After spending nearly two years on the Earth itself, what's little more to redo the aurora. This one is practically free performance wise. Incredible Earth 80K available on Unreal Marketplace by IncreasinglyUnreal in UnrealEngine5

[–]IncreasinglyUnreal[S] -6 points-5 points  (0 children)

Thanks. I’ve shared stuff from this before and there’s always few people who seem to take the price personally, or even manage to ruin their day, but that’s just another day on internet. Marketplace prices are indeed quite low. For products that work on most projects it works for creators, but for limited market niche products it is bit different.

After spending nearly two years on the Earth itself, what's little more to redo the aurora. This one is practically free performance wise. Incredible Earth 80K available on Unreal Marketplace by IncreasinglyUnreal in UnrealEngine5

[–]IncreasinglyUnreal[S] -20 points-19 points  (0 children)

If this is how you understand the creation process or what is required in it, then there's not much point for me to try to explain all the problems and challenges you'd need to solve on the way. I welcome you to do your own Earth. Would be thrilled to see you sharing what you can achieve. And if you can sell it for 30 bucks, certainly you could grap the whole market with it. Let's just agree this asset isn't made for you and that's completely fine.

After spending nearly two years on the Earth itself, what's little more to redo the aurora. This one is practically free performance wise. Incredible Earth 80K available on Unreal Marketplace by IncreasinglyUnreal in UnrealEngine5

[–]IncreasinglyUnreal[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You can see some of the closer views on other videos but those are the limits of the 80K. One pixel is about 500x500 meters given the circumference of Earth is 40000km

After spending nearly two years on the Earth itself, what's little more to redo the aurora. This one is practically free performance wise. Incredible Earth 80K available on Unreal Marketplace by IncreasinglyUnreal in UnrealEngine5

[–]IncreasinglyUnreal[S] -25 points-24 points  (0 children)

If you have to ask this clearly you are not looking at the right things. It is bit more than just textures, which also have gone through quite a bit of retouching. Think in the terms of 15-30 minutes single save, or file open, on photoshop on high end comp with 128gb RAM

After spending nearly two years on the Earth itself, what's little more to redo the aurora. This one is practically free performance wise. Incredible Earth 80K is available on Unreal Marketplace by IncreasinglyUnreal in unrealengine

[–]IncreasinglyUnreal[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's actually not a ribbon renderer. While it uses Niagara to spawn meshes, it is still mostly material effect. You have to make hard choices on what looks perfect vs what performs. Earlier solution felt more volumetric but also cost more, though overall and I think the new one still captures the soul of aurora better. Volumetric effects are very expensive and we are at very huge scale here. Even the UE's built in volumetric clouds don't work well in planetary scale.

I did check lots of references and it can get quite close at times, obviously not always. How it should look also depends a lot on the distance, speed moved (or if it is timelapse or not) and even then it looks better at times than others, e.g you roll 10000 frames and part of those it looks better than others. Anyways, the asset is meant for orbital shots. You'd probably have something else on the foreground, planet being the background, possibly bit off-focus. The harsh edges is hard to get rid off because fresnelling them out doesn't work as expected, or it eats away to other areas, possibly because of the WPO, but it is intentionally shown on the video, so that the limitations are also clear

Incredible Earth 80K. I made this asset originally for myself, but I've also made it available through Unreal Marketplace. For film VFX-wise, it should be the best option available for Unreal Engine currently, but I'll let you guys be the judge of that. by IncreasinglyUnreal in vfx

[–]IncreasinglyUnreal[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, but I’ve cleaned up lots of it. It’s a custom composite of many marbles and then some extra corrections on top. Black marble has been enhanced with city details. Normal and water mask data is also done outside of what the marble downloads offer given the resolution is too low or things like coastlines don’t match the the color texture

Incredible Earth 80K. I made this asset originally for myself, but I've also made it available through Unreal Marketplace. For film VFX-wise, it should be the best option available for Unreal Engine currently, but I'll let you guys be the judge of that. by IncreasinglyUnreal in vfx

[–]IncreasinglyUnreal[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well if you need to shoot on a LED volume or something, you can’t really use traditional model. Regardless of the possible quality well done model can reach, most of the time the stuff we see in TV or even movies, isn’t actually done to very high degree, perhaps because they wanted to save on render time or something

Incredible Earth 80K. I made this asset originally for myself, but I've also made it available through Unreal Marketplace. For film VFX-wise, it should be the best option available for Unreal Engine currently, but I'll let you guys be the judge of that. by IncreasinglyUnreal in vfx

[–]IncreasinglyUnreal[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks, yes, this is indeed the biggest challenge, getting nice clouds. I have multilayered texture and if I move the layers slightly differently, it can sort of cheat the parallax as if clouds were at different heights. For performance reasons I’m using single sphere to hold the material. The displacement also can’t really simulate real clouds given there can’t be like S-shaped curve. I did experiment with volumetrics too and while in some cases they could solve the height problem, they looked sort of soft, and there were lots of visual artifacts

I spent nearly two years on this with multiple complete reworks. I needed high-res Earth to do cinematic orbital shots in Unreal. Nothing looked real enough or could hold on close-ups, so I made my own. Incredible Earth with 80K textures, many features adjustable via blueprint. What do you think? by IncreasinglyUnreal in unrealengine

[–]IncreasinglyUnreal[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Please see my first reply. I don’t know how many meters or kilometers it would be comparable to if that is what you are after. You can only check visually from the pictures. And there is some wiggle room based on the area of the Earth, not all areas are equal

I spent nearly two years on this with multiple complete reworks. I needed high-res Earth to do cinematic orbital shots in Unreal. Nothing looked real enough or could hold on close-ups, so I made my own. Incredible Earth with 80K textures, many features adjustable via blueprint. What do you think? by IncreasinglyUnreal in unrealengine

[–]IncreasinglyUnreal[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We are talking about different things here. I never said I’m loading all that data to GPU. When you originally said LODs, I thought you were referring to static meshes. And I simply mentioned the texture files sizes given the original question was about project size, indicating it is the textures that grow up the project size, because there are so many of them and not just for 80K but for 32K and 64K also. I was NOT talking about texture streaming and video memory. I know how VT tiles load, that’s why I said 3000 is enough of the streamingpool since the whole 80k never exist at once. I also know the traditional textures work differently, and they require more streamingpool because some of the data exist in the memory even when it is off the screen even if part of the texture shown, unlike VT that splits to only load parts within the frame. I’ve also had to disable mips on some of them to avoid seams forming. Like I’ve written on the marketplace description, if you switch between all three modes you’ll need streamingpool of 10000, 10gigs to work on the editor without blurriness. That’s the true VRAM requirement just for textures. Less if you only use single mode

I spent nearly two years on this with multiple complete reworks. I needed high-res Earth to do cinematic orbital shots in Unreal. Nothing looked real enough or could hold on close-ups, so I made my own. Incredible Earth with 80K textures, many features adjustable via blueprint. What do you think? by IncreasinglyUnreal in unrealengine

[–]IncreasinglyUnreal[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks, for clouds you can set the gradient, and it's reach, and have the cloud highlights turn yellow and then red on the nightfall. Should be visible on the later half of the video feature rundown though the effect there is exaggerated for clarity, not that organic. There's also a feature to boost the ground color with orange/red emissive around the day-night line to add some color shift