Why Your Procedural Planet's Night Side Is Still Lit — UE5 Terrain, Foliage & Clouds @CodeLikeMe

Uploaded July 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

My procedural UE5 planet looked great — until I flew to the night side and found glowing white clouds, a gold speckle crawling across the dark terrain, and an exposure that washed the whole frame out. This video is the debugging story and the fix: correct day/night lighting on a planet you can see whole from orbit.

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🪐 GET PLANETGEN
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► PlanetGen on Fab: com.epicgames.launcher://ue/Fab/product/96c36654-f244-4c75-a527-cfaaab2d5ac4
► Free Playable Demo + Project (Patreon): patreon.com/CodeLikeMe/posts/164408672

A planet breaks the assumptions every local scene relies on — you see the lit and the shadowed hemisphere at the same time. I walk through three separate causes and their fixes:

• Clouds — UE's Volumetric Cloud shares ONE sun-transmittance value across the whole layer, so the night side inherits the lit side's light. Fix: Use Per Sample Atmospheric Light Transmittance.

• Terrain & foliage — a directional light isn't occluded by the planet's own body (cascaded shadow maps can't span a 50 km world), so the sun lights sun-facing slopes and foliage on the night side. Fix: a shader-space day/night terminator — dot(up, sunDirection) from the macro sphere normal, driven by a Material Parameter Collection (PlanetCenter + SunDirection), multiplied into BaseColor AND Specular.

• Exposure — auto-exposure re-brightens the dark hemisphere. Fix: a fixed exposure for the from-space view.

Also covered: why shadows can't fix this, the subtraction-order / PlanetCenter-vs-ObjectPosition gotchas, only updating the parameter collection when values actually change (a static sun writes once), and how it behaves across many planets.

The lesson that generalises: when the engine's occlusion can't reach your scale, answer the lighting question analytically in the material instead of fighting a shadow system.

#UnrealEngine #UE5 #GameDev #IndieDev #ProceduralGeneration #PlanetGeneration #UE5Lighting #VolumetricClouds

Why Your Procedural Planets Night Side Is Still Lit — UE5 Terrain, Foliage & Clouds

$PlanetGen — Procedural Spherical Terrain for UE5 - Free Playable Demo Project Files: https://www.patreon.com/posts/157863513 . Free Playable Demo: https://www.patreon.com/posts/157984927 PlanetGen is a runtime C++ plugin (with full Blueprint support) for Unreal Engine 5 that generates streaming procedural spherical terrain — a full planet you can fly around, land on, and explore. Async chunk streaming, layered 3D noise, biome blending, foliage, and a water sphere, all without blocking the game thread. Drop ACLMPlanet into your level, assign a material, and click Preview Planet. Hit Randomize for a new world. ────────────────────────────── CORE FEATURES ────────────────────────────── ▸ Spherical Streaming Terrain — Cube-face parameterization divides the sphere into 6 faces, each streamed as a grid of chunks. Actor pool recycles chunks at runtime — no spawn/destroy overhead. ▸ 3D Noise Sampling — All noise is sampled in 3D world space, ensuring perfectly uniform terrain on every face with zero equatorial stretching. No distortion at the poles or seams between faces. ▸ Async Mesh Generation — Geometry built entirely on a thread pool. Game thread is never blocked. ▸ Layered Noise Stack — Stack up to N noise layers. Layer 0 acts as a continental mask controlling where mountains appear vs flat plains. Built-in presets: HighDetail, Smooth, Mountains. ▸ FastNoise Lite Integration — Perlin, OpenSimplex2, Cellular, Ridged Multifractal, Domain Warp Progressive (MIT licensed, ships with source). ▸ Biome Blending — Vertex color blend weights for Grass / Rock / Snow / Underwater. Plug directly into any landscape material. Compatible with WorldGen flat terrain materials. ▸ Foliage System — BiomeFoliageAsset data assets drive HISM scatter on the thread pool. Per-mesh density, height, slope, scale, clustering, and collision. Same data assets as WorldGen flat terrain — configure once, use on both. ▸ Dense Grass System — WorldGenGrassAsset data assets drive ISM ground cover at high resolution. Slope-aware instance sinking, surface normal alignment, per-chunk random jitter. Same data assets as WorldGen flat terrain. ▸ Procedural Water Sphere — Smooth UV sphere at sea level. Configurable subdivisions (default 64) for silky-smooth appearance at any planet scale. ▸ Seed and Randomize — Every planet is seeded and deterministic. One click generates a completely new world. Seed is exposed so you can save and share specific planets. ▸ ACLMPlanetSunSky subclass — Optional subclass with full SunSky integration. Requires SunPositionCalculator plugin (bundled with UE5). Automatically configures the scenes SkyAtmosphere radius and VolumetricCloud layer height to match your planet size. ▸ Editor Preview — CallInEditor buttons (Preview Planet, Clear Planet, Randomize Planet) rebuild terrain without entering Play mode. ────────────────────────────── TECHNICAL HIGHLIGHTS ────────────────────────────── ▸ Full Blueprint Support — All properties are Blueprint-readable and writable. PreviewPlanet(), ClearPlanet(), and RandomizePlanet() are all Blueprint-callable at runtime. Trigger planet rebuilds, seed changes, or clear events from any Blueprint graph. ▸ ProceduralMeshComponent-based geometry ▸ Cube-face parameterization — equal-area distribution, no pole distortion ▸ 3D noise sampling — zero equatorial stretching on any planet size ▸ Fully exposed parameter categories with tooltips and clamped slider ranges ▸ Seeded RNG per chunk — deterministic foliage placement ▸ Compatible with WorldGen flat terrain foliage and grass data assets ────────────────────────────── INCLUDED ────────────────────────────── ▸ Full C++ source ▸ Pre-built planet material (M_Planet) with biome blending wired up ▸ Water sphere material ▸ Sample foliage data asset (trees, pine) ▸ Sample grass data asset (grass clump) ▸ Sample tree and pine meshes with materials ▸ Sample grass mesh with material ▸ BPCLMPlanet Blueprint subclass for easy editor configuration ▸ PlanetMap demo level — ready to Preview Planet out of the box ────────────────────────────── PERFECT FOR ────────────────────────────── Space games, planetary exploration, sci-fi survival, alien world prototypes, and any project needing a fully streaming spherical planet with real terrain — without writing cube-sphere math, noise systems, or chunk management code from scratch. ► 👇 𝐒𝐮𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐥 // 𝐁𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐀 𝐏𝐚𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐧! https://www.patreon.com/codelikeme ►Patrons will have access to project files of all the stuff I do in the channel and other extra benefits Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClb6Jh9EBV7a_Nm52Ipll_Q/join Like my facebook page for more content : https://www.facebook.com/gamedevelopersclub/ Follow me on twitter : https://twitter.com/CodeLikeMe2 Follow me on reddit : https://www.reddit.com/user/codelikeme #CodeLikeMe #unrealengine #ue5 #ue4 #indiegamedev$

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