Hello!
I am in the midst of learning unreal engine and I must admit, my project is quite heavier than i thought but nonetheless i wont ive up just because of a few setbacks, this is a passion project regardless
I am facing a few challenges right now. I am currently developing and fairly realistic (semi-to scale) solar system I call Sol-B, it has 6 planets and a thousand problems right now. My biggest challenge is the lighting. Currently I made a artificial central sun in the center of my solar system which gives the entire scene lighting via a point lighting. The issue with using this point lighting is that I cannot render a proper atmosphere for these planets using a sky atmosphere. These sky atmosphere were placed inside the blueprint class of my planets and scale just right to fit very well and I admit, it looks amazing IF I use a directional light. The issue is sortve obvious now maybe?
I cannot use directional light because it would mean some planets day/night cycle is completely messed up.(Shown in bottom half of image)
I am trying to achieve the first half of the image (top half) where the light disperses all around and the sky atmosphere will be able to display correctly. (Second image)
I have thought up of 3 ideas that in theory could work but in practice, I am not skilled enough to know how to do or it simply doesn’t work…
Option 1: Use a directional light and somehow find a way to remove the restriction of having it only display in on direction and make it omnidirectional and shine all around, thus all planets atmosphere will show.
Option 2: Use a point light and somehow find a way for it to work similar to how a directional light works but only in that, its able to work with sky atmosphere.
Option 3. Use a directional light in all the blueprint classes of the planets, do some math and blueprint work to have the directional light simply face the planet depending on its of the sun. This comes with a limit, UE5 only allows 1 directional light and so to work around this, I will have to add a collision sphere large enough for it to detect when a player goes in and out of it to load and unload the directional light and sky atmosphere of another each planet. When you get to a certain distance of the planets, they load and unload based on how far you are, So for example, when i start getting within a certain distance to planet 1, planet 1’s directional light and sky atmosphere will load up while every other planet will unload. This will allow me to bypass the limit of the 1 directional light issue.
I know this is alot to take it but im smashing my head against walls here and want to insight and maybe even better more easily achievable solutions. I have tried extremely hard to do some research on this and even had different AI models walk me through, step by step for some solutions and still to no avail. What would you guys do? And if possible, how would one go about doing any of the proposed options accurately? Sources and Links to help me learn would be VERY appreciate~
