Grand designer, the procedural universe generator, is available in V1.0 on Steam, no more early access.
It’s a planet, asteroid, terrain and space backgrounds creation tool that you can use easily with unreal.
The software uses DX11 directcompute shaders to update everything in realtime.
You can export textures sets (albedo, normal map, roughness, ambient occlusion) and the optimized geometry of the planet that you can use directly with the Unreal engine. A sample scene is also provided in the application to help you integrate your creations in your unreal projects.
Here is the trailer of the V1.0 :
The -15% promotion will last a week (ends 04-20-16), check the store page
Hehe, thanks … Well, it may be the starting point of a game. It is already used for some projects, the biggest one being “Fractured Space” by Edge case games, made with the Unreal engine
Looks wonderful, but how does it relate to UE4 and tools ?
I am seeing using it to generate planets for rendering in Blender and also to use them in UE4 (either as actual planet on a planetary scale or just as a decorative actor). Is it something the program can already offer ? (export to OBJ/FBX with materials and textures to be used in 3D apps and some way it integrated into UE4 for in-game use)
Thanks,
It exports the mesh (.obj) and all the textures you need. There is an unreal 4 preset (albedo, roughness, normal, ambient occlusion) but you can add other textures too, like emissive or advanced masks (but this requires the Pro-Dlc).
You can also simplify the mesh geometry by a given amount, so you can indeed do a full geometry planet and a simplified one (or more) for the LODs if you want.
There is a sample scene provided with some material variations that you can use as reference (basic planet, planet+clouds, planet with displacement, planet+emissive, atmosphere …)
It’s a tool that allows you to create resources (meshes and textures) that you can use for your unreal projects. See the previous answer for more details (the one to the DamirH post)
@franktech
Interesting project, but it’s a different approach. Some people already asked me if it’s possible to generate the planets directly in the unreal engine, but it’s definitely another project on the integration side. The advantage (well, at least for me) with the current application is that it is stand alone and can be used for virtually any usage, and it’s not dedicated to a specific platform. It’s a similar to asking for Maya to be integrated into unreal directly … I know that it’s definitely not the same scale, but you get the idea.
Thank you for this great app.
Will you put up a quick-start guide to show us how to import the mesh into UE?
I had a quick run with the app but after importing the planet obj file into UE .,. i got something really weird http://prntscr.com/au4edh
I had this configured when importing into UE http://prntscr.com/au4guw
and got this warning : No smoothing group information was found in this FBX scene. Please make sure to enable the ‘Export Smoothing Groups’ option in the FBX Exporter plug-in before exporting the file. Even for tools that don’t support smoothing groups, the FBX Exporter will generate appropriate smoothing data at export-time so that correct vertex normals can be inferred while importing.
I plan to add more tutorials in the coming weeks, when I’ll have some free time to do so. But as there is a demand for the export/import I’ll try to do Unreal and Unity export/import as soon as possible.
Don’t forget to have a look at the sample provided with the application (Help->Open samples). You can check the Unreal_4_Sample zip, where you have a complete project with several materials shown as examples, with atmosphere, clouds, displacement … etc
On your example, the decimation level may be too high is you have such artefacts, on your object. You can try first without decimation and then try to increase the value. The normals looks like you have hard edges everywhere, I don’t have such problem with the tests I’ve done … You can try to change the import normal to compute instead of import, this may help.
… Well, it may be the starting point of a game. It is already used for some projects, the biggest one being “Fractured Space” by Edge case games, made with the Unreal engine