How to Create Planets in Unreal Engine: Ground to Space Transition UE4 Tutorial

In this tutorial we will create a planet and add a surface to this planet and animate between the surface of the planet and space in Unreal Engine. We will also go over how you can implement this as a gameplay feature within your Unreal Engine 4 projects! We are using Earth textures but feel free to create your own.

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Link to Assets:

The Unreal Masterclass:

Timestamps
0:00 - Intro
0:57 - Create the Planet
18:07 - Planet Surface
38:52 - Animate Ground to Space Transition
50:28 - Add Transition to a Video Game
54:37 - Outro

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[UnrealSensei]

Important! At 6:29 100 billion should be 100 million I misspoke whoops

[Vonsteffan]

Thank you, Zak. You deliver an incredible amount of information without making it overwhelming to folks new to Unreal. The pace and level of detail is perfect. I also appreciate that you get right to the subject rather than wasting time with a pointless and rambling introduction. Please keep doing what you are doing.

[KaustavMajumder]

12:00 - Dot product, to put in simple terms is "how much" two vectors (or directions) are aligned. The resulting value is a scalar (directionless) value indicating how much the directions are aligned or apart.

If we are working with unit vectors (essentially just the directions and not their magnitudes) to begin with, then the resulting value will be strictly within the range [-1, +1]; -1 implying that the directions are exactly opposite to each other and 0 meaning they are at perpendicular and +1 meaning they are absolutely aligned.

So, when we are taking the dot product of the light direction and the vertex normal, we are basically asking, how much is the light aligned to the normal. Technically, if we are at a perfect alignment then the light source is hitting the exact underneath side of the geometry's face (the face that's nearest to the vertex normal that is) and thus making the face darkest, so we would get 1 as the result if we are considering unit vectors or a clamped result. For our usage though, we want this dark area to be represented by 0 for usage as a mask, hence we flip the value with an One Minus to get the Darkest area (analogously the vertex) as 0 and the brightest area (analogously the vertex) as 1.

[ajking]

In UE5, make sure to choose Subdivison Type>LatLong when creating your sphere, or the spherical texture maps won't apply correctly. Also, I had to set my Earth sphere scale to 4, 000, 000 rather than 2, 000, 000 as the tutorial says, for some reason.

[ReginaldusGaming]

One of the best Unreal Engine 4 content on youtube hands down. I liked n sub'ed. Keep up the great work.

Trouble shooting - for anyone not seeing the plugins "Modeling Tools Editor Mode" its because you are most likely not using a updated project.

Opening your project through 4.25.3 which will tell you that your project was created with a older version of unreal blah blah hit yes create copy and when your project loads you'll see the plugins Bar~Modeling .

[tonycarpenter-Makzimia]

I'm trying to get up the motivation to get into this, videos like yours make it a LOT easier to consider. Last time I built anything was with the Neverwinter Nights toolset. Things have come a LONG way since then.

[hanzulu]

Omygorsh... I was blown away in just the first 7 minutes. A whole friggin' planet... First, the new modelling tool, totally amazing. But then.. a planet with atmosphere. Love it!

[justusvega]

At 32:35 he says "Let's go into Foliage Paint" and means to say "Landscape Paint." I am clearly an auditory learner here and didn't see the visual cue of him clicking into landscape paint mode. Thought I would throw it in the comments in case anyone else wondered why their texture brushes weren't present. Also very grateful for these tutorials. Thank you for this quality content!

[TheBelrick]

Hi! I too was inspired by the video you mentioned. I picked up a 2 tricks keen folk can try.
1. Add an infinite postprocessvolume and change bloom method to convolution. Check out the sun then!
2. Epic have created a procedural planet we can use! The beauty of this is that its like kerbal and has surface lod. (farside of planet is low detail, highest closest to cam). Enable volumetrics plugin . restart. Enable show engine content and show plugin content under Content view options. Now you can file open level. Volumetrics content/sky/maps and either of the two levels. (oh and you get volumetric clouds to play with too!)

[badashphilosophy]

It's Unreal Sensei! I was pleasantly surprised when I opened this video. You do the best tutorials for beginners like me.

[undisclosedpolitics]

I just switched from Unity to Unreal Engine and this just saved my project. Thank you.

[easonxie]

What a great tutorial! Hope Zach can make a same one but for UE5 :)

[jaymike]

It would be nice if landscapes 'adhered' to the surface. In real life the average distance to the horizon from the human eye (if the ground were flat) is only about 4km. This also helps give a sense of scale and position.

[mridulsarmah]

Sensei is Andrew Kramer of Unreal Engine. The beginner tutorials have really made me a huge fan.

[jaysprenkle]

at @15:00 the box that magically appears used to set the emmissive color is a 'Constant3Vector'.

[pennaverdeful]

You even showed how to implement it in a gameplay scenario, you are amazing!

[stevenranck]

Nice! If you modulate the city light mask by the inverse cloud texture, the clouds will block out some of the lights on the shadowed side of the planet.

[cyberfeedforward]

It's not glitchy. Your space ship just has its warp drive engaged.🚀😊

[Celticninja]

what a beautiful spear.. very nice work

[ranger]

Thanks! This was an amazing tutorial!
I am trying to make a video game and this was very helpful.
I didn't do the surface and animation part, but I did make the planet. I also went a few steps further and set the angle of the Earth to 23.5 degrees, made it rotate, and overall made it look a little nicer.