i’m “serious playin’” around with Cesium and Unreal, I’m not a veteran dev so i have lots of trouble doing “simple things”.
I need to make the world a “tron-like” world, as much as possible. In that regard I apreciate every tip you can leave me in that general direction, link at tutorials or just “tech” inspirational (like this, for example).
Right now i’m here: i spent a day changing the Sample material to obtain an acid green grid on the terrain (shown in the embedded video). I wanted to change the color of the fonts of the base map using blend properties, but this is beyond me right now apparently (again, every tip is apreciated)
Now i wanna try to procedurally generate some ADDITIONAL mesh on the OSM buildings (the unmodifiable building mesh in the video), the dream is to obtain something like that on the surface
Do any of you have any idea how can i go in that direction? Isn’t it teoretically possible using geometry script, dynamic mesh and/or proper procedural meshes?
The process is entierly graphical, so you could even work in Blender.
The difference is that with Houdini you should be able to import levels and hierarchical instanced static meshes directly without having to extract and parse array of locations manually.
Yes, the idea is that it will not be entierly procedural anymore
(Its procedural in the DCC app, but then exported and re-created as a fixed thing).
That’s because the engine sucks at procedural anything (of late, it can barely support rendering so it shouldn’t exactly be surprising).
A possible alternative, if you wait about a year until they put the thing they made into a usuable state…
Epic created some sort of procedural AI system that takes a custom level you create and automatically generates and spreads randomized variations of it all around.
On paper and the highly doctored videos they release it absolutely great.
In reality, as i mentioned, unless it generates before runtime, its not going to work right on the current engine.
To make your own procedural based thing in engine, well, the best way is to make a Bluetility script that runs and generates stuff in the editor which you then save and use as a fixed result.
This can really be powered any way you prefer so long as you utilized either the Foliage system or an Hirerchical Instanced Static Mesh array to populate instance of different items all around based on whatever criteria you prefer.
If cesium is any good, it would likely provide building data which you can utilize as the locations of the instances…
thanks man, i higly apreciate the answer. A lot of things to google and process here.
Cesium is a monster in tiling and dynamically streaming real world data.
It’s the basic of the concept i’m working on, where i need to syncronize real world and game world based on geodata, on a realworld-based open world. I don’t know if that really make sense for you
i understand that real procedural generation is something really intensive on the hardware and hard to implement on the software, but i’m talking about pretty basic stuff here… i just need cubes, maybe with some light, on top of other cubes after all.
EDIT: i realize now that the embed code of youtube didn’t work on the forum, so my preview video on the first post was gone. I added it again, check it out, i think this will clarify a little what i intend. I also see that houdini can work with geodata. I’ll definitely give it a shot.
It does. It probably wont really work. At least it 100% does not for archeological applications.
The reason being the engine is based on planar math.
Syncing to an esri derived sphere outside of the engine does ofc work.
Goes back to real archviz which any DCC focuses solely on, vs a game engine for fortnite where the map size is very limited …
Checked the video.
Doesn’t really change much. Somehow (probably bluetility) you need to pop in instances of objects.
If the level is pre-built in editor before you activate PIE you should be good to even manually place stuff in or use the ProceduralFoliage tools…
Thank for the answers, i’m doing a lot of research about the interesting things you mentioned.
I’m planning of breaking down the world in different origin locations. The coordinate close to the origin doen’t have that much of a trouble. The plane of unreal is not that bothered from the scale of the globe. Of course moving far from the origin gonna be a problem, but i’m building a teleport system that it’s not really moving you across the globe, but actually rotate the globe to match the plane… the scale i’m gonna use the game in a single session is as large as a city. Users will not have the possibility to jump from a place to the other without updating the origin.
Only thing worth suggesting is to ditch the server model so that you don’t need to have fees for people to not play a game like most online games do.
P2P is ofc more prone to cheating and hacking, but it also offers enough benefits that Rockstar had been doing just that for years…
That said, Cesium is attemting to come up with a standard - and i for one applude them for the effort.
Unfortunatley it’s very doubtful theyll make any progress when they have to deal with the eggheads who run Epic Games…
