Blue Marble | Earth in Unreal Engine 5

For something a little closer to home … Earth! Rendered in realtime using Unreal Engine 5. Textures courtesy of NASA.

Earth is always super tricky to do well enough – mostly a combination of complexity and the fact that it’s the planet that we’re all the most familiar with. The planet shader and the atmosphere were quite straightforward, but with UE5, the hurdle is always the clouds…

Tessellation was not present in the Unreal 5 early access – for some reason – so getting 3D volumetric clouds was tricky without having to import in massive pre-displaced meshes that have a tendency to make Unreal crash. So. For the moment – texture maps it is. Hopefully when the full release of UE5 finally drops, there’s a more elegant solution to this – or a way to leverage the volumetric clouds feature on a planet wide scale…