[Openclay] Blue Gem Earth

Stylized Earth with detailed Terrain and Textures.

Blue Gem Earth is designed to help tell better stories about the world in geography-oriented games, YouTube videos and editorial presentations. Built with artistically crafted color maps that are draped over Nanite-powered terrain data, it's designed with raytracing, to run in real-time. Blue Gem offers visually striking, vertically exaggerated (~11x) or realistic topography and bathymetry heights (2 different levels), adding depth and dynamism to the appearance of the land and ocean floors, as the shadows cast over the surfaces. Additionally, it harnesses Epic's atmospheric lighting system, allowing dynamic lighting and shading adjustments based on the sun angle, turning the city lights on and off depending on the light visibility.

⭐4 good reviews → We'll create country meshes for easy country highlighting for the vertically exaggerated version!

⭐5 good reviews → We'll create country labels and country border meshes for the vertically exaggerated version!

⭐6 good reviews → We'll create an ocean current mesh for the vertically exaggerated version!

Surface

The color map consists 81,920 pixels wide and 40,960 pixels high and has been hand painted to have many data processing artefacts removed. The normal map comprises 81,920 pixels wide and 40,960 pixels, and allows for normal flatness to be adjusted, changing the intensity of the terrain features to better suit the different artistic needs of the production.

Country Borders [textures]

• Adjustable Intensity
• Adjustable Color
• ~80,000 x 40,000 pixels of texture

Internal Borders (state and province textures)

• Adjustable Intensity
• Adjustable Color
• ~80,000 x 40,000 pixels of texture

Unused textures that are unpacked will be removed in a update of the project.

The project includes the level sequence used for the showcase video.

Hardware

Nanite on PC requires the following;

• NVIDIA: Maxwell-generation cards or newer
• AMD: GCN-generation cards or newer

If you are looking to render out movie sequences, a graphics card with 16GB+ of dedicated VRAM is recommended - ideally 24GB+. If you are using UE 5.1 or great with DX12 and experiencing crashes, please use the following video to help render out sequences after UE 5:

https://youtu.be/JtcWsGrX9kc

Notes:

This project is ~11.3 GB in size.

• This project does not include heightmaps or adjustable terrain height features.
• Please press play and then stop in the editor to execute the recommended console variables.
• Blue Gem requires SM6 to be enabled for Nanite if using Unreal Engine 5.1+. SM6 is enabled by default in Unreal Engine 5.1+.
• Please see the Nanite documentation below for more information

https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/nanite-virtualized-geometry-in-unreal-engine/

If large seems are still present, navigate to your Unreal Engine Project Folder, and locate DefaultEngine.ini. In a text editor, such as Notepad or Notepad ++, edit this file. Change the following

from

[/Script/WindowsTargetPlatform.WindowsTargetSettings]

DefaultGraphicsRHI=DefaultGraphicsRHI_Default

to

[/Script/WindowsTargetPlatform.WindowsTargetSettings]

DefaultGraphicsRHI=DefaultGraphicsRHI_DX12

Disclaimer:

The translucent water meshes in this project are not Nanite enabled by default (this is intended). Enabling Nanite on the water meshes will stop them from being translucent. If you would like to like to learn more about the currently supported material Blend Modes for Nanite, please visit the link below:

https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/nanite-virtualized-geometry-in-unreal-engine/

Update log:

v1.1.1 released (12-08-2024)

• Added Blue Gem Countries level with country materials and meshes.
• Organised material parameters into groups
• Texture-based border thickness controls
• Animated pulsing material parameters

v1.0.0 released (01-09-2023)

• Added Blue Gem Mini level with;
• 400,000 poly terrain (instead of ~50,000,000)
• 50,000 poly water mesh
• 8k texture (instead of 80k)

v0.9.0 released (03-07-2023)

• Added flat color options for land or water
• Added opaque water material

v0.8.0 released (18-06-2023)

• Added version without vertical exaggeration

v0.7.0 released (11-05-2023)

• Added country internal border (states and provinces) textures (50 x 8k textures)
• Added foliage mesh to enable foliage painting tool

v0.6.0 released (29-04-2023)

• Added country border textures (50 x 8k textures)
• Added animation sequence used in showcase video

v0.5.1 released (25-04-2023)

• Blue Gem released!

Technical Details

This product supports Nanite for Unreal Engine 5.0+

Features: 

•  4 x levels with stylized planet smaller than real-world scale (approximately 2000 Unreal units in diameter) .
• 1 x level with world surface at 11x vertical exaggeration (shown in Showcase video)
• 1 x level with world surface without vertical exaggeration (see Gallery image with 'Realistic surface height version' label for example)
• 1 x level with world surface made from a single sphere of ~400,000 triangles and using 8k textures.

Number of Unique Meshes: 578

Collision: Yes - automatically generated

Triangle Count: ~52,500,000

LODs: No

Number of Materials and Material Instances: 6 Materials, 687 Material Instances

Number of Textures: 407

Texture Resolutions:

• 8192x8192
• 8192x7160

Supported Development Platforms: Windows

Documentation: 

If you are experiencing seams and Nanite triangulation issues, please press play and stop to execute the console variables in the Level Blueprint.

Notes:

This project uses data from NASA sources. Many thanks to NASA for their incredible work, especially the team behind Visible Earth.