Recreate the moon in UE5 with Cesium’s free moon terrain data
Geospatial software firm Cesium has released Cesium Moon Terrain, the “first comprehensive, precise, and readily available 3D dataset of the moon”.
The data set, which was developed to support NASA’s Artemis space program, can be used to create detailed CG replicas of the moon or smaller parts of the lunar surface inside game engines like Unity or Unreal Engine, via Cesium’s free integration plugins.
Create accurate digital twins of the moon for research or entertainment work
The Cesium Moon Terrain is based on imagery collected by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), combining multiple datasets into a single 3D tileset.
Resolution is highest in the polar regions of the moon, at 1m per pixel for imagery and 5m per pixel for terrain data, falling to 100m per pixel for imagery in the mid latitudes.
The dataset was developed to support NASA’s Artemis program of lunar missions.
As well as scientific research and commercial spaceflight programs, it is available for use in entertainment work, including visual effects, games and motion graphics.
Can be streamed into Unity or Unreal Engine via Cesium’s free integration plugins
The moon terrain data is provided as 3D Tiles, the Cesium-developed open standard for 3D geospatial content.
That should make it possible to use via Cesium’s free integration plugins for game engines O3DE, Unity and Unreal Engine, and NVDIA’s Omniverse design platform.
The plugins’ 3D Tiles engines stream massive 3D geospatial datasets into the host application in real time, and provides level of detail and caching functionality.
Both the Cesium for Unity and Cesium for Unreal have been updated to support the moon terrain data: whereas representations of the Earth use the WGS84 standard, the plugins also now support ‘non-WSG84 based ellipsoids’ like the moon.
You can find a walkthrough on importing the Cesium Moon Terrain into Unreal Engine in the online documentation.
Price and system requirements
The Cesum Moon Terrain is available via Cesium ion accounts, which are free for non-commercial use, and in unfunded educational and reserach projects.
For commercial use, paid subscriptions start at $149/month.
Compiled binaries of Cesium for Unreal are compatible with Unreal Engine 4.26+ and Unreal Engine 5.0+. To use the moon terrain data, you need version 2.7.0 or later.
Compiled binaries of Cesium for Unity are compatible with Unity 2021.3 LTS or later. To use the moon terrain data, you need version 1.11.0 or later.
Source code for the plugins is available under Apache 2.0 licences.
Read more about the free Cesium Moon Terrain data on Cesium’s website
Download the free Cesium for Unreal plugin (From the Unreal Marketplace)
Download the free Cesium for Unity plugin (From GitHub)
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