engine/foliage wishlist - static mesh placement import/export

Development Modding ARK: Survival Evolved
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An engine/foliage feature that would be nice-to-have would be allowing static meshes(thinking of the current foliage system) to allow file import/export of mesh location,scale,rotation for a given level. I’ve seen blueprint examples that do this at runtime, but I’m thinking more of how the current landscape textures are supported with allowing other programs to generate the layerInfo file texture map areas based on conditions like height or slope and would be convenient to be able to produce foliage maps with similar scripting inputs(trees or types of environments at various altitude or near certain defined areas as rivers or clearings, etc).

Hand-drawn, manual approaches are great for creating unique/personal environments, but even artists tend to work from recycled content(kits) changing location,scale,rotation with larger scale projects such as Skyrim http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JoelBurgess/20130501/191514/Skyrims_Modular_Approach_to_Level_Design.php and for my foliage workflows similar to terrain generation, I’d prefer to start with automated content placement based on some reasonable scripting rules in an external program producing a file that I can tweak and reapply the same rulesets/scriptiong to other landscapes, than apply the same basic rules in a repetitive(and brain-dead) manual way to each individual landscape/map.

Happy trees
3ndoflin3

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u can import and use whatever u want as long as u set it up properly?

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This is the sort of thing that would really need to be done by the guys at Epic, with the main engine branch. It isn’t really reasonable to ask for the developers here to mod in that kind of functionality to the base engine just to save you a few hours. :frowning: Really the landscape tool as it is is freaking incredible, and a massive time saver.

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My argument is that if many map makers(not just me) are doing the same repetitive/routine starting tasks over and over again with the foliage(static mesh) tool, you might as well make it a feature of the engine similar to how the material texture supports splatmaps from third-party tools such as world machine,etc when determining slope textures such as cliff,ground,etc. I am curious technically as the engine is able to write and read level-internally the location, scale and rotation of level objects to an internal format what the technical hurdles are to allowing this to be file exported/imported.

The devs at ark and epic have been and continue to be awesome(massively awesome, freaking incredible, insert praise here) as always and will continue to improve the engine and game in awesome ways based on continued constructive feedback from users,modders,etc amen.

On a different note, thanks for the ADK Launcher, it’s uploader works where the editor does not for me - look forward to your future fixes so it doesn’t create a new steam version on each upload as mentioned in other threads.

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You’re very welcome! I got some cool stuff coming for the update, especially for managing Total Conversion mods. :slight_smile: Don’t get me wrong, I think your idea is totally awesome and I can think of a ton of cool ways to use it past what you have described here, I just think it would be better to go talk with the guys in the base engine boards and see if someone would do a plugin. After that I think it would be more reasonable to ask the Wildcard guys to just add that onto their fork. cough MySQL please cough