How would you go about creating a ‘Daytime Moon’ effect?
In real life, celestial bodies are partly lit by the sun and the shadowed area is essentially invisible: 
But in Unreal all of my planet’s are looking a little too close for comfort:
Fog doesn’t seem to be the solution… any other idea’s?
I’d simply do it as a texture. But you could do a 3d model with a custom material.
I wouldn’t light them with lights the rest of the scene is using.
Probably the best way would be defining sky color globally via BP’s, then use those color in moon shader.
As example, you can make BP where you will set SkyColor and SunDirection. In mood shader, do simple NdotL and use result as alpha for lerping between moon texture and solid sky color.
Not sure if that solution are easiest/better but it can work.
Make a sphere, unwrap it to use the moon image
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/L…/lro-topo.html
You can find the properly squared/rectangular one too - it’s on the nasa site along with the stars
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3895
There. found it on USGS.
https://astrogeology.usgs.gov/search…M_118m_Mar2014
Anyway, wrap up the moon with that texture in 1080 since you don’t need much detail when it’s way up and way from the player.
Move the moon out to the edge of the sky-sphere - or even outside but then you have to make the sky map material transparent to see it.
Make the Moon Material emissive.
The material code above sort of works, You just need to make a mask and change the material to be masked. this will make the side of the moon that’s not lit literally disappear instead of sort of fading with a halo.
That’s sort of all there is to it until you get into implementing Tides and the actual movement.
As far as movement goes, the moon takes ~50m longer then the sun to do a full loop. you can start with that 
Thanks for the tips guys! I’m still working on my version, when I’m finished I’ll share!
