Day and Night System to the project only using Unity’s native Lighting system. Editor window to provide an easy implementation in your project
Celestial Time of Day
Celestial Time of Day is a lightweight, procedural day-night system for Unity. It helps you build dynamic skies, lighting, fog, clouds, sun, moon, stars, and time-of-day transitions with a simple setup workflow and a customizable Shader Graph skybox.
This tool is being shared openly as part of the larger Celestial Cycles vision: a modular world automation framework for Unity. Thank you to all previous buyers; your support and feedback helped shape the system into a stronger foundation for dynamic environments.
Product Overview
Celestial Time of Day brings life and atmosphere into Unity scenes by smoothly transitioning through morning, noon, evening, night, sunrise, and sunset.
The system directly controls:
- Directional Light
- Skybox material
- Environment lighting
- Reflection intensity
- Fog settings
- Sun, moon, star, and cloud shader values
It is designed to be easy to integrate into existing projects while staying lightweight and compatible with other Unity tools.
Key Features
Fast Setup
Use the included setup tools to quickly assign or create the required scene references, including the Time Profile, Directional Light, and procedural skybox material. You can get a working time-of-day setup running quickly, then fine-tune the look from the inspector.
Procedural Shader Graph Skybox
The included procedural skybox supports:
- Dynamic sun rendering
- Dynamic moon rendering
- Moon phase control
- Stars
- Clouds
- Atmospheric sky color
- Horizon blending
- Ground color blending
- Fog-friendly sky transitions
The skybox is editable through Shader Graph, giving artists and developers room to customize the visual style.
Dynamic Day-Night Transitions
Create smooth transitions from dawn to day, day to dusk, and night back to morning. The Time Manager blends profile settings automatically based on the current time of day.
Morning, Noon, Evening, and Night Profiles
Create and edit separate profiles for different parts of the day. Each profile can control:
- Sky tint, exposure, and contrast
- Sky color and blend
- Horizon and ground color
- Sun disk color and size
- Directional Light color
- Ambient intensity
- Reflection intensity
- Fog color, density, start, and end distance
Artist-Friendly Time Manager
The Time Manager inspector is organized into clear workflow sections, making it easier to understand and tune without constantly checking documentation.
Sections include:
- Scene Setup
- Time Mode
- Realtime Location
- Sun and Moon
- Lighting and Fog
- Clouds
- Wind
- Performance
- Time Profile Details
The inspector includes tooltips, status readouts, setup warnings, and helpful guidance for common settings.
Sun, Moon, Stars, and Moon Phase
The skybox includes sun, moon, and star rendering. The Time Manager controls sun and moon movement, moon brightness, and moon phase using the existing skybox shader properties.
The system supports both automatic and manual moon phase control.
Realtime Location Option
For projects that want more location-based behavior, the Time Manager can calculate sun direction, sunrise, sunset, and moon phase from a game date and location.
You can use city presets or enter manual values for:
- Latitude
- Longitude
- Elevation
- UTC offset
- Year, month, and day
Cloud Controls
Clouds are controlled through simple artist-facing values such as:
- Color
- Coverage
- Thickness
- Brightness
- Softness
- Movement Speed
- Storm Darkness
The system safely maps these values to the procedural skybox shader to help avoid extreme settings that can break the sky appearance.
Skybox Fog Blending
The skybox includes fog-friendly controls designed to reduce harsh seams between scene fog and the sky. This helps terrain, oceans, distant objects, and the horizon blend more naturally into the atmosphere.
Lighting and Environment Control
Control scene lighting, skybox intensity, ambient lighting, reflection intensity, and fog through the Time Manager and time profiles. Changes are applied in real time as the day progresses.
Celestial Night Object
Use CelestialNightObject to control lights, particles, and emissive materials based on day and night. This is useful for lamps, fire, windows, signs, and other nighttime effects.
Celestial Cycle Trigger
Use trigger volumes to smoothly transition the time of day in different parts of your scene.
Dynamic Nature Integration
Celestial Time of Day is designed to work with Dynamic Nature. When weather controls clouds, the Time Manager can hand cloud ownership to the Weather Manager so both systems work together cleanly.
Important Upgrade Notes
- The system uses a procedural Shader Graph skybox.
- Sky and fog behavior may look different from older cubemap-based setups.
- Existing scenes should be checked after upgrading, especially skybox assignment, Directional Light assignment, and Time Profile references.
- Always back up your project before upgrading major versions.
Support
Original_Link: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/celestial-cycles-dynamic-day-night-system-279274
