I’m currently working on putting NASA’s international space station into UE4 and having it appear to be in-orbit around Earth, animating solar panels to always be facing the sun, etc.
Getting the iss model was no problem, but I’m currently sifting the internets for ideas on the best way to make the Earth appear larger than life and not have any parallax. I only really need it to animate thru day/night cycles, but I really want to make it look good since there isn’t much else in the level.
I’m not sure the best way to make this. I was able to make this UDK Earth shader but the ISS orbit is relatively very tight so the textures look really bad that close up.
Procedural, streamed, animated skybox, any resources/ideas that anyone can point me to would be appreciated. I’m guessing procedural has the highest potential but I have no clue as to how to start learning how to make that happen.
You should experiment with the “Height Lerp” material node. It is designed to take low resolution or low frequency data (like a blurry landmass map for example), then modulate that data with high frequency data, such as a tiling texture with some noise to break up a blend.
So basically, you would make your texture alpha for the shape of your continents be a little bit blurry on purpose. That’s because Heightlerp can only modulate where gradients occur, anywhere that is full 0 or 1 will remain the same. Then you would put this texture as the Transition Phase of the HeightLerp node. Then you would specify a tiling heightmap style texture as the heightmap input. Then you use the alpha output to Lerp between various diffuse and normalmap textures.
That should give your continental edges a meandering noise that is crisp. Use that Lerp to go between Land and Ocean.
Then you could tile various terrain style normal maps within the various sections. You could use one channel of your continent map as the height for ALL continents (ie, where is water), then the other channels could represent things like how much greenery the terrain has, maybe another channel for city lights etc.
Should be plenty of possibilities for making a high resolution planet using relatively little data.