Uploaded July 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Unreal renders exactly ONE Sky Atmosphere and ONE Volumetric Cloud for the whole view — they're global effects, not per-actor props. So in a level with several planets, how does each one look like it has air, while the planet you're flying toward gets a real scattering sky?
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🌍 GET PLANETGEN
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► Get it on FAB: fab.com/listings/96c36654-f244-4c75-a527-cfaaab2d5ac4
► Free Playable Demo + Project: patreon.com/cw/CodeLikeMe
► Discord Community: discord.gg/jRhvJtw5r5
► Subscribe: youtube.com/codelikeme
This is the atmosphere half of PlanetGen V1.6's planet LOD system. The same arbiter that decides which planet streams terrain also decides which planet OWNS the sky: the single Sky Atmosphere is repositioned onto that planet's centre and configured from its data asset, on handoff only (every scattering change rebuilds the transmittance LUTs). Every other planet gets two cheap stand-in shells instead — a fresnel halo and a cloud deck — driven from the same per-planet atmosphere asset.
Covered in detail:
• The UPlanetGenAtmosphereAsset — one data asset defining Rayleigh/Mie scattering, ground albedo, cloud altitude and more, feeding both the real sky and the distant shells
• The fresnel halo shell — and why fresnel peaking exactly at the silhouette gives you a hard bright line against space, plus the edge-softness fix
• The cloud shell — why it sits at the cloud layer TOP, why it's its own mesh, and why noise sizes are authored in km instead of raw multipliers
• The shared-asset altitude problem: one atmosphere asset, planets with different mountains. The authored value wins when it clears; otherwise only the STAND-IN is lifted, and it's logged
• Why the shells have to ride the terrain LOD envelope scale — and why that scale must be clamped to at least 1
• Cross-fading a real scattering sim against a fake halo, and why you fade SCATTERING rather than radius (a tiny atmosphere isn't a dim one, it's a different-looking one)
• Throttling the fade to a 2% step with explicit endpoint checks so it always lands exactly on 0 and 1
• Why the cloud shell can't fade on LOD at all — and fades PER PIXEL on camera-to-pixel distance instead, so nearby clouds hand over to the volumetric layer while the horizon keeps its deck
• The grazing-angle fade that stops a thin shell reading as a flat sheet
• Matching volumetric cloud scale to shell cloud scale (and the knob that moves backwards)
• Per-planet terminators: why a shell must take its centre from its own pivot, never from the shared parameter collection
The lesson that generalises: arbitrate the scarce global, give everyone else a stand-in, cross-fade on a parameter whose zero is genuinely nothing — and when something is shared between LOD levels, fade it per pixel, because the object is the wrong granularity.
──────────────────────────────
🚀 SPACE TOOLKIT
──────────────────────────────
► GravityCore — custom gravity for any shape: fab.com/listings/c74de757-8cf8-45ff-9d6e-82d3b421af5b
► Starship — pilotable spaceship for planet-to-planet travel: fab.com/listings/3f2e3b36-eb5f-468d-a47a-6e378ddefdbf
#UnrealEngine #UE5 #GameDev #IndieDev #ProceduralGeneration #PlanetGeneration #SkyAtmosphere #VolumetricClouds #AtmosphereLOD #UE5Tutorial
Unreal renders exactly ONE Sky Atmosphere and ONE Volumetric Cloud for the whole view — they're global effects, not per-actor props. So in a level with several planets, how does each one look like it has air, while the planet you're flying toward gets a real scattering sky?
──────────────────────────────
🌍 GET PLANETGEN
──────────────────────────────
► Get it on FAB: fab.com/listings/96c36654-f244-4c75-a527-cfaaab2d5ac4
► Free Playable Demo + Project: patreon.com/cw/CodeLikeMe
► Discord Community: discord.gg/jRhvJtw5r5
► Subscribe: youtube.com/codelikeme
This is the atmosphere half of PlanetGen V1.6's planet LOD system. The same arbiter that decides which planet streams terrain also decides which planet OWNS the sky: the single Sky Atmosphere is repositioned onto that planet's centre and configured from its data asset, on handoff only (every scattering change rebuilds the transmittance LUTs). Every other planet gets two cheap stand-in shells instead — a fresnel halo and a cloud deck — driven from the same per-planet atmosphere asset.
Covered in detail:
• The UPlanetGenAtmosphereAsset — one data asset defining Rayleigh/Mie scattering, ground albedo, cloud altitude and more, feeding both the real sky and the distant shells
• The fresnel halo shell — and why fresnel peaking exactly at the silhouette gives you a hard bright line against space, plus the edge-softness fix
• The cloud shell — why it sits at the cloud layer TOP, why it's its own mesh, and why noise sizes are authored in km instead of raw multipliers
• The shared-asset altitude problem: one atmosphere asset, planets with different mountains. The authored value wins when it clears; otherwise only the STAND-IN is lifted, and it's logged
• Why the shells have to ride the terrain LOD envelope scale — and why that scale must be clamped to at least 1
• Cross-fading a real scattering sim against a fake halo, and why you fade SCATTERING rather than radius (a tiny atmosphere isn't a dim one, it's a different-looking one)
• Throttling the fade to a 2% step with explicit endpoint checks so it always lands exactly on 0 and 1
• Why the cloud shell can't fade on LOD at all — and fades PER PIXEL on camera-to-pixel distance instead, so nearby clouds hand over to the volumetric layer while the horizon keeps its deck
• The grazing-angle fade that stops a thin shell reading as a flat sheet
• Matching volumetric cloud scale to shell cloud scale (and the knob that moves backwards)
• Per-planet terminators: why a shell must take its centre from its own pivot, never from the shared parameter collection
The lesson that generalises: arbitrate the scarce global, give everyone else a stand-in, cross-fade on a parameter whose zero is genuinely nothing — and when something is shared between LOD levels, fade it per pixel, because the object is the wrong granularity.
──────────────────────────────
🚀 SPACE TOOLKIT
──────────────────────────────
► GravityCore — custom gravity for any shape: fab.com/listings/c74de757-8cf8-45ff-9d6e-82d3b421af5b
► Starship — pilotable spaceship for planet-to-planet travel: fab.com/listings/3f2e3b36-eb5f-468d-a47a-6e378ddefdbf
#UnrealEngine #UE5 #GameDev #IndieDev #ProceduralGeneration #PlanetGeneration #SkyAtmosphere #VolumetricClouds #AtmosphereLOD #UE5Tutorial
