OMG… It… just… works!
That is just plain epic. And the material seems to be quite manageable compared to many that I have seen. I still don’t know what 99% of the nodes are really doing, but whatever!
And yeah, I saw the occlusion culling when I scrolled north and the oceans disappeared followed shortly by everything else. I don’t really know anything about that, but it seems like a problem that could be dealt with.
So a few questions…
- How do I alter the world position in the material? Also, can I feed the position to the material from blueprint(different map sizes would require different parameters)?
- What exactly is the mask portion doing? It was greyed out in the materials that I pasted it into so I am not sure if it is working or not.
- What exactly is the problem with wrapping it around? You mean around to form a sphere instead of a hemisphere? That might not even be necessary if I can just hide the flat tiles in the background and get everything to dynamically update as I scroll around. Of course, it would be all around better if I could actually wrap it into a sphere though(background, camera stuff, etc)
- I didn’t see it update as I moved around, but I don’t currently have a way to drag the things around. That sounds like you would have to move all the tiles past the world position… is it possible to just move the material’s base world position past the tiles?
Thanks again ! I didn’t think this would even be possible in blueprint/editor and I had just about written off ever making the map into a sphere, but now I see it is not only possible, but something I could probably pull off(especially with help here and there from pros like you 
).