Blockout Tools Plugin

I’ll see what we can do about that :slight_smile:

Submitted a 1.3 update, it should be live soon. Includes: new Blockout Tube, updated Railings and much more optimized grid material for blockouts.
I know, it’s not much, I wanted to include more stuff such as individual icons for blockouts in a custom category, full Android support and a possibility to have custom materials etc. But it’s best I can do at the moment due to time constraints. Sorry about that! Otherwise the update could take an another month or so.

I tried to make this easy to setup in a new update, but here’s what you can do right now quick and easy (though it’s a little dirty) - go to a BlockoutToolsPlugin/Materials/MI_BlockoutTools_Grid and set the TextureSize parameter to 128 units or whatever you’d like, it should work right away.

OMG, I need that!!! :o

Just saw a tweet about new update - looking sweet!

Btw, have you seen this https://twitter.com/Leukbaars/status…88819708125185 [USER=“35008”]Dmitry Karpukhin[/USER] ? It would be nice to have that tool in UE4!

Yep, I’ve seen this, but yet to try actually.

Love this plugin - is there any chance we could have the physical material exposed as well? So we can assign custom ones? :slight_smile:

Thanks, man. Hmm, that’s an interesting question. If I understand correctly, you want to change physical material on a default blockout grid material, without applying custom materials?

Aye! So let’s say we have made our own surfaces like Grass and Rock and we can then assign those to a blockout mesh we’ve placed in the level. These bad boys.

Alright, I’ll see what I can do :slight_smile:

Hello,
I’ve been extensively using this plugin for blocking out levels and it has been extremely useful. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to make a second version of the tube that can act as an open spline but when changing the blueprint spline component to not be set as a closed loop, the model does not update to show as an not being closed. It remains the same. Any ideas on the matter?

Hello and thanks for using it! Yeah, the spawn function must be rewritten too, though I’m yet to try it out myself. I guess I’ll add an option to tube to be cut by half in the next update. Can’t say when, I’m a bit guilty for slow updates to Blockout Tools, because of other projects…

Thanks for the response. Hope to see that in an upcoming update.
Also, I’ve noticed that the plug-in handles interior lighting and shadows fairly well but when using lit mode and setting up a night scene, the blockouts have a glow to them. Ive tried modifying the material and adding a basic normal map but I can’t see to remove the glow effect. Any ideas? I’m fairly new to UE4 after coming from other engines. I figured it might be something to do with how the normals are calculated but wasn’t able to pinpoint the issue.

Hmm, I never noticed something like that… Tried to replicate night lighting and everything seems to be normal. I guess maybe it was reflections? Can you post a screenshot?

I was wondering If It’s possible to create a Boolean between blocks.

Also, having option for collision (specifically, No collision) would be great.

Hello, I added having custom collisions to consideration.
About booleans - it’s much harder stuff than it seems to. There’s a small chance that it would be actually possible in 4.26, but that requires some investigation. Source: Mesh Generation and Editing at Runtime in UE4.26 — gradientspace

A new 1.40 version is on the way and will be available soon!

Features:

  • Unified blockout material parameters
  • Blockout material section UI redesigned
  • Added “Grid Size” and “Checker Luminance” variables to blockout material parameters
  • Collision can be toggled on/off
  • Added Editor Widget Utility Tool to convert old material parameters to new (otherwise all settings will be resetted to default)

So what’s an “Unified blockout material parameters”? Talking simple, that feature will allow you to select any number of different blockout elements and set their material parameters at once such as Color, Custom Material etc. Before 1.40 you coudn’t do that - each type had individual material parameters that couldn’t be shared at once. I believe that feature alone will simplify the workflow even further.
Besides that, that feature will allow to develop a “material preset system” using Data Tables and such and this is in to-do list right now.

There is an one downside to that - technically a new material parameters represent new variables in the parent actor of blockouts. That means that old material parameters to individual blockout actors tuned by artists will no longer work. That’s why I added an Editor Widget Utility Tool to convert old material parameters to new ones.

If you freaked out by seeing default material parameters after the update - please follow this short tutorial to convert old parameters to new: https://youtu.be/VDe4EjxGrLU
It only needed to be done once per level with blockouts and then this level needs to be resaved. After that you can forget about that Utility Tool.
This is only for users that have worked with BTP versions prior to 1.40.

Update was tested and no bigger problems should occur, but please write back if you encounter some unexpected problems. Thanks!

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Request: Numbers that appear while editing the size of the blocks (like the ruler tool (middle mouse tool)). <3

So it appears that this plugin isn’t compatible with Steam Audio, the entire editor crashes if I try to play with phonon geometry components added to my blockout objects.

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Oh, wow. I doesn’t sound good. I was going to start using Steam Audio.

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