Make a PLANET in Unreal Engine

hey everyone in this video we are going to be creating a nice looking planet and using some of the features built into unreal engine 4.26 initially i was inspired by a video published by epic on youtube called exploring the depths of the new sky and atmosphere system what was really interesting to me was how the presenter was able to seamlessly zoom from ant level all the way out to planet level i did some more research and found a behind the scenes video posted by epic where they go into detail on how they actually did this however i was disappointed when i found out that it was all done using visual trickery and wasn't something playable since i was on the topic youtube started recommending other videos to me regarding unreal engine and large planets i found another great tutorial that shows the basics of just creating a large planet and putting it together with an atmosphere however in this video they are just using a regular sphere with some textures and i wanted something a little more immersive and playable my vision was to have a planet where you can seamlessly zoom from planet to ant level but still be able to experience the gameplay on the planet itself i started to think of some potential solutions and i remembered that an old plugin i bought a couple years ago called voxel plugin actually had some really good spherical planet support so i started researching the topic on the voxel plugin discord server and found quite a bit of information on how to create a planet i also started looking into the voxel plugin documentation and found some really good information there as well so with all that research done i had a pretty good idea of how to start implementing a planet system and that's what we're gonna start covering this video now so the first thing we're going to do is just create a new blank unreal engine c plus project then we just want to create a map and get some light in the basic planet structure into it from the voxel plugin we're going to use the sun sky plug-in that comes built into unreal engine so that all our atmosphere and lighting are in one container the sun sky plug-in's directional light comes in at 75 000 lux for arc fizz so we need to just lower that down to a more reasonable value in order to get the planet into the level we need to actually install the voxel plug-in so let's go ahead and take care of that now as well the voxel plug-in starts off as a plane so let's go ahead and set it to use the default planet voxel graph generator to turn it into a sphere the planet is pretty big so we need to zoom out really far in order to see it the best way to do that is to change the camera speed to the maximum and just zoom out as quickly as possible we now want to get this planet to a size that will work for a game surprisingly the initial planet is kind of small so we actually need to make it bigger in order to work with the sky atmosphere and volumetric cloud system we also have to adjust the sky atmosphere's ground radius to match up with the planet size then we also need to shift the planet itself down to line up with the center of the sky atmosphere once all that is done you'll have a good initial setup i find that it's good to oversize the planet a little bit to hide any of the black that's remaining from the sky atmosphere i just add an extra one or two thousand meters or so to it i also check and modify the voxel world size using a visual debugger to make sure that the voxel generation is optimized and efficient once we change the material of the planet to use a height-based configuration it starts to look a little bit better as we start to see some color i also want the mountains to stick up quite a bit just so they look more magnificent and for the art style i'm going for so i increase the noise strength of the voxel graph algorithm i find that the planets look a little blurry from a distance so i reduce the max level of detail giving us more detail and shadows a big problem is that the planet has got a quarter million voxel generation tasks to complete so there will be some more optimizations that need to be done here i put in an unbound processing volume so we can adjust the exposure and reduce some of the brightness i start to adjust the level of detail more to get the planet to generate the voxels faster from any distance and sacrifice detail for speed i start to make more optimizations like increasing the number of threads that are assigned to processing the voxels this almost doubles or triples the voxel generation speed another trick that i use is to increase the voxel size by four times and then divide the radius of the planet by four times so that the planet stays the same size but with lower detail voxels all the optimizations together greatly increase the speed of voxel generation and make the game playable now the scale of the planet is pretty amazing actually when you zoom in you can tell how massive the planet's terrain is i'm pretty impressed with it the atmosphere is also amazing and reacts really well to lighting changes at this point we're ready to start putting in the volumetric clouds when you put them in you won't actually see anything at first until you apply the default material to it however the default material by itself doesn't work very well for this planet so i'm going to go ahead and create my own custom material using a really great tutorial i found online the key to creating a volumetric cloud material is to make it an additive volume type material this gives us the extinction material input node that handles all visual aspects of the volumetric clouds there's quite a bit of work that needs to be done in the material but at the end you end up with something highly adjustable and that looks really good i spent a lot of time tweaking the volumetric cloud material parameters to try and find settings that work with this planet one problem i ran into but wasn't able to solve was for some reason when i zoom out of the planet far enough the clouds in front of me disappear i took some time to try to fix this but i couldn't figure out how to get it working so i just left it for now as you can see the planet is very playable there's a lot of different types of games that could be made with this you can do a spacecraft simulator a flight simulator an earth simulator or pretty much anything else you want with just this base setup here overall this is pretty easy to set up if you think about it you can get this entire thing ready to go within an hour which is pretty much incredible it seems that the hardest thing to do is to get everything performant at runtime however the new clouds are highly performant by default which is one reason they're so cool traditionally volumetric clouds took a big hit on the cpu but these new unreal engine volumetric clouds are perfectly performant there's still quite a bit of work that needs to be done like making the camera automatically change speed depending on how close or far you are from the center of the planet adjusting how the camera rotates to auto align with the horizon as you get close to the planet adding grass trees and of course an ocean those things are all pretty straightforward and can be done with little effort overall i think this is a really exciting time and we're gonna start seeing a lot more planetary scale games coming out with all these new technologies that are here i hope you enjoyed this video and that it helps you to build your own planetary environments in unreal engine

Channel: Kevin Bikhazi

Views: 41,621

Keywords: game development, coding, programming

Id: _IqkePmKdAg

Length: 7min 15sec (435 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 08 2020

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