while my project runs and i make good progression with it, i played with the idea to make a farming simulator with UE4.
But if i look at the editor from Giants Software, i can’t figure it out how to make this possible with UE4. I mean the things like plow, or seed the fields. Then, if one field is ready for harvest, the plants are gone and the texutre from the ground changes.
Anyone who played the farming Simulator games know what i mean. Tractor and trailer, or trailer on another trailer and so on.
I have a few ideas for this, but none brings me to an end. Nothing would work. Is here anyone who can point me in the right direction?
For your interest:
Giants Software uses for the textures on the field bits. Let’s say field 1 have the plants potatos. Then texture for the naked ground is for example bit 1 and 3. If the field is plowed, then the texture with bit 1 and 8 is used. And so on. How can i use this with UE4 or is there another way? Like Render Texture to target…?
I hope someone have experience with things like this.
It is not as difficult as you may think. The first thing are the tractors and farm machines. You can export them through giants editor to blender.
There you need to remove some unnecessary parts like some collision blocks or other unnecessary parts, which don’t belong there (you can do that in giants editor as well)
The next step is to reassign and recreate all the materials and assign the right textures. For this you need to correctly select all vertices of the relevant parts which is not always obvious (most important to know is that the uv layout is intact, so no problem here) and you will need to separate some mesh parts like wheels for them being able to rotate later on. (that may take some time as the assets can have several tens of thousands of triangles with really small and detailed parts like screws)
It works best with FS 2013 assets, because for some reason the giants editor is not able to fully load meshes from the newer versions (at least the downloadable equipment from the web). Or do you know why this is happening?
You can even import your tractor as a real vehicle, for this see the vehicle tutorials (wheel offset etc.)
As for harvesting crops the only way I can think of is to make an actor for every crops mesh unit, give it a collision box and then let it collide with your other actor (vehicle part or your player).
A simple blueprint setup would look like this:
Crops actor (needs a mesh+a collision box): On component begin overlap(crops_coll_box)—>cast_to_player_farmer–>DestroyActor (or whatever: set material to a different one like “harvested crops”) and that’s it.
Planting could be done by spawning of actors or just setting a different material/mesh on collision with the corresponding actor.
Plowing would work similarly as it would destroy the harvested crops actors (or make them invisible: set to invisible texture) when they overlap with the plow collider/actor/player etc…