I’ve recently picked up Sky Creator by Dimitry Karpukhin. It gives much more fine-grained control over cloud creation than what I’m used to from Ultra Dynamic Sky. It also contains rain and surface puddle effects. Naturally I wanted to animate the clouds with sequencer and make sure the way the clouds evolve is the same every time I play back the animation. It wasn’t immediately obvious how to do that, so a few quick notes are in order I feel.
Setting up Sky Creator
It’s as easy as dragging a new Sky Creator object into the scene from the Lights Tab. No other objects are necessary to get good looking results. Sky Creator includes its own Post Process Volume, Volumetric Height Fog, Directional Light and Sky Dome.
There are two ways to “craft” weather: either by using a preset, or by using custom settings. Depending on which option we choose, the preset picker or the custom settings will show, giving us huge control over the clouds. Also notice the Editor Time of Day option, which is used to dial in the time.
If you want to move the sun position, rotate the Sky Creator actor around its Z axis (sun/moon rise can be adjusted with the time of day setting).
Animating the Clouds
To control the exact appearance of our clouds, we can animate the Cloud Map Offset value, which can be found in the Volumetric Clouds main section (incidentally this is NOT the same as the one Volumetric Clouds section under General… making it ever so slightly confusing to find).
Small values make large contributions to the cloud movement, so a float increment of 1 over 60 seconds is enough to make clouds whizz by.
Setting Cloud Quality
In the screenshot above, take a look at the Quality Setting and set it to Cinematic Quality for rendering. This is probably not meant to be used for real time playback.
Lite Version vs Full Version
Sky Creator is available from FAB as the “full version”, but the creator also sells a “lite” version on Gumroad. From what I understand, the lite version has all the functionality of the full version, but the full version adds
- Windows and Mac Support (Lite is Windows only)
- access to source code (handy if you ever need to distribute your own changes to a team)
- no server replication support (for multiplayer games)