Dynamic Skies

The purpose of the Dynamic Skies asset is to allow a fully dynamic, simple to use and realistic experience of multiple skies during continuous day and night cycles, while keeping a high performance with an optimized system.

This asset includes 5 different skies to choose from. The Earth’s Sky, the Earth’s Orbit, the Alien Sky, the Alien Orbit and the Moon’s Sky. This way you can create 5 entirely different environments and customize them to your needs.

All the skies include celestial bodies such as planets and moons that act accordingly to the sun’s position and twinkling stars that change intensity depending on the time of day. Some skies also include a clouds system with all the necessary atmospheric components.

To save performance, the atmospheric color changes make use of color curves instead of real time calculations and the sky blueprints do not use volumetric clouds. Instead, they use animated materials on a clouds dome to imitate a seamless sequence of two layers of Cirrus clouds. This allows for a convincing visual effect, light and opacity wise, while allowing higher frame rates and an overall better experience.