Planet Earth in UNREAL ENGINE 5

Experiments in planet rendering: the Earth as seen from space, done in realtime using Unreal Engine 5.0.

Trying my hand at planet-scale rendering again in UE5 - and what a difference having subsurface shading makes. I've previously tried similar scenes in Unreal Engine 5 Early Access and UE4, with ... mixed... results. I feel like this is a lot closer to what I had in mind - although still some ways to go.

This version is using a combination of masked cloud spheres and displaced high poly spheres in Blender to sort of get that 3d, shadow casting cloud effect. A bit clunky, but I've also been playing around with planet scale volumetric clouds, although that still needs a fair bit of work to make it less cartoon-y when used from outside of the atmosphere. Maybe the next one, I'll be able to dial it in.