Faking a Spherical Planet with a Tileable Texture in UE5

Alina Ledeneva explored a material-based pseudo-sphere technique that makes it possible to use regular tileable textures without custom spherical UV mapping. What if I told you this planet is actually just a flat card with a regular tileable texture? There is no spherical mesh in the scene and no texture prepared in advance as a spherical map. The geometry never bends or turns into a hemisphere. The entire illusion of volume is created in the material: World Position Offset keeps the flat card facing the camera, while transformed UVs make the image look as if it were mapped onto a…