Planet Data

Planet Data Asset is the central authoring asset for a planet.

Create one from the Content Browser asset menu, or duplicate the included example asset:

Content/Example/Assets/ExamplePlanetData

Dimensions and LOD

Setting	Description
Planet Radius	Base radius before elevation is applied. Stored in Unreal units.
Noise Height	Converts normalized material elevation to world-space displacement.
Generation Seed	Stable seed supplied to generation material expressions. Identical inputs and seeds produce identical terrain.
Min Recursion Level	Lowest terrain recursion level.
Max Recursion Level	Highest terrain recursion level.

Materials

Setting	Description
Planet Material	Visible surface material. Add Planet Biome Material Output when blending per-biome material attributes.
Generation Material	Computes global height, biome height outputs, and vertex colors.
Biome Mask Material	Chooses biome IDs for the baked biome-cell map.

Biome Layers

Biome Layers is an ordered list of biome entries. Each entry has:

• a display Name
• optional Foliage Data
• a stable internal identity used to preserve material connections when layers are reordered

Layer order matters. Later biome layers have priority over earlier layers in the biome mask pipeline.

Biome names also matter for material synchronization. The Planet Data biome name must match the Entry Names used by the biome output nodes in the biome mask, generation, and surface materials, as well as entries on Planet Biome Strengths. Empty names are normalized to Biome 1, Biome 2, and so on.

Named biome-strength bindings are stored per Planet Data asset and applied to each terrain chunk's dynamic material instance. Planet Data assets with different biome orders can therefore use the same parent surface material.

Settings Owned by Material Outputs

The current pipeline keeps settings next to the graph that consumes them:

Output Node	Authored Settings
Planet Biome Mask Output	Biome Cell Resolution and Biome Cell Seed.
Planet Elevation Output	Biome Transition, height-based material blending, blend smoothness, and biome Voronoi warp strength/scale.

Planet Data stores synchronized cooked caches of these values. Edit the output nodes, then run Rebuild Planet Pipeline; do not treat the hidden cache fields as authoring controls.

Generated Data

The asset stores a generated Biome Cell Map texture. The baked texture is:

width  = 6 * BiomeCellResolution
height = BiomeCellResolution

The six cube faces are packed horizontally. Each texel corresponds to one Voronoi biome cell.

Build Buttons

Button	Use When
Rebuild Planet Pipeline	Materials, biome layer setup, node pins, generated data, or placed planets need a full rebuild.
Refresh Biome Map	Only the generated biome-cell texture needs to be refreshed.