My team and I at the Texas A&M University ASTRO Lab work on Space Teams PRO, a simulation platform for space vehicles and VR training. We are trying to improve the fidelity of the Earth rendering we can do, and a big obstacle to that is the spherical assumption of SkyAtmosphere. Earth has a 21 km difference in its equatorial and polar radii (center of planet to sea level), and the real atmospheric properties vary based on altitude from sea level, not radius from the center of the planet.
While it is possible to modify the atmosphere properties of the spherical SkyAtmosphere to match the local sea level, the illusion breaks when viewing the Earth from orbit. The poles are way too low in the atmosphere compared to the equator, as shown in the screenshots.
We took a look at the component, proxy, and shader, and we have some ideas for how the code could be modified to support an ellipsoidal atmosphere with a Equatorial and Polar bottom radius. Is this something already in development? Is there any good way to make this functionality without modifying engine files? If we start modifying the core shaders, what should we look out for in the render functionality we might break?
