Demystifying the Skylight [Unreal Engine 4 & 5]

Just a bit of info since we have a lot of newcomers here, this approach is mainly targeted towards cinematics use (as that is what this channel is about), where you don’t have multiple environments/biomes to light at once. Obviously if you’re making a game, you will need to take a different approach here in regards to a low sky distance threshold. In my mind that was obvious but I realize now that I should have specified this more clearly in the video.

YOU are the BEST

Very useful thanks you man!

Omg... I was working on a project where we were having issues with distance falloff of objects in the rear view mirror of the car. We had to come up with an overly complex camera to material projection to get it to have enough detail, when this could have been the solution all along... wow. Pumped to try it out. Brilliant video man.

The sky light is honestly lacking a lot. At least when it comes to large open worlds with day and night cycles. It captures the sky in real time, but only at one specific place that cannot be changed, which sucks when the sky changes as you move. Sky light shadowing is done with distance fields, but only for the base color. If you want to shadow the reflections, you need hundreds, if not thousands of reflection captures, it's not even possible to add one to a blueprint and use it in a more efficient way. Lumen shows that it is defenitely possible to use distance field reflections. I cannot understand why it's not implemented with regular distance fields

Thanks!

GREAT VIDEO!
For some reason I get really dark shadows after switching back from lumen to SSGI via post process.

I seem to hit a wall in regards to Distance field AO, I looked everywhere it seems like there is no option to increase the visibility range on it , its visibility range is too short

how do i add an HDRI i downloaded from polyhaven? UE 5 isnt allowing me to use the HDR as a cubemap

"I'm an eternal student". You my friend get it. And I'm glad to find your videos as my own studies progress!

Hello, I may have missed it, but is there a way to "capture" the light color produced by the Sky Light when the directional light is rotated? I would like to pass the color to some rect lights I am using to spread some/intensify lighting in certain areas.

might i ask where you got the rock assets? would be perfect for my game

Dude, thank you so much for this and other videos.. When I did a lot of lighting, I never really used SkyLight when I worked in production in UE4 (game had only artificially lit environments bar 1 case which I did not lit myself :) ) and did not really touch UE5 since I switched jobs to a company where we use an inhouse engine.
So now that I started to do some personal work and also start wrapping my mind around UE5, this was SOOOOO helpful to make me understand wtf I was looking at and how to find a good balance in the indirect lit areas as well as how the SkyLight integrates and contributes to the overall picture!
Thank you again for this video and for the many other you posted! Awesome and to the point info! Thank you, thank you, thank you! :)

it has no effect for mobile

The sky background you have on the back, is that an hdr backdrop?

In 5.1 the rotation of direct light doesn't affect HDRI and reflection.... they changed everything and we lost this ability! But sky distance thresholds no need to control anymore it doesn't work, it's everytime OK now! But I really need that functionality of direct light link with hdri.... dammm

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👍👍👍👍

Thanks for uploading this. It's a simple, but effective tutorial.

that was PERFCET. thanks you man

Man, your tutorials are excellent. Thank you for posting them

Legendary

Thanks!

skylight not working with 4.27

man Will, you're the man, i was literally trying to figure out on my own how to add my own hdri, couldn't figure it out but now i know why hah. hope you and yours have a fantastic new years

I have an error message with my static mesh that says your scene contains a sky dome mesh with a sky material that doesn't cover this part of the screen. What does that mean fully? And how to I get rid of the message?

great channel, thanks!

amazing video!

Hey William, I do not know any words to thank you. God Bless you.

Hey! Thanks for the great tutorial. I am currently facing a problem which is, when i enable real time capture, even with mobile skylight my shadows gets darkend like if i am disabling my skylight. I couldn't find any solution. Do you or any of the viewers had anything in mind to handle it? Thanks in advance :)

Great Thanks

Awesome video, do you have any dedicated video for mobile lighting environment development?

If you connect the recapture function to a timer and trigger it every in game minutes will it cause massive performance drop?

Nice tutorial! btw, what is the name of the megascans you are using there? looks awesome

Hello sir, very enjoing your tutorials. I’ve just started with ue5, migrating my project 😊 I’m changing all lightings to lumien and all going well except when character posses vehicle. with the automatic exposure on the outside environment become vert very bright, so nothing could be visible while driving. Could you advise to where look to resolve this problem?

amazing

This was a really great video and gave me exactly what I was looking for. Couldn't understand how the skylight was affecting my scene in relation to all the other light sources. Thank you.

Excellent!! Your lighting videos have been extremely helpful!!!

Thank you so much, you help me solve my porblem. 🙏🙏

And I was always wondering why my shiny materials have a black shadow to them - it was the void below the skylight! thanks

Have anybody ever encountered with the problem that nanite meshes glowing of skylight in the dark?

Well done video sir. No paid for tutorials have I seen are quite as good as these.

Thanks

What a game changer !! Thank you so much!! Like always, your tutorials and content are amazing, you are a wizard :)

God that's so simple and effective! I needed this video ages ago, Thank you so much!!

Can’t thank u enough… have found new inspiration through ur videos

thank you, your videos are short simple and very helpful

So if the distance is set to 1 doesn’t that effectively make it a local light and no longer a sky light?

thank U bro ,that was so useful.

Hi! Did you have problems like black shadows (or all the meshes black) in the reflections on the chrome ball? I can see the sky and the horizon in the reflections of the chrome ball but the meshes near are horrible (black shadows if I use the skylight as a reflection capture, and total black meshes when I use the sphere reflection captures). I have this problem using mesh distance field, with movable skylight). Anyway, thank you for this video William, now it's more clear what all the options do in the skylight :)