Landable planet with spherical gravitation and land features(Mountains,oceans,hills,foliage)

Hello. I have been searching for a couple of years now for information to make a space game in ue4(Or at least 1 detailed planet). I would greatly appreciate it if someone could help me to create a planet that you can enter, be able to walk around it(seemingly infinite) with gravity pulling you towards the center, and to be able to have an atmosphere that looks good from the outside in space, and that looks like a sunny blue sky from the inside(and a nighttime, like on earth). I want to be able to exit the planet without a loading screen and enter it(vice versa). I also wish to be able to add foliage such as grass, flowers trees, etc. And if possible, clouds that rotate around the planet. By the way this might be asking for much, but i can only do this within blueprints. No written code. I know what i’m asking for is possible. I’ve seen multiple videos of this done in Unreal Engine 4. Some examples:

Galaxia: Galaxia in UE4 - YouTube

for example of how i want to enter/exit planet: *WIP* Ground to space Unreal Engine 4 Landscape - YouTube

For how i want gravity to work and in general what the planet looks like: Spore Planet in UE4 (Planetary Gravitation) - YouTube

I know this is asking alot and even if im not an expert at ue4, and i don’t have any people working with me, I would still like to know how this even works and how i might go about doing it. Please don’t tell me how silly this might sound for 1 person and how long it would take.

Hi, I can update this with more info, but this dissertation has been the most helpful for me.

Big things to get over are custom gravity, and dynamic tessellation for the planet as you approach. A lot of this is done with your own procedural mesh code, but definitely check out the procedural mesh component through UE4.

1 Like

Thank you this helps a lot. Is there any way to have like a sphereical trigger or something that when you cross over it will start pulling you toward the center of the planet?(I want to be able to walk around the planet and have hills that i can walk over accurately just like the “spore planet” video I posted above) (I also want to be able to size the area where gravity starts “pulling” you down.)

Welcome!

You’re going to want to make a custom movement component for your player pawn derived class. (If you do a Character derived class you have to modify the engine so this is not as recommend for ease of use). You can definitely increase gravity with triggers in certain areas. Experiment with using the surface normals to adjust which way is up for the player.

Look up custom gravity, planet gravity, etc. in the forums as well. This is the most helpful one I have found.

Good luck!

Thank you so much.