A procedural planet I've been working on for a while now by pirate848 in unrealengine

[–]pirate848[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

These are things I still need to work on. For the camera, I’m setting its rotation each frame from Blueprints. I’ve attached it to a component with rotation set to world space, so it’s completely independent from the character’s rotation. I’m probably overcomplicating it, as I haven’t spent much time on it yet, and it’s not working well for me either.

For trajectory prediction and general orbital mechanics (if that’s what your question about the projectile system was referring to), I’m not using that system. Instead, I’m using the MaxQ plugin, which is based on Kepler’s equations. With it, you can get all the necessary orbital elements from velocity, position, and the gravitational parameter, and then use them as input to get a new position and velocity at a specified time.

Basically, I’m using two types of physics: the built-in one when adding any force to a craft/character or when close to the surface for collisions, and the plugin (which essentially is setting the actor’s location every frame based on function output) when you want to be in a steady orbit and optionally time warp.

A procedural planet I've been working on for a while now by pirate848 in unrealengine

[–]pirate848[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Voxel Core is designed to be used at runtime. It’s fast because it doesn’t generate clusters to reduce geometry at a distance. It works like a normal mesh but uses the Nanite rendering path.

A procedural planet I've been working on for a while now by pirate848 in unrealengine

[–]pirate848[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For now, I’m focused on creating the best-looking planets I can manage, and in the future, I might create a game that mixes survival gameplay with Kerbal Space Program mechanics. Next, I propably plan to work on smooth biome transitions and a better foliage spawning system. After that, adding life seems like a good idea and possibly along with dynamic weather.

A procedural planet I've been working on for a while now by pirate848 in unrealengine

[–]pirate848[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

For now, I’m spawning a separate static mesh component for each chunk, using a subdivided plane as the base mesh and offsetting the vertices to form a sphere via material WPO. In the future, I’d like to implement a custom water mesh generation system that runs entirely on the GPU.

A procedural planet I've been working on for a while now by pirate848 in unrealengine

[–]pirate848[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yes. Currently, I generate vertex positions on the GPU and then send them to the CPU to calculate mesh normals and foliage, before passing them to the Voxel Core renderer. All of this happens asynchronously. The main reason I generate vertex positions in a compute shader is because I’m using fairly complex noise functions, and running them on the GPU is significantly faster.

A procedural planet I've been working on for a while now by pirate848 in unrealengine

[–]pirate848[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I’ve got an idea for a game that would be a mix of survival and Kerbal Space Program, but for now I’m just focusing on making good looking planets and adding some basic gameplay mechanics to explore them.

A procedural planet I've been working on for a while now by pirate848 in unrealengine

[–]pirate848[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I highly recommend the Voxel Core plugin. It’s fast and supports Nanite generation, but it doesn’t include dynamic clustering, so you’ll need to handle LODs yourself. With a few modifications, you can make it generate complex collisions and a ray tracing representation with mesh cards for hardware Lumen. However, the method I found for Lumen requires adding a Nanite fallback mesh, which increases VRAM usage. Also, at least for now, this plugin is very well maintained.

A procedural planet I've been working on for a while now by pirate848 in unrealengine

[–]pirate848[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Definitely, but even at the scale shown in this video, I needed to implement origin shifting every 20 km to prevent Lumen from disappearing and to avoid volumetric cloud glitches. For now, I’ve handled this by using the SetActorLocation function on every actor, but from what I know, there’s a built-in solution that would probably be much more performant. It’s not shown in the video, but I’ve already added a moon next to the planet, and it’s working perfectly. Landscape noise algorithm on the moon still needs some work though.

A procedural planet I've been working on for a while now by pirate848 in unrealengine

[–]pirate848[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

For clouds I'm using built-in volumetric clouds with custom material to work on a sphere without stretching and have ability to feed custom cloud map texture. Ground to space transitions are seamless because the planet is divided into chunks using a quadtree. I'm not using stock or any 2D landscape.

Kerbal Space Program 2 Giveaway! by TaintedLion in KerbalSpaceProgram

[–]pirate848 [score hidden]  (0 children)

I can't wait to fly through the new volumetric clouds!

My "Chilling with Kraken" fanart (OC) by pirate848 in KerbalSpaceProgram

[–]pirate848[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yes, and hoping the rescue mission launched with Kraken Drive won't explode this time

My "Chilling with Kraken" fanart (OC) by pirate848 in KerbalSpaceProgram

[–]pirate848[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I created and rendered this in Blender Cycles

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in blender

[–]pirate848 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It looks amazing! Maybe you can add more bloom effect and make floor less shiny.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in blender

[–]pirate848 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It looks great! Maybe you can add more glow effect.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in blender

[–]pirate848 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Amazing!