Metaplanets Creator 2.1: forests, skies and speed
2.1 is about what your planets look like up close and from the ground. It adds textured forests grown from node graphs, a way to design a planet's sky without writing code, a 3D preview of your terrain as you build it, and up to 3x faster terrain generation. It ships for Unreal Engine 5.6, 5.7 and 5.8 with full C++ source.
What's new
Lush forests, grown from node graphs
Texture Synth now draws leaves, needles, fern fronds, grass blades and bark. Plant Synth turns those textures into leaf-card trees. A new temperate European forest kit includes beech, oak, birch, spruce, ferns, meadow grass and leaf litter: 7 species, 14 variants and 12 texture sets, all rebuildable from the graphs. The S_TemperateForest spawner places them by ecology: beech stands on moist ground, oak and birch at the edges and in clearings, spruce in the cold.
Forests to the horizon, even on UE 5.6
Every non-Nanite plant now gets a multi-directional impostor as its last LOD. It is baked from 64 directions, so canopies still read as forest at distance without Nanite foliage.
The Atmosphere Graph: skies without code
Design a planet's sky as a node graph. Air, haze, ozone, ground fog, the sun and cloud layers are all nodes. A live Sky Preview renders with the real sky renderer while you edit, from the ground to orbit. Assign the graph to a planet's atmosphere and the world updates. Five example skies ship with it: Earth, Mars, a hazy moon, a storm world and an alien world. Graphs copy and paste as JSON.
See the planet as you build it
The terrain graph editor has a new 3D Preview tab. It shows a lit globe coloured by height, with relief and sea-level controls, and refreshes live as you edit.
Faster terrain
Terrain graphs now compile custom nodes into the fast path, and skip noise detail too fine for the tile to show. Gameplay height queries stay exact. On our Wildlands planet, tiles generate 3.1x faster (331 ms down to 107 ms per tile) and stream 2.7x faster while descending (31.9 up to 86.7 tiles per second). On MP_TestPlanet, tiles generate 1.6x faster (271 ms down to 165 ms), with streaming unchanged. Measured on one thread on the same machine, 2.0.2 against 2.1.
Fixes
Clouds no longer stretch into stripes or radial streaks away from the poles, and the weather map no longer has a seam. Cloud patterns move as a result: the same settings give different but similar-looking clouds.
Tree trunks under a closed canopy no longer turn blue from open-sky lighting.
Known issues
Clouds seen from the ground tend toward an even veil as coverage rises. Distinct cumulus cells are still weak.
Aerial views over dense temperate forest are GPU-heavy, about 40 ms in the editor at 250k instances.
In deep shade under a closed canopy, leaves and ground can still look slightly blue.
Get it
Metaplanets Creator 2.1 and Metaplanets Atmosphere 2.1 are available now for UE 5.6, 5.7 and 5.8. The full changelog is included with the download.