Advice on how to achieve this "world in a cube" look

Hi all! I’m trying to achieve a look similar to what’s pictured


for a cinematic I’m making (fairly new to Unreal, andI learn best with a project).
A mostly transparent cube that functions as a window to another scene / dimension / level. Eventually, there would be multiple such cubes on screen simultaneously. Ideally, the camera would start on an extreme close up of the astronaut’s helmet (inside the space scene), then dolly back outside the glass, revealing all the other cubes.
I’ve got everything molded out (c4d) and into Unreal 5.4, with my cubes on one level and my space scene on another. I’m having a hell of a time figuring out how to connect them though.
I’ve tried using a SceneCaptureCube to put the space scene on the inside of the cube, but it only remains static and doesn’t move in reaction to the camera view when it pulls back (it also looks really flat).
I’ve looked into level streaming, but can’t seem to figure out how to get it to only be inside the cube.
Feels like I’m going a bit in circles. If some kind soul could point me in the proper direction for how to achieve this look, I’d really appreciate it.

1 Like

You can make an inner cube with normals pointing inwards, and put a simple texture cube shader on it like this

( The power node is only because you couldn’t see the stars well ). And put another everyday cube around that with the glass/plastic material

cube

You would need to make the outer cube material more carefully than that. The edges need that ‘intersecting plastic’ look, which is a bit like edge wear. But this is the basic concept.

You can make the edge wear procedurally, so I then copied this edge detection shader ( that only works for cubes )

to make the edge pop :slight_smile:

cube4