描述
Ultimate Earth
🎉UPDATE 2025-02-14: Aurora Borealis, latitude and longitude locator, orbiter camera and georefenced mesh spawner added!
🎉UPDATE 2024-09-18: Country labels and border meshes added!
Historical Questions and Reviews (pre-FAB). Have more questions? Please feel free to ask questions in our Discord.
Ultimate Earth (formerly Giga Earth) is derived from over 2 billion polygons, with the optimised terrain data powered by Nanite, enabling cinematic viewing of Earth for games, cinematics and interactives, in real-time. This Earth is built to scale and leverages Epic's atmosphere to dynamically light and shade the atmosphere depending on the angle it's set to.
If you like it, please leave a review! It motivates us to improve the project. If you have suggestions for improvements please ask a question or let us know. Thank you!
Surface
The color map comprises 81,920 pixels wide and 40,960 pixels high and has been hand painted to have many data processing artefacts removed. The normal map comprises 81,920 pixels wide and 40,960 pixels, and allows for normal flatness to be adjusted, changing the intensity of the terrain features to better suit the different artistic needs of near and far shots.
Night Lights [texture]
Visibility driven by lack of sunlight
Adjustable Intensity
Adjustable Color
81k of texture
Clouds - Volumetric (for close shots [experimental])
Simple volumetric clouds (as shown in stills [requires 'Volumetrics' plugin be turned on])
Clouds - Textured (for medium to long shots)
Adjustable normal flatness
41k of pixels of real cloud texture
Country Borders [texture]
Adjustable Intensity
Adjustable Color
81k of texture
Stars [texture]
Adjustable Brightness
8192x8192 pixel texture map
Watch - Demo Video
Discord - Openclay Creator Discord
Please note performance varies in different version of UE. For example, a computer running the project 5.0.3 might be 80 fps, while the same computer will get 65 fps in 5.5.1.
Hardware
Nanite on PC requires the following;
NVIDIA: Maxwell-generation cards or newer
AMD: GCN-generation cards or newer
Notes:
This project is ~10.7 GB in size.
This project requires the 'Volumetrics' plugin be activated to use the volumetric clouds.
Volumetric clouds have limited range of shadows (~400km) - see gallery for examples. Volumetric clouds will cause shadow streaking beyond this if viewed from far out distances.
If you are looking to render out movie sequences, a graphics card with 16GB+ of dedicated VRAM is recommended - ideally 24GB+. If you are using UE 5.1 or greater with DX12 and experiencing crashes, please use the following video to help render out sequences after UE 5 with DX 11:
Ultimate Earth requires SM6 to be enabled for Nanite if using Unreal Engine 5.1+. SM6 is enabled by default in Unreal Engine 5.1+.
This project does not include heightmaps.
Please press play and then stop in the editor to execute the recommended console variables.
Ultimate Earth requires SM6 to be enabled for Nanite if using Unreal Engine 5.1+. SM6 is enabled by default in Unreal Engine 5.1+.
This project is not suitable for first person or ground level use.
This project is made of many meshes to create the planet, not a single planet mesh.
The meshes in this project are triangulated.
Please see the Nanite documentation below for more information
https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/nanite-virtualized-geometry-in-unreal-engine/
If large seems are still present, navigate to your Unreal Engine Project Folder, and locate DefaultEngine.ini. In a text editor, such as Notepad or Notepad ++, edit this file. Change the following
from
[/Script/WindowsTargetPlatform.WindowsTargetSettings]
DefaultGraphicsRHI=DefaultGraphicsRHI_Default
to
[/Script/WindowsTargetPlatform.WindowsTargetSettings]
DefaultGraphicsRHI=DefaultGraphicsRHI_DX12
Questions
If you have question, please ask and we'll see how we can help.
Email - [email protected]
Version Log:
v 1.2.0 Changes (released 14th February, 2025).
Added simple static mesh based Aurora Borealis [v1].
Added a latitude and longitude locator blueprint that can have it's altitude changed, mesh changed and orientation altered.
Added Orbiter blueprint to orbit the planet.
Added Mesh Spawner blueprint to spawn meshes at latitude and longitude locations based on a given data table (spreadsheet).
Added simple night lights glowing through texture clouds.
Added controls for cloud textures to glow in the dark.
Added fog effects to for more cinematic appearance by default [limited in range to that shown in new gallery renders].
Water now animates by default.
Texture clouds are now visible by default.
Historical version log notes can be found here.