Proceducal Mesh Sculpting and painting plugin

This is a plugin developed by me and Freestyledork. we have been working on it for almost a couple of months now and we thought it was time to see if there is any interest in it and to get some feedback,suggestions or requests.

Description:

Allows you to use the procedural mesh component in a much more easier way with new blueprint nodes custom made for the job. Realtime vertex painting and mesh sculpting is now as easy as adding a couple of nodes in your blueprints. Use it for deforming, “landscape” or why not let your players sculpt their own custom stuff?

Video only shows a small portion of what can be done and is taken at a early stage.

Nodes:


**Features as of now:
**

  • Sculpt tool with ready to use brushes perfect for city builder games or deformation of meshes.
  • Supports sculpting across multiple meshes
  • Supports scaling of meshes.
  • Supports planes, cubes and custom mesh shapes.
  • Supports undo function
  • Vertex Painter tool that easily allows you to set the vertex colors in real-time on proceducal meshes
  • Node to get all needed information for saving and re-creating your meshes.
  • Advanced performence and visual controls
  • Blueprint version of the plugin is also available (Still requires plugin so not fully standalone blueprint)

Upcoming

  • Create planes from heightmaps
  • Dynamic Tesselation
  • Automatic deformation of meshes based on strength

Performence notes:

Sculpting meshes performence is highly depending on how many vertices your mesh got. We do work on optimization all the time to support super high detail meshes. Other ways of increasing performence is to use mesh sections or simply make smaller tiles with the same vertex density.

Painting is extremly fast, the vertex count will hurt your draw time more than painting will affect your cpu time.

We will update this post with more videos and pictures as we get closer to being done.

Looking forward to hear your thoughts and inputs on this little plugin :slight_smile:

Neat, colour pallet on preview video reminds me warcraft 3 editor :slight_smile:

Warcraft 3 editor was amazing so taking that as a good thing haha :smiley:
The ui will be tweaked before a release thats mainly for our internal testing :slight_smile:

I would love to have this please :eek:

We are on the final stretch so hopefully it’s not too far away now :slight_smile:

A bit of an update!

There are tons of ways to improve the performence of meshes you wish to modify. Some games dont need super accurate normals or tangents, or if you planning on modifiyng 10,000verts+++ per tick you can cut down on normal and tangent calculations and save a ton of frame time. We try to test as many scenarios as possible with different models of hugely different vertex count, from 10 to 100,000.

Unfortunately something seems broken with the forums today so it only accepts a single image, more videos and images are coming soon:

Please, add, dynamic tessellation, procedural generation and voxel capabilities.

Dynamic tessellation is on my todo list :slight_smile:
with proceducal generation could you be more specific what you are looking for? Terrain styled generation, random planets or totally random meshes?

Hi @Lambdarevolution

For 3D object deformation: could be cool to replacing planes (Like landscape editor) by any other 3D object like sphere for planets, cubes for alien structures or cylinders, etc),:

For procedural noise generation in the 3d object (Deformed or created in the previous step) could be included a additive heightfield blending method using procedural controls to generate fractal noise effects as tileable seamless gray-scale material for scattering perturbation effects, like: Erosion Effects (Diffusive, Thermal, Glaciation, Wind, Alluvium, Fluvial, River Valley) and Global Effects (Grit, Peaks, Plateaus, Terraces, Cracks, Craters) and Slots for imported textures

And maybe slots to add material including normal and POM (like simple texture or procedurally generated), for manual painting and/or dynamic blending in the object generated in previous step considering terrain slope, cavity, AO and heightfield.

But I think this goes way beyond Vertex Painter, but that’s the idea and the feedback. Thank you for reading:)

This is potentially very exciting news for a game project I’ve been developing. Due to the lack of detail in the core terrain/landscape tools, which is limited to 1m grid spacing, and also the inability to clearly define transition borders between different grass cut areas I am forced to use static meshes for terrain (similar to varying grass areas on a golf course). So…my main question is do you think this plugin would be a feasible option for use on imported static mesh terrain? Big advantage it would provide is the ability to tweak or maybe even sculpt areas where the imported mesh (based on 1m lidar data) requires to accurately reproduce certain slopes. Right now I do all terrain work in 3rd party tools but it would sure be nice to do most of this work directly within the UE4 editor environment.

Thanks

Hi Uvhausen, yes you can use a static mesh convert it to proceducal, modify it and use the data to save it as a static mesh. It would need to be setup in blueprints before you start modify it so you have a way of saving it once your happy with it.

Looks very promising indeed. Like Uvhausen, I also need to be able to sculpt and modify static mesh on a very detailed level. Typically I have been using Meshmixer for this as I love some of the features of that software. Their tools are great. I love that you can create a spline (although you can only paint the a shape and then tell it to use the border as the spline instead of being able to just draw in a spline manually), tons of sculpting options and even things such as adaptive remesh, which is fantastic at keeping your final tweaked mesh very optimized.

I think you guys are only scratching the surface here on this. If you made is so we could use draw splines on the static meshes in addition to powerful sculpt and mesh optimizing tools, wow, that would be fantastic.

Hi jeff, just need to make sure we are on the same page. This is not a subsitute for any 3d software at all. This plugin is for mesh editing within the game itself in realtime (think sim city etc). Now you can save your meshes created in game but its not the intended use. Unless we get more requests for a standalone window editor it will continue to be only ingame/realtime editing

Got a question on collision and collision update speed, made a really quick video from my laptop using a physical sphere. Tiles got 441verts and is using perfaces normal calculation.

Another quick update is that deformation is almost ready, i will post a longer video about it once it work 100%.

I also got a request to lock the edges of a sculptable & deform meshes. It’s now an option and is very useful if you only want parts of your map/models to be modable or deformable.

A bit more clear view of Locked/Holding edges option for open meshes, here tested with deformation but works the same if your sculpting.

Hi. My game requires real time creation of craters in the landscape using C4 etc. Would your plugin allow this in the standard ue4 landscape (ie, not a static mesh version of a landscape?).
Regards
John

Hi SlinkyMuffins, no you cannot deform the standard ue4 landscape with this plugin.

What you can do is replace parts of it where you need it to be deformable (if you dont need the whole map to be destructable). It can also be used for tanks,cars, metal objects etc that needs to be deformed during runtime.

If that sounds like a path you could go i could make a quick example of it in action.

We are now really close to submission, expect it to happend within a few weeks. Ive kept on exposing almost everything used in the background to bp so you can make your creations even more customized :slight_smile:

PS we are looking for serious testers pm for more info :slight_smile:

Hey I wanted to know if this could be use for real-time deformable terrain for vehicles? If so I would like to see it in action.

Hi racerindiekid, if you mean use proceducal meshes as terrain and deform them, then yes that is possible, you could use paint at the same time to make the material realistic. Dont have access to my main pc for a couple of more weeks just my laptop but i will try to make a simple video for you as soon as possible :slight_smile: