언리얼 Sky Atmosphere - eonlieol Sky Atmosphere

언리얼 Sky Atmosphere - eonlieol Sky Atmosphere

Hey 3D Artist! In this tutorial we’ll be looking at a few settings we can use in the Sky Atmosphere to totally change the look of a scene in Unreal Engine. We then take a look at how to correctly use the Exponential Heightfog in conjunction with the Sky Atmosphere. This Applies to both UE4 and UE5. Tutorial released by William Faucher.

How to create sky atmosphere & fog in Unreal Engine?

Keep in mind: you may need to go in the project settings and search for “Support Sky Atmosphere Effecting Height Fog“, and make sure that box is checked.

Tips for Sky Atmosphere & Fog – Unreal Engine 5 (& UE4)

Click here for more Unreal Engine Tutorial.

In main, as of this writing, the CesiumSunSky doesn't show an atmosphere at all on Android and iOS. In #459, we added a manually-enabled EnableMobileRendering that uses a SkySphere to render a basic atmosphere. That's an improvement, but still not ideal because it is much lower visual quality (especially at planetary views) and must be manually enabled.

I noticed while working on that PR that when we try to use the regular desktop atmosphere rendering with emulated Android ES3.1 rendering in Unreal Engine v4.27, it displays a message:

언리얼 Sky Atmosphere - eonlieol Sky Atmosphere

PROJECT HAS VERTEX FOG ON MOBILE DISABLED
On mobile the SkyAtmosphere component needs a mesh with a material tagged as IsSky and using the SkyAtmosphere nodes to visualize the Atmosphere.

The 4.27 release notes imply this isn't a new capability but rather a new message intended to help diagnose problems with the SkyAtmosphere on mobile:

Added an onscreen warning for mobile for a misused Sky Atmosphere. This will help to identify why Sky Atmosphere is missing on mobile platforms.

And that in turn implies that we can use the SkyAtmosphere on mobile if we play by the rules, rather than replacing it with something else entirely.

So enabling vertex fog on mobile is easy in the project settings, just uncheck this and restart the Editor:

언리얼 Sky Atmosphere - eonlieol Sky Atmosphere

With just that change the surface looks nice on emulated Android, like it does on desktop, but there's still no sky shading:

언리얼 Sky Atmosphere - eonlieol Sky Atmosphere

So then I added a new "Static Mesh" component to the CesiumSunSky Actor, gave it a huge Scale (1000000000.0) and set its static mesh to the engine "Sphere_inversenormals" mesh. And give it a Material (again from the Engine) of SkyAtmosphere_MaterialSkyDome. And presto:

언리얼 Sky Atmosphere - eonlieol Sky Atmosphere

It looks kinda funky when you zoom out. And who knows about performance. But we should at least consider whether this is a better solution (default) on mobile.

Category: UE4October 29, 2021


언리얼 Sky Atmosphere - eonlieol Sky Atmosphere

Overcast day creates a very distinctive atmospheric feel - melancholy, somber, emotional, quiet and desolate.

Overcast lighting scatters light in all directions and removes strong light and shadows. This introduces additional artistic and technical roadblocks you wouldn't normally experience.

Standard sunny daytime lighting tends to be simple. You pick a time of day that creates interesting light/shadow play such as morning or evening. Usually you get pretty good results right away without much work.

But overcast lighting is different. It is more subtle and subtlety is hard to achieve in game art.

There are a number of ways to create overcast lighting in UE4. These include using Sky Atmosphere, Sky Light or HDRI image-based lighting.

In this tutorial I will show you how to do overcast lighting using Sky Atmosphere.

Overcast Lighting Results

Here are some overcast day lighting scenes created using this tutorial.

언리얼 Sky Atmosphere - eonlieol Sky Atmosphere

언리얼 Sky Atmosphere - eonlieol Sky Atmosphere

언리얼 Sky Atmosphere - eonlieol Sky Atmosphere

Scene Setup I am Using

I already have a scene setup that I'll be using for this tutorial. So it already includes some important actors inserted into the level.

To understand what is going on and what actors I have in the level, take a look at this tutorial first - UE4: Recreate the Dynamic Time of Day Template Level - Why You Should and How-To.

What You Will Need to Adjust

  • Sky Atmosphere
  • Directional Light
  • Sky Light
  • Exponential Height Fog (optional)
  • Post Process (artistic visual look of the environment)

I will go through each actor one-by-one and what you'll need to change. Although, you will often jump from one actor to another adjusting various settings all at once.

Video Tutorial

Sky Atmosphere

Let me give you the answer right away that will give you overcast lighting.

In Sky Atmosphere, increase Mie Scattering property above 1+.

This will give you diffused overcast lighting and soft cast shadows. The number to increase to will depend on the Directional Light intensity and its position in the sky. If it's mid-day, you may need to increase it to 5 or more.

언리얼 Sky Atmosphere - eonlieol Sky Atmosphere

Mie Scattering will get you 80% but there are more settings you need to adjust.

Sky Atmosphere has two primary Scattering Methods:

  • Mie Scattering: how light interacts with LARGER particles in the atmosphere (dust, pollen, air pollution); usually absorbs light causing haziness or clarity; often scatters resulting in halos around light source; increasing or decreasing Mie density causes more or less clarity in the sky
  • Rayleigh Scattering: how light interacts with SMALLER particles (air molecules); highly dependent on the lighting situation

Now, here are Sky Atmosphere settings you need to adjust.

Atmosphere - Mie

  • Increasing Mie Scattering Scale (1+). This should be the first thing you adjust and this number will need to be increased based on the sun position in the sky, if it is midafternoon with sun up above then you may need to increase higher to like 8+. Shadows will begin to soften as Mie Scattering is increased.
  • Lower Mie Anisotropy to 0 (uniform light scattering); look at the sun as you decrease it.
  • Optional: You can add certain color to Mie Scattering by using the Color Wheel but be careful with this, could lead to dramatic changes. I usually don't change this.
  • Optional: Adjust Mie Exponential Distribution this is the altitude in kilometers at which the Mie Scattering effect is reduced to 40%. I usually don't change this.

언리얼 Sky Atmosphere - eonlieol Sky Atmosphere

Atmosphere

  • Atmosphere Height has an effect on the overcast lighting and shadows (Planet's radius in kilometers from the center to the ground level). Increasing this value will introduce more light into the atmosphere of your environment, making it slightly brighter.
  • Increase or decrease Multi-Scatting, how much light is being bounced in the atmosphere.

언리얼 Sky Atmosphere - eonlieol Sky Atmosphere

Atmosphere - Rayleigh

  • Adjust Rayleigh Scattering Scale. I usually reduce Rayleigh Scattering Scale to 0.

언리얼 Sky Atmosphere - eonlieol Sky Atmosphere

Atmosphere - Absorption

  • Change Absorption Color. This will begin to absorb selected color from the atmosphere which will reduce and remove that selected color. The opposite color on the color wheel will begin to appear in the atmosphere.
  • Decrease or increase Absorption Scale to adjust ozone atmosphere molecules distribution.
  • Optional: experiment with Tent Distribution to adjust distribution of particle absorption in the atmosphere.

언리얼 Sky Atmosphere - eonlieol Sky Atmosphere

Art Direction

All the settings here are optional. Most important setting here is Aerial Perspective View Distance Scale. Lowering this will help to remove thickness of the atmosphere and reveal the sky clouds.

  • Lower Aerial Perspective View Distance Scale very close 0 such as .1 or .05 (this makes aerial perspective more transparent or opaque).
  • Decrease or increase Height Fog Contribution (if you have Exponential Height Fog inside the scene).
  • Add Sky Luminance Factor. This will add the selected color into the sky.

언리얼 Sky Atmosphere - eonlieol Sky Atmosphere

Directional Light

Directional Light is your sun. It has few important settings you need to adjust - light's intensity, color and removing the sun disk.

  • Lower Source Angle to 0, this controls in degrees the size of the sun disk. Setting to 0 will remove the sun disk completely.
  • Adjust Intensity. You may need to increase or lower this value.
  • Adjust Temperature (if you are using this property). I usually increase it to 7000K + for cooler lighting.

언리얼 Sky Atmosphere - eonlieol Sky Atmosphere

Sky Light

Sky Light helps to illuminate indirectly lit areas of your environment; parts that are in shadow.

  • Enable Real Time Capture.
  • Increase or decrease Sky Light intensity.

언리얼 Sky Atmosphere - eonlieol Sky Atmosphere

Exponential Height Fog

You don't need to use Exponential Height Fog, as Sky Atmosphere is capable of rendering its own fog. So this is optional.

However, Exponential Height Fog adds additional fog effect into the environment and I do like how it looks. Additional benefit of Height Fog is it helps to fill the bottom part of the world with a solid color, something that Sky Atmosphere can't do.

If you are going to use Exponential Height Fog with Sky Atmosphere you must enable it in Project Settings. Go to Edit > Project Settings and under Engine: Rendering, enable Support Sky Atmosphere Affecting Height Fog.

언리얼 Sky Atmosphere - eonlieol Sky Atmosphere

  • Change Fog Inscattering Color and Directional Scattering Color both to black.
  • Adjust Fog Density.
  • Adjust Fog Height Faloff.
  • Adjust Fog Cutoff Distance.
  • Adjust Fog Max Opacity.
  • Adjust Start Distance.
  • Optional: enable to see if you want to use Volumetric Fog and what it brings into the environment.

언리얼 Sky Atmosphere - eonlieol Sky Atmosphere

Also remember that in Sky Atmosphere you can adjust Height Fog Contribution property.

Post Process

I already had the following properties enabled prior to this tutorial:

  • Min/Max Brightness: 1.0
  • Unbound: enabled

Post Process will allow you to adjust how your scene looks such as changing colors, saturation, white balance, contrast, shadows, mid-tones, highlights etc. on the entire environment.

You want to always do Post Process Color Grading last. So make sure you get the lighting figured out first before adjusting the colors and brightness of the scene.

언리얼 Sky Atmosphere - eonlieol Sky Atmosphere

Volumetric Cloud

You also want to adjust Volumetric Cloud actor and Volumetric Cloud Material Instance to make the clouds pop in the sky.

If you lowered Aerial Perspective View Distance Scale in Sky Atmosphere to make the clouds visible in the sky then adjust Volumetric Cloud Material Instance and Volumetric Cloud actor properties.

Next Tutorial

UE4: Analysis of Volumetric Clouds and How to Use Them

UE4 Fundamentals Vol.1 Tutorial Course

These Quick Tips are just a small part of a very complex Unreal Engine. Get started with UE4 as an absolute beginner by downloading "UE4 Fundamentals Vol.1 - The Essential Beginner's Guide" tutorial course.

언리얼 Sky Atmosphere - eonlieol Sky Atmosphere