Planetary LOD System in Unreal Engine 5 — Many Planets, One Chunk Pool
A single streaming procedural planet is thousands of chunk actors. Place four of them in one level and you pay for all four — memory, ticks, async builds — including the three you aren't even looking at. This video is how PlanetGen V1.6 fixed that, and the LOD transition that hides itself.
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The core observation is simple: you can only stand on one planet at a time. So a central arbiter (a world subsystem) picks the planet whose SURFACE you're nearest, gives exactly that one a full streaming chunk pool (LOD0), and leaves every other planet as a single low-poly sphere built from the same noise (LOD1). At most one pool is alive, no matter how many planets you place.
The interesting part is the handoff. Instead of dithering or fading — which shows stars through the planet and costs a translucent pass — the far sphere is scaled: slightly ABOVE the terrain peaks for the far view (so chunk detail can't poke through), then shrunk BELOW the lowest terrain once chunks are ready, where the streamed geometry occludes it for free.
Planetary LOD System in Unreal Engine 5 — Many Planets, One Chunk Pool (YouTube)
Comments (2)
this is amazing
Thank you