Sky setup in UE4

Maximum-Dev

Hello,

Bought this HDRi:
http://www.cgskies.com/sky.php?sky=240&type=overcast&hdronly=&sortby=rating&page=1&pagesize=

Here's my material for it:



Here's how it looks:



Pretty much a basic setup. But I'm trying to get the most out of it so any guidance would be appreciated.
Also the texture is imported as a 16Bit .png since I can't use the 32 bit .hdr in material editor.

Mant1k0re

No one? I'd be interested in knowing more about this myself.

Obscura

There is not much to do with a static sky texture. Procedural skies gives you a lot more freedom. The static texture could be changed to be hdr again. This can be done with desaturating>powering the texture, then doing a lerp between max hdr value and 0 based on the result of the power.

Mant1k0re

Thanks Obscura - there's not a whole lot of information available online on doing skies any piece of information available is gold.

leleuxart

If you wanted a little extra 'flare' for your static sky, you could overlay a few extra meshes in the sky for moving clouds, like a simple tiling texture that rotates. You just have to be careful to not have a strong light source in the rotating texture, but something like wispy clouds should be okay.

abcdethan

I don't have much experience with UE4 but I have worked with other next-gen game engines that support HDR images. The high dynamic range offers more lighting and exposure ranges. Using a .png is not a proper HDR format and has its values clamped at 1 to 0. Procedural skies that offer dynamic moving clouds and time of day cycles are cool, but it is more complex when using HDRIs as a skybox. That is why you will see some next-gen games the great lighting have static skies.

King Mango

Instead of using an append and a multiply to access your UV coords in an Instance you can right-click the UV node and convert it to a parameter, or simply create a constant2 vector parameter. Further, if you know your aspect ratio will remain the same you can simplify changing UV tiling by entering the correct aspect ratio in the UV node, then hook that to a multiply and plug a scalar parameter so you only have to change one value when tweaking.

Also if you want to pan a Lat/Long texture like that around a dome but you are experiencing saw-teeth jitter at the pole, increase the tessellation at the pole and then decimate down a row or two. Like this:
 

Maximum-Dev

Just linking this here in case anyone missed it, very useful.

https://80.lv/articles/understanding-lighting-creation-in-games/

Thanks for your inputs everyone! very appreciated.