Marching Sky
Volumetric skies for Blender Cycles. Raymarched clouds that reach all the way to the horizon, a single clock for the sun, moon and stars, and the effects that make a sky feel alive: god rays, aurora, nebulae, meteor showers, contrails and eclipses.
Real clouds, all the way to the horizon.
Most skies in Blender are an illusion: a painted backdrop, or volumes that only cover the space near the camera. Marching Sky raymarches real three-dimensional clouds inside the world shader, out to 220 km by default and up to 300 km, so the cumulus on the horizon is as real as the cloud overhead.
It is also built for speed. Clouds in a sky only need light from the sun, the moon and the sky itself; they do not need light bouncing off the ground or around the scene. So instead of Cycles’ general-purpose volume path tracing, Marching Sky marches each view ray through the cloud layers and gathers exactly that light, leaving out the work clouds never needed.
- 220 km
- Default cloud draw distance; Max Distance goes up to 300 km.
- 3 layers
- Low, middle and high clouds, each with its own coverage and density.
- 1 clock
- Time drives the sun, moon, stars and Milky Way together.
- 10 presets
- From Clear Blue to Northern Lights, all fully editable.
What it does
Low cumulus plus middle and high cloud layers, each with its own coverage, density and scale. Move from fair weather to a storm front, animate wind and cloud evolution, and raise Cloud Detail for crisp, billowing edges.
Linked Time positions the sun and moon and rotates the stars and Milky Way together. Keyframe Time from 18 to 30 for an evening-to-morning time lapse; latitude and season set the actual sunrise and sunset.
A drag-to-set moon phase sphere, a moon that follows the sun and the clock, and an eclipse studio for total solar and lunar eclipses, corona and blood moon included.
Twinkling stars, a remastered Milky Way, and an artistic nebula whose coverage, gas colour and rim colour you can tune to match your art.
Light shafts cast by the clouds themselves, animated aurora curtains with ribbons up to 12,000 km long, procedural meteor showers, and aircraft contrails that drift with the wind.
Clear Blue, Fair Weather, High Wisps, Golden Hour, Sunset Glow, Rainy Day, Storm Front, Moonlit Clouds, Milky Way and Northern Lights. Each preset is a starting point: every setting stays editable afterwards.
One add-on, every kind of sky
Stills rendered in Blender Cycles from the built-in presets and effects.
Cloud Detail
The same golden-hour clouds with Cloud Detail at 0 and at 1.5. Detail adds fine surface imperfections to the larger banks, on both their sunlit and shadowed sides.
Requirements
Blender 5.2 or newer with Cycles and Open Shading Language. NVIDIA GPUs render through OptiX; other machines render on the CPU. Eevee is not supported.
Marching Sky works with its own daylight sky or with an existing world: a Sky Texture, an HDRI, or a plain colour graph can be connected for the lighting.
- The sky is a distant envelope: scene geometry is composited in front of the clouds, so objects cannot sit inside a cloud
- Point and area lights do not light cloud interiors
- Rain and lightning are not included; Rainy Day and Storm Front are cloud and lighting looks
- The extension must be installed on every machine that renders the project
Releasing November 10
Marching Sky launches on November 10 on Superhive, BlendKit and Gumroad. It is released under the GPL-3.0-or-later license.
- Superhive
- BlendKit
- Gumroad