The globe sphere is compound of thousands of triangles which approximates well to the sphere curve for most situations. However, when you zoom in or use greater scales, using spheres based on triangles is not a good solution since clipping and z-fighting artifacts will occur on objects near the surface.
Globe Edition rendering system is designed to avoid clipping artifacts on surface due to the imperfection of triangle-based geometry. It works by rendering the different map layers from back to front without writing to z-buffer. As a result, objects around the world will not be clipped.
However, there’s a downside – if you need objects inside the globe itself, they will not be clipped! Fortunately, Globe Edition provides you with 2 custom materials/shaders for any objects that you need to go inside the globe and still be clipped correctly. They implement clipping logic in the fragment shader to provide precise clipping around the globe curve without the triangle approximation issue!
The materials are SurfaceGlobeClip (for Standard Shader materials) and UnlitGlobeClip (for unlit materials). You can test a demo of these materials in action opening demo scene #13.
