weather Display Name Changed, which fires when the output of Get Display Name for Current Weather Changes. This is a good dispatcher to use to trigger something based on general weather changes.
For the started/finished events, you can adjust the threshold which triggers them from the Event Dispatchers category on UDW.
There are also dispatchers called State Change, which can be used to monitor specific weather state values for when they change. For example, you could bind to "State Change - Rain" to run logic whenever the amount of rain changes on UDW.
-----
ACTOR WEATHER STATUS
-----
Actor Weather Status is a component you can add to an actor which will keep track of its direct exposure to weather, as well as its temperature and wind exposure. This is intended for important actors like the player pawn which may need to constantly monitor their individual status with regard to weather.
At runtime, this component will use periodic traces to test the actor's weather exposure and keep track of how its temperature is affected by that exposure. All of these values can be found in the component's Status category.
The Actor Weather Status component also has its own event dispatchers, for when the actor itself is exposed to rain, or snow, or its temperature goes past thresholds for hot and cold.
You can also add dynamic material instances to an array in the component's Material Effects category, to have parameters set using the status values. These parameters are all 0-1 values and are called "Wet", "Raining", "Snowy", "Dusty", and "Wind Intensity". The UDW material functions have an input called "Use Local Parameters" which is made to work with this.
Instead of using an Actor Weather Status component to always track weather state, you can also do a single query of an actor's exposure to weather by calling "Test Actor for Weather Exposure" on UDW. If you have your actor call this function, and provide a reference to itself for the Actor input, the function will output floats which describe how exposed the actor is to rain, wind, snow and dust. These values each range from 0 to 1. They scale with the intensity of the weather and the amount the actor is exposed. So for example a value of 1 for snow would mean the actor is fully exposed
to snow at maximum intensity.
-----
WIND
-----
-----
WIND DIRECTION
-----
The direction of the wind on UDW is controlled separately from the weather state, using the Wind Direction variable in Basic Controls, and the settings in the Wind Direction category. In addition to the movement of weather particles, the wind direction also controls the movement direction of clouds on UDS.
In the Wind Direction category, you can enable Wind Direction Variation. This uses random noise to vary the direction of the wind at runtime. This variation is centered around the Wind Direction selected in Basic Controls.
Weather Override Volumes can also override wind direction as well. If Apply Wind Direction is true on a WOV, the wind direction setting below will be used as the player enters the volume.
-----
WIND DEBRIS
-----
Wind Debris can be enabled, which adds small debris particles flying through the air, when Wind Intensity is high in the current weather state. This feature is found on UDW in the Wind Debris category.
The amount and scale of wind debris particles can be adjusted there, as well as the texture sheet used for the particle sprites. If replacing this, make sure it is formatted as a 4x4 sheet with an alpha channel.
The behavior of the wind debris particles (for spawning and collision) shares the same settings used by the other weather particles, in the Shared Particle Settings category.
If you want to have the debris amount vary at runtime, you can set the Wind Debris Particle Spawn Count and the particles will update at runtime with the change.
-----
WIND GUSTS
-----
By default, wind intensity will have a variation applied to it, to simulate gusts of wind. This variation comes from a stream of perlin noise, which pushes wind intensity higher and lower.
The settings for this are in the Wind Gusts category. You can scale the amount of variation applied, and the speed of the perlin noise stream which is the source of the variation.
-----
WIND DIRECTIONAL SOURCE
-----
A Wind Directional Source is an engine component which can affect a few things, like chaos cloth and speedtree assets. UDW has an option, enabled by default, to make and control a Wind Directional Source component with the current wind speed and direction.
You can find this option in the Wind Directional Source category. There's also settings to scale how high the Wind Speed is set on the source component, and an option to disable wind speed when inside an interior.
-----
WIND PHYSICS FORCE
-----
If you have objects which simulate physics, and you want them to be able to be pushed by the current wind on UDW, there is a component included for that. It's the Wind Physics Force component.
Just add this component as a child of any primitive component which simulates physics. At runtime, the component will query the current wind state on UDW and do line traces to see how exposed to wind the component is.
You can adjust the strength of the wind's physical force, as well as other specifics of how the component behaves, from its exposed settings.
-----
WIND CAMERA SHAKE
-----
If you want the player camera to shake when exposed to maximum wind speeds, UDW has a feature for that. You can find the toggle for it in the Wind Camera Shake category.
You can adjust the scale of the shake applied, as well as the range of Wind Intensity from the weather state which will trigger the shake.
The shake will also be masked by the global player occlusion. Meaning it won't happen when the player is in an interior. This is determined by the settings in the Player Occlusion category on UDS.
-----
ADDITIONAL FEATURES
-----
-----
PUDDLE FLUID VOLUME
-----
The Puddle Fluid Volume is an actor class which can render a puddle as an actual water surface that moves up and down as the puddle fills/empties with weather state. This is in contrast to the puddles achieved using material effects, which are just flat surface effects changing the roughness and normal of a material. A Puddle Fluid Volume is suitable for situations where there is an actual geometric recess/cavity in the ground, for water to fill.
Optionally, you can also render the Puddle Fluid Volume using Puddle Fluid Interactions, which renders the puddle as a grid mesh simulating natural ripples, caused by the DLWE Interaction component contacting the water surface. (See the entry on the Dynamic Landscape Weather Effects for info on the DLWE Interaction component.) Understand, when using fluid interactions, the puddle is a dense grid of simulated particles. The size of the puddle area will have a significant effect on the cost of this simulation, and should generally be kept to small spaces/individual puddles.
You can find the Puddle Fluid Volume class in the Blueprints/Weather_Effects folder.
When placing the actor in the level, note its current filled/dry state will be informed by the current weather you have selected on UDW. You can override this in the level editor as needed, using the setting Level Editor Preview State. You should place the puddle so that when it's dry, it's completely hidden under the ground. Note that the puddle mesh is visible in the editor when it's in its dry state, to help with placing the actor. But at runtime, the puddle mesh will be hidden when dry.
You can scale the puddle area using the Puddle Area setting, or by scaling the actor. The actor can only be rotated on the Z axis.
The water surface is rendered using a translucent material by default, so for good reflections with Lumen, make sure to enable High Quality Translucency Reflections in your project settings.
For settings relating to how and when the puddle will be filled/emptied at runtime, see the Puddle State category.
For toggling or adjusting the behavior of the fluid interactions with DLWE Interaction components, see the Fluid Interactions category.
-----
WATER LEVEL
-----
If you have a global water height in your level, like for an ocean, there are features on UDW to make the weather effects be universally affected by that water level.
The option for this is found in the Water Level category. Just enable Use UDS Water Level and set the water level in Ultra Dynamic Sky's Water category.
Here is all the water level can affect:
- Weather particles will be kept from traveling or spawning beneath the water level.
- Sound Occlusion will be fully occluded when the player camera goes below the water level.
- Screen Droplets will turn off automatically when the camera goes underwater and the screen will be wet when the camera comes back out of the water.
- The Rainbow will be masked beneath the water level if the option for it is enabled.
- The Surface Weather Effects and Dynamic Landscape Weather Effects functions have inputs to enable masking of coverage below the water level.
-----
POST PROCESS WIND FOG
-----
Post Process Wind Fog is an effect which adds extra fog noise in the local area around the camera, moving with the wind and weather particles. It's achieved using a post process effect, simpler but much more performance friendly than similar effects achieved with volumetric fog. The intensity of the effect scales with the amount of fog, rain, snow, or dust, in the current weather state.
There are multiple methods for masking the effect in spaces blocked from weather like interiors. By default, the effect uses the Weather Occlusion Volume, a volume texture which caches exposure to weather around the camera, using the global distance field. This is the best option, but you can also change to having the effect mask using player occlusion.
-----
RAINBOW
-----
You can enable a rainbow effect as a result of the weather state, on UDW. The settings are found in the Rainbow category.
A rainbow will only be visible under these conditions:
- There is rain or fog contributing to the visibility of the rainbow. The amount each of these contributes is controlled by settings in the Rainbow category.
- The camera is directly exposed to sunlight, as affected by cloud coverage. If the camera is under an overcast cloud layer, the effect won't appear.
- The sun itself needs to be low enough for the rainbow to be visible above the horizon, or the camera has to be high enough to see the rainbow beneath them.
There are further settings in the Rainbow category to control how visible rainbows can be above the cloud layer, or below the water level, if the water level is enabled.
-----
SCREEN DROPLETS
-----
Screen Droplets is an effect on UDW which can render an effect of water droplets on the screen, when the player camera is exposed to rain.
You can enable the effect from the Screen Droplets category on UDW.
The settings there can control the size of the droplets texture, the strength of the effect, and how much the camera is affected based on how much its directly facing the rain.
-----
SCREEN FROST
-----
Screen Frost is an optional effect to make frost/ice form on the camera when exposed to snowy weather.
You can find the settings for enabling and adjusting the effect in the Screen Frost category on UDW.
Screen Frost can be triggered by snow, material snow, and a manual contribution. It will form and clear over time using the Form Duration and Clear Duration settings.
By default, Screen Frost will not form when the player is occluded inside an interior. This uses the player occlusion values which are configured from the Player Occlusion category on UDS.
-----
HEAT DISTORTION
-----
From the Heat Distortion category on UDW, you can enable an effect of heat distortion/heat haze. This is a post process effect which distorts distant scenery with a shimmering/convection noise, imitating the way hot air above surfaces like sand or tarmac can refract light in turbulent patterns.
If you enable heat distortion, its default configuration is to be applied based on the current calculated temperature value. See the entry on the temperature system for details on how temperature is calculated by UDW.
You can also manipulate Manual Heat Distortion to add distortion irrespective of the temperature.
-----
CURRENT WEATHER DISPLAY WIDGET
-----
There is a widget blueprint included which you can use to display the current weather on UDW. It's called UDW_Current_Weather_Display, and it can be found in the widget designer library under Ultra Dynamic Sky Widgets.
By default, this widget will represent the current weather as an icon, and it will get the current weather to display using the function "Get Display Name for Current Weather". You can change it to instead display as text, or to get the current weather preset asset, with the exposed settings on the widget.
-----
CUSTOM WEATHER BEHAVIOR
-----
The Weather Settings Presets have a framework for adding additional custom blueprint logic on individual weather presets.
The UDS_Weather_Settings data asset class has a function on it called Custom Weather Behavior. You can create a child of the UDS_Weather_Settings class and override that function to add your own custom weather logic. Data assets you create using that child class will make use of that custom logic. The parent behavior is what applies the Sky Modifier selected on a weather preset, so if using that, make sure to keep the parent logic in your version of the function.
The function has an input for Alpha, which represents how much this preset is currently affecting the local weather state on UDW, from a scale of 0-1. The function will be called at runtime as weather state changes on UDW in any way that involves this settings asset.
-----
DRIPPING MESH PARTICLES
-----
There are niagara systems included which can make a static mesh or a skeletal mesh spawn drip particles on the mesh surface, in response to the amount of rain or material wetness of the weather state.
The niagara system assets can be found in Particles/Standalone.
The systems are configured to use the mesh of their attach parent. So to add the effect to a static mesh, simply add a niagara component using the Dripping Static Mesh system as a child of the static mesh component you want to spawn drips. Do the same for a skeletal mesh component, but using the Dripping Skeletal Mesh system.
User parameters on the niagara component are exposed to scale the lifetime of the drip particles, change the max spawn rate, and adjust the fraction of the spawn rate to use when raining, wet, or independent of weather state.
The appearance of the drip particles (sprite size, color, alpha) is controlled using the settings on UDW for rain particles.
Note, if you use one of these systems on an actor which has an Actor Weather Status component, the actor's local status will be used to drive the amount of drips, rather than simply using the weather state from UDW.
-----
RAIN DRIP SPLINE
-----
Rain Drip Spline is an actor which you can place into your level to have a line or curve spawn rain droplets which fall based on the amount of rain in UDW's weather state. This can be used to make something like the edge of a building roof appear to drip water during rain. You can also additionally enable icicle meshes hanging from the spline for cold weather.
Rain Drip Spline can be found in Blueprints/Weather_Effects. When you drag it into your scene, it will be a small straight line, but you can edit the spline to change the length and shape of the line. Move and rotate the spline points, and add more spline points by right clicking on the spline path.
The collision and appearance of the particles this actor spawns will be controlled using the settings for rain particles on UDW.
-----
ICICLES
-----
If you want to create icicles hanging from the edges of meshes in your level in cold weather, see the entry on the Rain Drip Spline actor, which has an optional feature for rendering icicle meshes along its spline.
-----
WEATHER OCCLUSION VOLUME
-----
The Weather Occlusion Volume is a volume texture which contains a low resolution cache of the area around the camera position, and how occluded each point is from the weather/wind. It does this by sampling the global distance field, so it requires distance fields to be enabled and supported.
The Post Process Wind Fog can use this volume texture to mask its intensity in spaces blocked by scenery.
-----
CINEMATICS AND RENDERING
-----
-----
USING WEATHER WITH SEQUENCER
-----
Here are some tips for how the weather system can be animated using sequencer.
Keyframing the Weather State
To animate the current weather state manually using sequencer, you'll want to use the Manual Weather State, keyframing the variables in that category. See the entry on the Manual Weather State for more info on using that.
Keyframing the Material Effects
If you're keyframing the Material Wetness, Material Snow Coverage, or Material Dust Coverage directly, you'll need to make one change to have those keyframes work the same at runtime as they do in your sequence. In the Material Effects category, disable "Simulate Changing Material State Over Time". This will make it so at runtime the material effects show exactly as they're keyframed at each frame, instead of changing gradually with weather state.
Keyframing Cloud Movement
To animate cloud movement in a way that will play back the same every time: First, set Cloud Speed to 0 on UDS. Then, turn off Randomize Cloud Formation On Run, in Cloud Movement on UDS. Then in Sequencer, keyframe the Cloud Phase variable on UDS. This will allow directly controlling cloud movement with keyframes.
Keyframing a Lightning Flash
To spawn a lightning flash from a sequence, add UDW to the sequence and create an Event>Trigger track on UDW. Add a keyframe to the track, and right click it to see its properties. For its Endpoint, search for Flash Lightning under Quick Bind. With that function bound, you can configure the inputs for the lightning flash (it's custom location, seed, etc) from the keyframe's properties. Make sure to also check Call in Editor in the properties if you want the lightning flash to be previewed in the sequence editor.
Rendering a Movie
Take note of the Project Mode setting on UDS, if you need to render a movie for offline playback. Change that setting on UDS to "Cinematic / Offline", to force max quality for the sky rendering and force both blueprints to update completely every frame at runtime. See the rendering entry in the sky section for more info.
Also, if you are rendering your movie with the path tracer, make sure to read the documentation entry on UDS' path tracer support and how to configure for it.
***
Common Issues
***
-----
TECHNICAL NOTES
-----
This section is a technical overview of the main features of the Ultra Dynamic Sky and Ultra Dynamic Weather blueprints. It's intended for those who want to modify the system to change or add their own features, to give a sense of the structure of the blueprints. Unlike the rest of this readme, which is written to be relatively approachable to unreal beginners, this section assumes the reader has a good working knowledge of blueprint.
-----
ULTRA DYNAMIC SKY
-----
-----
OVERVIEW
-----
Here is a brief look at UDS' overall blueprint structure, to start off.
Startup
The function Startup Sky is the one which contains all of UDS' startup logic, shared when run from Construction Script in the editor, and on begin play when starting the level. It's also called to restart the sky at runtime, like when applying a configuration or changing sky mode during play.
The Startup Sky function handles all of the logic which only needs setting up once at startup, and it does the first run of the Update functions.
Update Functions
Update Static Variables and Update Active Variables are the two update functions, used to apply changes to properties on the components and material instances.
Update Active Variables is for applying properties which change with time, weather, or other variables which are expected to commonly change at runtime. Update Active Variables is called frequently while the level is running, to update with these changes.
Update Static Variables is for properties which aren't expected to change at runtime. It's run as part of construction script and once on event begin play, but won't run again at runtime unless called manually.
Cache System
If Project Mode is set to Game/Real-Time, UDS utilizes a cache system which spreads out complex calculations so they don't have to happen every time Update Active Variables is run.
The function which caches these values is called Cache Properties. See the section below about the cache system for more information on how that works.
General Organization
For finding functions relevant to any of the specific features on UDS, take note first that the functions are categorized generally by feature. For example, the function which applies static properties for the lens flare is called "Static Properties - Lens Flare" and is in the Lens Flare category.
Also note that nearly every function has a description which should give a general idea of what purpose it serves and how it's used.
-----
CACHE SYSTEM
-----
The cache system exists to spread out calculations of changing properties, so that they don't have to run every time Update Active Variables is called.
The function which does this is called Cache Properties. It uses a set of functions to cache values of different data types to arrays of new and old values. These cached values are then lerped from old to new between updates of the cache.
The update period of the cache is not constant. It changes to be more frequent when faster changes are called for. The function which handles that is called Monitor for Changes. It looks at how time and weather variables are changing on each frame and these change speeds are used to affect cache timing immediately if necessary. The cache timing itself is handled from the function Increment Cache Timer.
Note, because Cache Properties operates essentially separately from the update functions, it has some of its own variables for things like Cached Sun Vector or Cached Moon Phase. Values which need to be shared by all of the cached properties, but aren't always the exact same as the actual current values for things like Sun Vector or Moon Phase.
As properties are cached by Cache Properties, the functions which apply the cached properties are bound to event dispatchers, which are called from Update Active Variables. These Apply functions all have the prefix AP, for Apply Properties.
-----
TIME AND LIGHTING
-----
Time is handled through manipulation of Time of Day and the Date variables. The sun and moon rotations are derived from time (unless Manual Position options are in use) and the rotations of the sun and moon are used by Cache Properties and Update Active Variables to influence properties like fog color or light intensities.
Time of Day is manipulated on tick through the functions Time of Day Animation and Apply System Time, if either of those features is active.
Date is only manipulated by UDS at midnight, to increment the day forward using the function Offset Date.
Sun and Moon rotation are cached values, so their rotation is determined in the function Cache Sun and Moon Orientation. The logic used in that function will depend on if the Simulate option is true for either the sun or moon. If it is, then the function Approximate Real Sun Moon and Stars is what handles the simulated rotations based on the time, date and coordinates.
Note, this cached orientation is only applied constantly to the Sun World Rotation and Moon World Rotation variables which hold the rotation to be used for the visuals. The lights themselves have settings (the Lights Update settings in the Directional Light category) which allow the lights to only periodically change rotation, so the rotation variables act as an intermediary.
Update Active Variables will then use the forward vector of the Sun World Rotation and Moon World Rotation to determine many properties which change with the lights orientation.
-----
CLOUD MOVEMENT
-----
Most of the properties for the clouds are handled in the Update functions, but cloud movement in particular (for Volumetric Clouds and 2D Dynamic Clouds) is handled in its own functions, called Increment Cloud Movement Cache and Update Cloud Movement.
Increment Cloud Movement Cache is run a couple times a second by default, and it finds the current speed and direction that the cloud position should be offset, and caches the new position and old position.
Update Cloud Movement runs on tick, and just takes those cached values and applies them to the material parameters for the visible clouds.
Note that the properties used for the volumetric clouds, both here and in the Update functions, are being set on a shared material parameter collection called UDS_VolumetricClouds_MPC. This is used to allow many different materials for things like cloud fog and cloud shadows to approximate cloud coverage using the same properties sampled by the visible clouds.
-----
FOG COLORS AND AMBIENT LIGHT COLORS
-----
The fog/ambient colors calculated by UDS are determined mainly in the function Get Current Base Fog Colors. This outputs a number of colors, for ambient and directional fog colors, as well as individual sun and moon contributions, which are used both to set color properties on the fog component itself, and also for other purposes. For example, Ambient Fog Color is used by the sky light color and intensity logic, if the Cubemap with Dynamic Color Tinting sky light mode is selected.
-----
REPLICATION
-----
Time of Day and Date will be replicated in a multiplayer environment. (For info about weather state replication, see the UDW replication section below.)
Time of Day's replication works by only periodically updating the "Replicated Time of Day" variable, which notifies clients to update Time of Day using the replicated value. Properties which directly inform how fast time moves forward (Day Length, Night Length, Time Speed, Simulation Speed) are replicated themselves. This way the client can handle moving time forward locally most of the time, the same as its handled by the server. Then it resyncs when Replicated Time of Day is updated.
-----
ULTRA DYNAMIC WEATHER
-----
-----
OVERVIEW
-----
The blueprint structure of UDW is modeled after UDS.
Startup
UDW has a function similar to Startup Sky on UDS. On UDW it's called Start Weather System.
This handles creating the necessary objects, like weather settings objects, and starting systems like random weather variation. It also does the first run of the update functions.
Update Current Global and Local Weather State
This function is what creates the composite global state and local state, if needed, during tick.
Monitor Local Weather Changes
This function runs after the local weather state is generated, looking for any values which have changed past a threshold. Any that have changed get a set of relevant functions bound to a dispatcher called in Update Active Variables, to apply changes to anything which responds to that state value.
Update Functions
Update Active Variables and Update Static Variables exist in much the same way as they do on UDS.
Update Active Variables handles applying changes to niagara systems, sound components, and material effects, which change with the weather.
Update Static Variables applies properties which aren't expected to change with the weather, like the max spawn distance of the weather particles for example.
General Organization
Just like on UDS, the functions on UDW are categorized generally based on the feature they relate to. Each function also has a description, explaining what it's for and where it's used.
-----
WEATHER STATE
-----
The weather state on UDW is determined in two stages, the Global Weather State and the Local Weather State.
Global Weather State
The global weather state is the state determined by the weather settings on UDW itself. This would be the weather settings preset, the Change Weather function, and the random weather variation.
Bind Global State Update Functions is called when anything which influences global state changes, for example a weather transition starting.
That function binds the global state update functions needed to a dispatcher called Construct Global Weather. That dispatcher is called in the function Update Current Global and Local Weather State.
The functions which can be bound do things like applying the weather preset, handling transitions if active, applying the random weather state, and incrementing the global material state sim.
Local Weather State
The construction of the local weather state is handled in much the same way. The binding function is called as needed to bind functions to the Construct Local Weather dispatcher, which is called from Update Current Global and Local Weather State.
The Local Weather bindings handle things like applying weather override volumes, radial storms, and changes above the cloud layer.
In the Update Active Variables function, almost all of the properties set there will be sampling the values on the Local Weather State object, since that represents the weather state at the player's location.
-----
NIAGARA SYSTEMS
-----
The niagara systems used by UDW can be found in the Particles folder.
Weather Particles
The Rain, Dust, Snow, and Wind Debris system assets can be found in the Particles folder.
These systems share many modules and parent emitters, since much of their behavior is the same.
They all use a CPU Collision and GPU Collision emitter, which handle filling the niagara arrays with valid particle paths. UDW toggles one of these emitters off when it constructs the system, depending the selected setting for Particle Collision Mode.
The rest of the emitters sample the arrays randomly to get a valid particle path, to control their location, velocity, and lifetime.
Lightning
The Lightning Strike niagara system is the one used for lightning flashes with a visible lightning bolt. The Obscured Lightning system is used for the passive effect of flashes which just light the clouds.
On UDW, the niagara components for the weather particles and obscured lightning are controlled mainly from the update functions. The lightning flashes are spawned from the Lightning Flash graph.
-----
SOUND
-----
Much of the sound effects logic exists in the MetaSound assets. These are found in Sound/MetaSounds.
UDW just updates the audio components periodically with the relevant weather state values, sound occlusion values, and volume levels. The values are interpolated using the update period, in the MetaSound graphs.
The sounds for weather are handled by two sources, Global and Directional. Global sounds are not panned/spatialized, and Directional sounds are. Directional sounds also have their sound occlusion applied directionally, so if the X+ direction is blocked, directional sounds in that direction will be attenuated.
The Global and Directional sources both output to an audio bus called UDS_Weather_AudioBus. This bus is used by another source on UDW called the Sound Mixer, which applies the necessary stereo panning and sound occlusion to all the weather sounds together, and outputs that to the base submix.
The occlusion values used for sound are calculated by the Player Occlusion component on UDS.
-----
MATERIAL EFFECTS
-----
The Material State Manager class is what UDW uses to increment global material state over time, if "Simulate Changing Material State Over Time" is enabled. The manager class is found in Blueprints/Weather_Effects/System.
If the simulate option is disabled, the material state will always come directly from the weather state objects informing the global state.
-----
REPLICATION
-----
Weather state is replicated by UDW for multiplayer. Specifically, the Global Weather State on UDW is replicated, as well as the state on Weather Override Volumes and the state of Radial Storms. The clients then determine their Local Weather State themselves, so each player can experience their own local weather, but the states inside and outside of volumes/storms will be shared.
The global state isn't replicated directly, but by replicating the weather preset assets used by the transition system, the random weather variation, and the weather override volumes. This way the client can only receive updates when a change of state on one of those sources starts, and handle global weather state reliably in the same way as the server between those updates.
***
Technical Documentation
***
-----
COMMON ISSUES
-----
This section contains solutions and workarounds for common problems faced when working with UDS and UDW.
-----
LIGHTING AND POST PROCESSING
-----
-----
EVERYTHING RENDERING BLACK AFTER ADDING UDS
-----
If after adding UDS to your scene, the entire level renders black, the cause is almost certainly exposure settings. Here's a few things to try:
- In your level, check to see if you have any post process volumes which are controlling the exposure settings. If you do, disable those overrides so UDS can control exposure.
- In the viewport, in the Lit dropdown, make sure Game Settings is checked for exposure.
- On UDS, try disabling "Apply Exposure Settings" in the exposure category.
-----
AMBIENT LIGHT NOT UPDATING AS TIME OF DAY CHANGES
-----
If you notice that the ambient light starts out looking correct, but as time of day changes at runtime, the ambient light doesn't update, it's almost certainly a problem with the sky light not updating. Here are a few possible causes of that:
- If you see this problem on specific platforms, it may be because they don't support real time sky light capture. I'd recommend changing Sky Light Mode to Cubemap with Dynamic Color Tinting for a good dynamic option that works on any platform.
- If you specifically notice ambient light remaining bright as night falls, you could also just have static light from an old lighting solution present in your map. To check for that, just run a lighting build, from the Build dropdown on the main editor toolbar.
-----
AMBIENT LIGHT TAKES A LONG TIME TO UPDATE
-----
When the sky changes quickly, due to a fast change of Time of Day or Cloud Coverage, you might notice the ambient light in the level taking a long time to adapt to that change.
This would be an aspect of Lumen, the default global illumination method in new UE5 projects. Lumen's default settings can take a long time to adjust to changes in the scene. Note that UDS doesn't interfere with Lumen's settings itself.
You can adjust that speed from a post process volume, in its Lumen Global Illumination section. The settings would be the ones for Update Speed. Note of course that increasing the speed will increase the GPU cost of Lumen.
-----
CHANGING A PROPERTY AT RUNTIME TAKES A SECOND TO APPLY
-----
If you set an active property on UDS at runtime, like Sun Light Color for example, you will typically see the change happen over the next 1 to 2 seconds.
This is because the blueprint handles recalculating and reapplying active properties as infrequently as it can, caching them and interpolating between cached values on most frames.
If you need changes like this to happen instantly, there's a few things you can try:
- You can call "Hard Reset Cache" to have the cache completely reset and apply all new changes at once. If you need a complete refresh instantly, this is the way to do it.
- You can change the max amount of time between cache updates on UDS. That's exposed as Max Property Cache Period, in the Scalability/Performance category.
-----
CHANGING A PROPERTY AT RUNTIME HAS NO EFFECT
-----
Some properties, if you just set them directly at runtime, will have no effect on what they control. In most cases this would be because they are what the system calls static properties. They are applied when the system starts up, but it doesn't waste resources applying them actively since they don't typically need to change based on time or weather.
For these, you can call one of the Static Properties functions to apply the change.
For example, if you wanted to set Sun Softness at runtime, you could set the variable and then call the "Static Properties - Sun" function to apply the change.
-----
WATER/OCEAN SHADER LIGHTS INCORRECTLY IN CLOUDY WEATHER
-----
If using some types of water or ocean shaders, you might notice in cloudy weather that the sun or moon directional lights appear to affect the material despite being blocked by clouds. This would be because the single layer water shading model tests the intensity and color of the active directional light without factoring in light functions.
The cloud shadows on UDS do support the light function atlas, a 2D representation of a light function which single layer water can sample. In your project settings, make sure you turn on "Single Layer Water Uses Light Function Atlas". With this enabled, the water should be able to recieve a good approximation of the cloud shadows.
Similarly, you might notice the sun reflection when near sunset/sunrise not matching well with the cloud coverage which should be blocking it. In that case, try enabling "Correct Specular Scale For Low Angle Cloud Shadows" in the Cloud Shadows category on UDS.
-----
VOLUMETRIC CLOUDS
-----
-----
VOLUMETRIC CLOUDS HAVE HARD MESH INTERSECTIONS
-----
If using the default settings, you might notice volumetric clouds intersections with meshes look hard and low quality.
By default, the volumetric clouds in UDS use a mode which is ideal for clouds as a background element only, with only low quality mesh intersections.
If you need your clouds to render well over the landscape/objects in your scene, the fix is simple. In the Volumetric Clouds category on UDS, just change the Volumetric Cloud Rendering Mode to one of the settings which prioritize Mesh Intersections.
-----
TRANSLUCENT MATERIALS AREN'T BLOCKED BY CLOUDS
-----
You may notice translucent materials rendering in front of volumetric clouds. This is because translucent materials require additional configuration to be blocked by volumetric clouds.
On the material, in its Translucency settings, make sure both Apply Fogging and Apply Cloud Fogging are enabled. Additionally, depending on the mesh, you might want to enable Compute Fog Per Pixel, as otherwise the cloud fogging will be per vertex.
-----
VOLUMETRIC CLOUD ARTIFACTS INSIDE/ABOVE LAYER
-----
When going up into the volumetric cloud layer you might notice banding/noise or other light artifacts in the volumetric rendering while in the layer.
The default settings are optimized to prioritize quality from the ground. Here are a few settings to try adjusting to improve render quality within the layer:
- Increase "View Sample Count Scale" This scales the number of samples used in the volumetric rendering. Increasing it will reduce noise in the resolve and can fix some artifacts if pushed high enough. Note that this will increase the performance demand of the clouds proportional to the amount you increase the setting.
- Reduce "Tracing Max Distance". There are two settings for this, one for inside the cloud layer, and one for outside.
- Adjust "Close View Sample Ratio". This controls how view sample count scales with distance through the layer.
-----
VOLUMETRIC CLOUDS LOOK BLURRY/STREAKY WHEN MOVING FAST
-----
By default, the volumetric clouds use a rendering mode which resolves the render with a long trail of past frames. Because of this, when the clouds move fast, like during a time lapse, the rendering can become blurry or ghosted.
The solution is to use any of the other Volumetric Cloud Rendering Modes. You can change the mode from the Volumetric Clouds category on UDS.
-----
VOLUMETRIC CLOUDS ARE TOO DARK / GRAY
-----
If the volumetric clouds look strangely dark, the problem is probably the directional light affecting them.
This can happen if you're using the "Custom Sun Light Actor" or "Custom Moon Light Actor" option. The built in sun and moon lights have a particular setting customized which you would need to apply to your own light to have them light volumetric clouds well. The setting is "Cloud Scattered Luminance Scale". For best results I would suggest copying the exact color from UDS' directional light components.
If you haven't selected "custom actor", the problem may instead be that you have a directional light actor or component in your level that you haven't removed before adding UDS.
-----
GENERAL RENDERING
-----
-----
HARSH LINE OF FOG/ATMOSPHERE AT SPECIFIC CAMERA DISTANCE
-----
If you see a hard line where fog/atmosphere suddenly starts on scenery at a particular distance from the camera, the problem is probably the position of the sky atmosphere relative to the scene.
Make sure the UDS actor is placed at ground level in your scene, where the camera will never be significantly lower than it.
-----
THE SKY COLOR FLICKERS BLACK WHEN MOVING THE CAMERA
-----
If you notice the color of the sky flickering to pitch black when the camera is moved in certain places in your level, you're probably encountering an engine bug with the sky atmosphere system.
The issue is caused in some circumstances by the camera going below the "ground" defined by the sky atmosphere component.
The best solution is to select the Sky Atmosphere component in UDS (found in the component list at the top of the details panel) and move it down to the lowest point in your level, below where the camera can go.
-----
VOLUMETRIC FOG IS LOW QUALITY / PIXELLATED
-----
If you have volumetric fog enabled, you might notice pixelation or sample quality artifacts detracting from quality.
These are determined by your project's scalability settings, they're not something UDS takes any control of. Volumetric fog's scalability cvars are a part of the Shadow Quality scalability group.
-----
SPACE LAYER NOT RENDERING
-----
If the space layer feature on UDS isn't rendering anything, the problem is probably the project configuration or platform limitations.
The space layer is rendered using dbuffer mesh decals, which are then sampled within the sky material. This is what allows them to be composited correctly, layered within the various elements of the sky mat.
Because of this, the space layer requires dbuffer decal rendering to be enabled, in the project settings, and supported by the platform. Note for the mobile renderer there is a separate Mobile DBuffer Decals setting.
-----
WEATHER
-----
-----
WEATHER PARTICLES NOT VISIBLE AT ALL
-----
If weather particles like rain and snow are not visible in your scene, regardless of the weather state, here are some things to check:
- The particle may be blocked by a source of invisible collision in your level, like a volume which has collision configured to block the channel used by weather particles. You can check to see if the particles are being blocked somehow by setting Particle Collision Mode to "No Collision" in Shared Particle Settings on UDW.
- Make sure particle sprites aren't being hidden by your editor viewport's Show flags. In the Show dropdown there, select Use Defaults.
- It's possible in some rare contexts for the engine to fail compiling the niagara systems for the weather particles when loading them in the first time. To fix for this, open the system asset in the Particles folder (Rain, Snow, Dust) and select Full Rebuild in the Compile dropdown on the main toolbar.
-----
WEATHER PARTICLES NOT SHOWING IN SIMULATE MODE
-----
If running in editor using the "Simulate" play mode, weather particles will probably not be visible.
This is just a limitation of Simulate mode. It plays the level, but keeps rendering through the editor camera, and in this context neither the blueprint or niagara can sample the editor camera location for the weather particles to use.
Using the other Play modes should display the weather particles correctly.
-----
DLWE INTERACTIONS NOT HAPPENING WHEN THEY SHOULD
-----
If you've set up Dynamic Landscape Weather Effects (following the directions laid out in the DLWE section of this readme) and interactions aren't happening, here's a list of things to check:
- Make sure your landscape has World Static simple collision which responds to queries and blocks the Visibility channel. If you're not using a landscape actor, but other kinds of meshes, note the extra steps for that involving physical materials, in the DLWE documentation entry.
- Make sure the DLWE Interaction component is positioned and has a size big enough to trigger interactions with the surface.
- Note the Control Point Location Source in the advanced dropdown of the Basic Controls category. This determines the area the DLWE interactions can happen in. If your camera is far from the control point location, it could keep effects from being visible.
-----
WEATHER PARTICLES NOT COLLIDING WITH OBJECTS
-----
If you're having trouble with weather particles not being blocked by objects that they seemingly should, here are a few things to check, based on what you have Particle Collision Mode set to:
Simple Collision
- Make sure the object has simple collision geometry. The traces used by the particles only check for simple collision.
- Make sure the collision profile of the object is set to block the trace channel selected on UDW as "Weather Particle Collision Channel". By default this is Visibility. Also make sure the collision response is Collision Enabled or Query Only, as queries are what niagara particles use.
- If particles are coming through the roof of a building with a very tall ceiling, it may be that the particles aren't checking high enough for the ceiling when they spawn in. You can adjust this distance using "Ceiling Check Height" on UDW.
Distance Field Collision
- Make sure your project is configured to generate mesh distance fields.
- Use the viewport option Show > Visualize > Global Distance Field, to see the distance field for your level. These are the surfaces weather particles will be sampling. Use this to spot issues with individual meshes' distance fields.
- Make sure the meshes you want to block the weather particles have "Affect Distance Field Lighting" turned on. This is what causes a mesh to be represented in the global distance field.
-----
WEATHER SOUNDS GO QUIET AT INCORRECT TIMES
-----
By default, the sound effects on UDW use a simple system of sound occlusion to dim and muffle weather sounds when inside interiors. That's toggled from the Sound Occlusion category.
If you're noticing this happen at incorrect times, it's probably because the occlusion traces are hitting surfaces they shouldn't. You can adjust the behavior of the occlusion system from the Player Occlusion category on UDS.
-----
SPLASH PARTICLES RENDERING WRONG IN VR
-----
In VR / Stereo rendering, you might notice rain splash particles rendering only in one eye.
This is an issue with a project setting called Instanced Stereo. It doesn't seem to support GPU particles rendering as sprites which use deferred decal materials, which is how the splashes work by default.
One thing you can try is changing the Splash Particles Rendering Mode setting on UDW to "Translucent". This of course will make the particles subject to the limitations of translucent lighting, but they should render in both eyes of the HMD with instanced stereo.
jamestagg
b0e000961f