Description

With this post process Material, you can add the atmosphere to an existing planet, which will look quite realistic, whether viewing from the planet surface or outer space. By adjusting the Scale parameter, the atmosphere can be added to planets of different sizes.

The Material best interacts with rough surfaces adding sky light and light attenuation (reddish mountain peaks at sunsets) to them. Regular shapes with high gloss polished surfaces may look unnatural in the day time because they will receive reflections of the sky only via the Screen Space Reflections (although it can render a nice looking ocean surface). Currently the atmosphere receives no shadows from any objects except its own planet.

For correct rendering of the brightness of the atmosphere, Pre-Exposure should be disabled in the project settings.

Planetary Atmosphere Material utilizes certain averaging and simplification techniques to compute Rayleigh and Mie scattering, which require no precomputation but can give a realistic look of an atmosphere with reasonable performance impact. Please try the demo first to make sure this Material meets your performance requirements.

Technical Details

Features and limitations of the PlanetaryAtmosphere Materials:

Texture Resolutions:

The main Materials: PlanetaryAtmosphere, CelestialSphere (Material instances are used)

The main Blueprints: PlanetaryAtmosphere, CelestialSphere, PlanetarySpectator

Supported Target Build Platforms: Windows 64-bit

Credits:

Supported Engine Versions

4.22 – 4.27