FREE Asset Constant Updates 5.3 Ultra Dynamic Sky v8.0A Hotfix

12-17-2021
Versions Affected: 4.26 and 4.27

• Added a new Lens Flare effect to UDS. In the Lens Flare category you can enable an optical lens flare for the sun. Presets for multiple lens types included.
• Fixed a bug where weather material effects would not be updated correctly when affected in certain ways.
• Added a new function to UDS called "Transition Sky Light Intensity". It can be used to fade the sky light intensity to a new level over a specific amount of time.
• Adjusted default sample balance for volumetric clouds to reduce noise at the top of the sky.
• Added an option to the Rain Drip Spline to have it ignore the weather state.
• Adjusted range of weather intensity cutoff with cloud coverage, so rain/snow under somewhat lower cloud coverage is possible by default.
• Adjusted behavior of weather when wind intensity is at 0, to make the snow movement calmer and the sound effects a little quieter.
• Made it so "Enable Rain and Snow Particles" can be set at runtime to enable/disable particles manually.
• Added an option to have rain/snow particles be cut off as the camera goes above the volumetric clouds.
• Fixed a bug with random weather variation starting up with the wrong rain/snow value.
• Fixed a bug where cloud shadows could flicker in some scenarios.

11-23-2021
Versions Affected: 4.26 and 4.27

• Added a Screen Droplets post processing effect, which applies rain droplets to the camera when it's exposed to rain. Disabled by default, can be enabled from a new Screen Droplets category on UDW.
• Added a setting to UDW for "Water Level" which applies a simple kill height for the rain/snow particles. Also occludes weather sound and disables screen droplets below the level.
• Added controls for Sunset/Sunrise Color to the Sky Atmosphere category, to more easily adjust the colors of the sky at sunrise/sunset, with the fog colors affected as well.
• Added a "Directional Balance" setting to UDS, to scale the contribution of directional light on the scene without affecting the brightness of the sky. Default intensity has been increased some as well. If you want to return to the old default look I'd recommend reducing Directional Balance to 0.7.
• Added an option to scale the amount of inside cloud fog for volumetric clouds.
• Changed logic for Sunrise and Sunset event dispatchers, so by default they will always happen at actual sunrise/sunset regardless of dawn/dusk time or simulation settings. The Event Time variables have been replaced with Event Offset variables, which offset the time the event is fired from the actual sunrise/sunset time.
• Changed logic for sun disk radius. The default size is the same as the old, but customized values may need to be readjusted.
• Fixed missing glow in static clouds moon lighting
• Improved blending of static clouds
• Adjusted behavior of 2D Dynamic Cloud colors to bring brightness of the overcast sky in line with the other sky modes.
• Made the default Sun Disk Intensity brighter.
• Replaced the setting for Captured Sky Light Lower Hemisphere Brightness with a color tint, for added control of the lower hemisphere color.
• Slightly decreased the saturation of the daylight fog color.
• Increased default Directional Lights Absent Brightness
• Improved accuracy of cloud shadows falloff within cloud layer
• Added a setting to scale the overall fog density resulting from all the other fog density settings.
• Changed Fog Start Distance When Clear back to 10,000
• Fixed border artifact on lightning flashes.
• Reduced default max exposure to 1.0.
• Fixed a bug with weather override volumes and nativization.
• General blueprint optimization on UDS and UDW. Added an option to UDS, enabled by default, to skip updating many active parameters unless cloud coverage is changing. Added a similar option to UDW to skip updating many parameters unless current weather state is changing.

10-19-2021
Versions Affected: 4.26 and 4.27

• Fixed weather sounds broken by 4.27.1.
  Added a "Z Disturbance" setting to the volumetric clouds, which distorts clouds on the Z axis. Not enabled on Low material quality.
• Added a "Temperature Offset" setting to Weather Override Volumes, to allow the "Get Current Temperature" output to be made arbitrarily colder/warmer inside of weather volumes.
• Added a setting to control how soft/sharp the edge of the sun disk is.
• Fixed a visual bug with the raindrops effect in the DLWE function.
• General performance improvements to weather effects.
• Improvements to compatibility with blueprint nativization.

10-5-2021
Versions Affected: 4.26 and 4.27

• Fixed broken snow trail particle material
• Added an input to the new "Test Actor For Weather Exposure" function, to allow testing only the bounds of collision components.

Versions Affected: 4.26 and 4.27

• Improved how fog and cloud wisps are lit by changing moon phases.
• Adjusted DLWE base wetness behavior to make more of the surface wet before puddle coverage starts.
• Improvements to particle materials for forward shading.
• Added event dispatchers to UDW for "Started Raining", "Finished Raining, "Started Snowing", "Finished Snowing", "Getting Cloudy", and "Clouds Clearing", to make it simple to trigger blueprints using these basic weather events.
• Added an option to UDS to allow using a custom sky sphere material.
• Turned off lightning flashes contribution to volumetric scattering, to fix compatibility with "Dim Directional Lights" option on UDS.
• Added inputs to the DLWE function to customize the snow color and roughness.
• Added a new utility function to UDW called "Test Actor for Weather Exposure". The function takes in an actor reference and, based on the actor's bounds, uses line traces to approximate how directly exposed the actor is to the current rain, snow, and wind.
• Added refraction output to High and Epic material quality rain particles.
• Added logic for sound occlusion to specifically ignore the player pawn, when possible.
• Adjusted light pollution behavior to be unaffected by moon positioning.
• Added a setting to UDW to allow material snow coverage to light up the height fog color proportional to the amount of direct light present, to simulate the indirect light bouncing off of the snowy ground.
• Improved how the rain and snow particles avoid going through thin collision surfaces.
• Added an experimental version of the DLWE function which uses a custom parallax occlusion setup for the snow trails, rather than relying on tessellation. The rest of the behavior is the same, so it can be used to replace the existing function without any modification. As it's experimental, it's not exposed to the function library, to avoid confusion with the standard function. You'll have to add it manually from the Materials/Weather folder if you want to try it.
• The readme has been revised and reworked, with a new search function to make finding specific entries easier. There's also a new Common Issues section for troubleshooting.

PATCH NOTES :

9-3-2021 (Hotfix)

• Removed an unintended plugin dependency from the new configuration manager.

9-2-2021
Versions Affected: 4.26 and 4.27

• Added a new editor utility, the Configuration Manager, which can be used to save and apply full configurations of all settings for either UDS or UDW. The manager can be found in the Blueprints folder.
• Added two functions to UDS, to simplify saving and loading the state of the sky and weather, when creating save files or moving between levels. The functions are "Create UDS and UDW State for Saving" and "Apply Saved UDS and UDW State".
• Added a post process based effect to add fog inside clouds when not using volumetric fog. Enabled by the existing "Enable Fog Inside Clouds" option.
• Changed default settings for Volumetric clouds to reduce rendering artifacts inside cloud layer and on distant clouds.
• Added settings for Light Pollution to UDS, to simulate city lights contributing to sky glow and volumetric cloud lighting. Exists in a new category called Sky Glow.
• Night Sky Glow lights up volumetric clouds and fog, and its settings have been moved to the Sky Glow category.
• The aurora effects will now light up the volumetric clouds a little bit.
• Added a Sky Light Temperature setting, to more easily adjust the color temperature of the sky light, independent of the sky light mode.
• Added an option to UDS and UDW, enabled by default, which spreads out some of their tick behaviors over 3 frames, as a game thread optimization.
• Adjusted behavior of sound and particles on UDW to fix some issues with sequencer.
• Modified behavior of rain splash particles to create scattered duplicates of each particle, to artificially increase the density of the splashes during heavy rain. Can be controlled with two new settings in the Rain and Snow Particles category.
• Made a change to Wet Weather Effects and DLWE functions to reduce texture seam artifacts in puddles.
• By default, sound occlusion on UDW now uses the camera location. There's an option in the Sound Occlusion category to have it use the Control Point Location like before.
• Made some changes to rain/snow particle behavior to better account for a fast moving camera.

Update to version 5 JULY 2021

PATCH NOTES :

Versions Affected: 4.26

• Fixed a bug with setting material parameters which could cause broken normals on materials using Wet Weather Effects.
• Adjusted how DLWE functions, so that it can work better with world composition/level streaming and so that the effects can be used on static meshes as well. UDW no longer requires a direct reference to the landscape actor(s) for DLWE.
• Changed implementation of rain/snow particle color settings, so that color is also multiplied over the refraction effect.
• Adjusted raindrop effect on DLWE so that it's tiled independently from the puddle interactions. The default render target area for the puddles is now much larger.
• Optimized limits of DLWE render targets, so that Interaction components can use more of the full render target space.
• Fixed DLWE render targets trying to recenter when neither dynamic snow or puddles are present.

Update to version 06-24-2021