Method for rendering lots of stars/points that are infinitely far away.

Here is the basic concept. The PanOffset_Speed parameter will change as well as the tiling depending on how big your sphere mesh is. You can lock it so it acts like a screen position node, however this way when you rotate, it stays static. The only time the stars would move with you is when your position changes.
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Nice one! What’s ideal about this solution is I don’t have to mess with any networking stuff, it’s all done in the shader which is exactly what I wanted :slight_smile:

I’m still confused as to what actual values the Vector nodes give out at times. Absolute World Position is just that right? The position of the pixel in world space? Screen Position still confused me somewhat, that’s a (assuming normalized) float2 from 0-1 in X and Y, corresponding to the pixels location on the screen right?

This is by no means the best (However it will get you a better result than the first image posted).
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Ideally, you would lerp between the X/Y artifacting poles using a vector direction. This way, as you rotate towards a pole, it lerps to the fixed version (While the pole out of your screen breaks). However, what you don’t see on screen can’t hurt you right :stuck_out_tongue:

As a side note: You could also just make a sphere mesh in a 3d software package that is about 10 miles in size, import it into the engine, then set it’s scale to something like 10,000. Which effectively is making it (10miles*10,000). Making a sky large like this would give you room to fly all over the place but never feel like the sphere moved.

Just another thought :wink:

I hope you don’t mind me adding to this thread. I’m trying to do the same thing with a textured star sphere (actually a cube) that I usually use only in 3dsmax. It’s a reproduction of the actual night sky from a star database. In max, I link the stars to the camera and set it to inherit position only. As long as the star mesh doesn’t intersect with other objects in the scene as the camera moves around, I’m fine. The stars maintain their apparent size.

How can I do the same thing in Unreal? I’ve imported the stars but I can’t find a simple way to link them to the camera or feed the camera position to the star mesh.

I’ve just started with Unreal and I’d really appreciate some help.
Thanks.

I’m trying to do something similar with a hdri background how can I adapt this to work?