描述

AeroPlanet Volumetrics is a volumetric planetary cloud and atmosphere component with its own C++/HLSL raymarching render pipeline. It does not use Unreal's built-in Volumetric Cloud or Sky Atmosphere.

The clouds are a member of the scene rather than an effect painted over it: the march runs right after the base pass, so scene depth from your terrain is already correct there and other plugins are not double-drawn.

FEATURES

- Volumetric clouds raymarched in real time: low, middle, high and storm layers, built from a layered noise field rather than a flat texture painted across the sky.

- Physically-grounded atmosphere with per-pixel Rayleigh and Mie scattering: the horizon reddens at sunset and the zenith stays blue because the sky colour comes from the sun's angle.

- Weather that varies by place: clear patches, overcast decks and storm cells sit side by side in the same sky.

- One continuous cloud field from orbit to the ground and above the cloud tops. The same clouds, not swapped for another representation as you approach.

- Several planets, each with its own atmosphere, in one scene. Presets checked in the editor: Earth-like, Ocean, Desert, Ice, Mars, Venus, Titan and Uranus. Every coefficient stays editable after choosing a preset.

- Cloud source switch: "Current clouds" (plugin weather map and noise) or "NASA clouds" (a global cloud field built from NASA cloud imagery, included in the plugin).

- Place a star and give it orbiting bodies (planet, moon, station), nested if you like. Orbits are a function of time, not an integrator, so the same second always gives the same position.

- Editor helpers: "Create Test Sphere" (a plain test sphere with cloud shadow), "Apply Orbit Scatter Earth Preset", and an Auto Performance setting.

- Self-contained: drops into an empty UE project, writes no CVars to your project Config, and coexists with other terrain and atmosphere plugins in your scene.

PERFORMANCE - PLEASE READ

The cloud march costs in proportion to the number of pixels it fills.

Measured on an RTX 5060 Ti with an i7-14700F at 960x540 in UE 5.5: about 11 ms per frame in orbit and about 16 ms at ground level (Auto Performance on; about six times cheaper when the camera is still).

A viewport of about 3.5 million pixels costs roughly seven times more. A high-end GPU is recommended; a smaller viewport is lighter.

FIRST SHADER COMPILE

The first compile takes roughly 3 to 4 minutes and the editor can look frozen. It is not. At least 10 GB of free memory is recommended.

REQUIREMENTS

- Unreal Engine 5.5 or 5.8 (a separate download for each version), Windows 64-bit (the only platform tested)

- DirectX 12, Shader Model 5 GPU

- No other plugin is required.

WHAT IS INCLUDED

- The plugin: atmosphere and volumetric cloud rendering and editor tools.

- The plugin's own weather map data (about 70 MB) for the "Current clouds" option.

- NASA cloud data for the "NASA clouds" option (about 110 MB).

WHAT IS NOT INCLUDED

- No terrain, ground, sea, stars or planet meshes. The sea and ground in the screenshots are a separate test scene (apart from the small "Create Test Sphere" helper).

- No sample maps or art content.

KNOWN LIMITATIONS

- When a pole sits at the planet's edge, a streak of colour error can appear outside the edge while the camera moves.

- Cloud edges look grainy when viewed up close.

- Cost grows with pixel count. Not suited to low-end GPUs.

- Tested on Windows only. Screenshots and performance figures were made in UE 5.5.

- UE 5.8: the shaders compile and the same scenes render with the same clouds, atmosphere and NASA option. Overall brightness comes out about 10% lower than in 5.5 because of a difference in the engine's own post-processing (it also happens with the plugin switched off). It was checked in an empty test project, not in a full game.