Hello there !

After many weeks of work, the sky/scene visuals system in SceneForge has been overhauled to be much more performant, realistic, and customizable.

As always, you can check out the video below:

What's new?

For starters, the entire sky system has been replaced with one that was rebuilt from scratch. In addition to looking much better, it runs faster and is more customizable. The one caveat is that the weather presets have been removed. But, if you do need rain or snow effects, you can always just create them yourself using the VFX Graph.

Now, on to specifics:

• You can now change the rotation of the sky
• Fog has been simplified to just horizon fog until the new volumetric solution is completed
• Clouds now react to the sun/moon's rotation in the sky
• Night skies are more realistic and less stylized (darker and starrier!)
• You can now use an HDRI sky image instead (see below)

HDRI Support!

This is super cool because, in addition to the procedural/real-time generated sky, you can import HDR files for your own custom skyboxes. For a great (albeit advanced) overview of what HDRI files are, check out this article.

This allows you to have super specific locations for your scenes, which will also have ambient lighting based on the imported file.

This system works really well but is highly dependent on the quality and scale of the HDRI you import. For example, interiors require some adjustment to the height and ground in order to look correct. See the video above for more information.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to reply right to this message.

Thanks for reading!

• Judah Mantell, Founder @ SceneForge.app