How to add night sky using Unity 5 procedural skybox? - unity3d

I'm using Unity 5 and it's new procedural skybox. It looks amazing!
In my game, I have a day/night cycle. I can't find a way to use a night skybox which will slowly appear (blend) to replace the procedural skybox when the night comes.
I know a shader exists to blend between two skyboxes, but it won't work with the new procedural skybox.
I want to be able to keep the procedural skybox, so I can keep my amaizing sunrise/sunset, but be able to add stars at night.

Create a new directional light, which the Unity will interpret as the sun. Then, just rotate it!

You could either use particles or use a sphere around the entire scene with stars textured all over it; use a transparent or particle shader on that material. :)

You could add a very big sphere around the player which isn't rendered but emitts small particels. You could turn it off at day time and fade it in by night.

Related

Unity URP Material scripting

I just started using URP in Unity for a game in progress. I'm doing a sort of sprites-in-3d thing, so I'm rendering some sprite sheets on quads. To do this, I create a Material with the sprite sheet and use tiling/offset to render the proper frame of animation by making a call like:
CombatMaterial?.SetTextureOffset("_BaseMap", new Vector2( (AnimationDefinitions[animationDefinition] % 16) * .0625f, CombatMaterial.mainTextureOffset.y));
I'm currently trying to add some feedback into my game for when characters use abilities or get hit by flickering the material. Because the base color starts at white and goes to black, that won't really work; the only other thing I seem to have available to me is emission, which looks great. Using a 0xAAAish color achieves the effect I'm looking for. I've been using the Feel Unity asset to do this, but I've also attempted using something like this:
CombatMaterial?.SetColor("_EmissionColor", Color.white);
The problem is, once I've set the _EmissionColor, the main texture offset no longer updates in game, thereby ruining all animations. If I change the texture offset manually through the inspector at runtime, animations don't work AND the _EmissionColor flickering stop working. If I mess around with the color of the _BaseMap in the inspector, _EmissionColor flickering starts working again.
Before I start diving into some unsightly color adjustments in an attempt to make this work again, I would love to know if I'm doing something that is simply unsupported by URP/Materials/whatever, or if there is some alternative to what I'm doing that's a little more straightforward.
Thank you!
After trying a bunch of random stuff, I don't have a "real" solution, but the game IS working how I want it to.
What worked for me was setting the _EmissionColor on the Material to (1,1,1). For some reason, when the _EmissionColor is set to (0,0,0) it's a black (ha) hole and won't accept future changes to the _EmissionColor. I assume this is some shader nonsense (with the base Lit Shader that URP uses) that I am clearly unfamiliar with.
Hopefully this helps anyone doing something as pointlessly against the grain as I am!

How do I add particles to my Skybox in Unity?

Hey stackoverflow community! Currently, my game has a skybox that is plain and gray. What I would like to do is add small moving particles in the skybox to make the game atmosphere better. Is there a simple way to implement particles to your skybox or do you have to do it by hand? If I have to do it by hand, how do I make a particle object?
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance,
E.W
There's no easy way to add particles to skybox (you'd have to write a shader for that), its much easier to just create a particle system or (a few) on the outskirts of your scene

Making rain particle as shadows

I've created following scene:
What you see is the light shining through a window to the back wall of the room. Outside is a tree blowing in the wind. What I'm trying to simulate it a stormy weather, so I need to add rain to the scenery as well. However, I just need it as a shadow through the window. How is this done, can it simply be done through Unity's Particle System, or do I need shader etc.?
Use particle system, it has Renderer Module where you can play around with material/texture/shader to get the desired result.
I would go for a grey/black colour to make it look like a shadow

How to write a custom shader in Unity 3D that lights up a specific pixel or group of pixel?

I'm making a FPS game in Unity, and I want the environment to light up as the player is shooting on his environment.
So say I have a tree. First it would be entirely black or greyish, but if I shoot somewhere, I would see some green.
To accomplish this feature, I'm using a raycast to have the impact point and so I can access any renderer of the point that the player is shooting on.
I guess the next step would be to write a custom shader to light the exact pixel that is shot.
Do you have any idea how I could write this shader or another way of doing this effect?
Regards
If you are using deferred rendering: Deferred decals.
If you are using forward rendering: Projectors.
If you need some more advanced "paint-like" functionality, use render textures coupled with RaycastHit.textureCoord to get the exact UV coordinate at your ray intersection point. You can draw stuff to render textures using Graphics.Blit. Check out this github project for some inspiration on how to do this.

Unity3d; Skybox on mesh like in Source engine.

In older games Ive made levels in, like unreal or half-life the skybox is a parallaxed texture that you assign to world geometry, for instance, the ceiling of your room, to give the illusion of the room being open to the sky.
There are some neat tricks or weird things you can achieve with this 'sky portal' method. For example you could have 'sky' in an underground room. or walk through a hole in the sky.
I'm wondering is it possible to make a mesh in unity3d render as part of the skybox like in these older engines.
You can do this yes. Usually you assign a "SkyBox" to your camera and change the "Clear Flags" for her "SkyBox". However, there are other ways to do.
Learn more here: http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Components/class-Skybox.html
Hope this help !