3D Class Week 15 Creating An Environment Part 03 Skydomes

Continuing with working on our environment, this week we had to make custom sky spheres, dynamic materials that included moving clouds and a dynamic sun, and turn it into a blueprint for easy use.

I wanted to make a sunset desert scene with a sort of vector-looking sun and stars just starting to become visible.

I started in Maya by creating my sphere mesh, a ring for my clouds, and then half a sphere for the stars I wanted to add

In photoshop, I created several textures: four different types of clouds, a sun, a starry sky, a cloud render texture to be used for uv distortion, and a sky sphere background that I ultimately scrapped.

In unreal, I put together the meshes and textures to create materials and the sky sphere

Sky sphere material with custom sun and changeable gradient

Cloud ring material for moving clouds with uv distortion, changeable colors

Material for low opacity, moving stars

Here is the material instance for my sky sphere and the material instance for one of my four cloud rings

Then I turned my sky sphere into a blueprint

On top of the sky sphere, I began changing the colors of preexisting elements of my environment for better color harmonies. I went into photoshop and played with the levels to make two of my terrain textures a better fit.

I also played with the colors of my rocks

And here are the final results of everything combined

Before and after comparison shot

Here is a small video to show the sky sphere in action