Finally, Grand designer, the procedural universe generator, is available on Steam. It’s a planet and space backgrounds textures creation tool that you can use easily with unreal4.
The software generates textures sets (albedo, normal map, roughness, ambient occlusion) that you can use directly with UE4. A UE4 sample scene is provided in the package.
And by the way, it’s also used by Edge case games in their 5 vs 5 space battle UE4 game Fractured space. You can see it in action in their latest trailer :
There is a 15% discount for the launch of the product : Steam store page
GD is exporting a texture set that you use in a material that you assign to a sphere. If you use the standard unreal preset, it exports the baseColor, roughness, normalmap and ambient occlusion map, but this can be customized if needed. So, there is no plugins on the UE4 side, just texture resources that you import in your project.
There is a sample scene with a planet and a background as reference, the material itself is quite straight in this case.
For your second question, here is a comparison of the features of the regular version and the pro one :
So the pro allows you to export at higher resolutions and also to export feature masks if you want to do more advanced shaders, with details or similar stuff.
I hope this clarify things? Don’t hesitate to ask if it’s not the case.
It just exports texture maps. If you’re highly familiar with the material editor it can be useful. I’ve been working in it since yesterday and it is a beautiful program, but not for those without material editor skills. I will be honest, at the moment I’m a bit regretful for my purchase. But for those who are more skilled in using the material editor then its many options can be extremely useful.
Yes, indeed, it ‘just exports texture maps’ as described in the product page, but all maps are standard ones and their usage is clearly defined (Albedo, roughness, AO, normal, clouds (rgb+a), rings (rgb+a) and height).
You can easily have nice results without a lot of hassles, as always with UE4 …
You can still add some nodes if you have clouds for instance : (Texture + linear interpolate) if you add it directly to the ground or just a secondary sphere with a simple texture if you want clouds above the ground.
This is awesome. I kind of wish they you could just outright purchase a pro version, unless I am missing it on steam. But that being said, the quality of the textures outstanding. Achieving quality like this is a task on itself in photoshop. I will purchase as soon as funds are available
@Arixsus, @HeadClot : Great! Thanks @lunyBunny : Why do you want a plugin for Unreal? The software is a standalone application that exports textures that you can use directly in Unreal (Albedo, roughness, normal, AO), it’s a quite direct pipeline, and a sample scene is provided with the application.
Concerning the export :
Yes, you can export rings texture (RGB+Alpha) - the geometry is not exported so far, but it’s a quite simple one
Asteroids can be made by using displacement maps, but it’s not really an optimal way of doing it. It’s probably better to optimize the mesh you do that way if you intend to use them in a game.
Can you elaborate on what you see in this plugin? I should say that I’m a bit confused.
>Please, fix the stiore in the footer of your page!
What do you want to fix on which page? I’ve check my website (www…com) and everything is fine from what I see, I’v also checked the steam store page and don’t see any problems.
You’re welcome,
The “volumetric nebulae thing” is basically a ray casting on a 3Dnoise … The densities of several layers of noise are accumulated to obtain something similar to clouds, except that a color ramp is used to add more richness to the final result. The lighting is also done in a similar way. All of this ensures a coherency on the result.
It renders a longitude-latitude map, like the one I use on the planet, except that it is mapped on a very large reversed sphere. The texture is in RGBE (RGB+Exponent, a kind of HDR format), but the current range of colors is somewhat limited for the moment, I’d like to improve that in future releases. It can be used as a simple RGB texture for the moment to be honest.
