Artist Explores Starry World with Unreal Engine 5.6's Celestial Vault

Unreal Engine 5.6 launched with a variety of useful features, including Control Rig Physics, Hardware Ray Tracing, and Celestial Vault, a plug-in that implements a Day Sequence to create a dynamic night sky using real information from any day of any year in any place.

Stephen Phillips, a Solution Architect at Epic Games, used the latter to explore the whole world through the sky, "to virtually scout out astrophotography opportunities across the globe with Cesium and Google's Photorealistic Tiles."

He noted that the plug-in works great with long-exposure star trails and Milky Way time lapses, and you can see the results in his absolutely stunning video.

You can even customize it with your own constellations if you follow Alban Bergeret's tutorial.

Phillips is no stranger to Cesium: he created a tool that expands its capabilities and lets you clip out sections of Cesium's Cartographic Polygon Actor and procedurally fill them with Geometry Script. You can find his other projects on LinkedIn.

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