My names Cody from PolyPixel, we are art content creators for the UE4 Marketplace, and we have always wanted to solve a big issue for us on the Marketplace, roads. But every time I or someone on the team builds out some spline system, its either clunky, hard to work with, unoptimized etc. And we never wanted to just sell just static meshes, theres not much you can do with that from a customer standpoint. What we are looking for is someone who can help us bridge the gap and take our art and help build a spline assembly tool. Its not anything ground breaking, but we are basically sick and tired of using the landscape spline system for all things splines.
Basic feature list: Clean easy to use splines, easy swap of road types, click and drag ctrl points, smart intersections, changing sidewalks. Big thing we cant do with landscape splines is easy adjustments of on ramps, transitioning road sizes. And have it easy to edit in the details panel, and not any fussing with BP nodes. In the end it should be easy to use for large interstate highways, and down to small suburban avenues.
There are features we would love to add onto it, and expand on, but I dont want to get too ahead of myself. Getting a nice clean tool that we can use to build out road networks as fast as possible is all we would need for now. So if anyone is interest, just shoot me a line at info@polypixel3d.com, and we can discuss things further.
There are entire companies that solve basically this one problem. It turns out to be really tricky, because intersections, terrain features, traffic lights, guard rails, bridges versus embankments, shoulders, and a whole lot more end up requiring a lot of careful special cases to all work well with each other.
I think it sounds great that you want to build this tool, and I hope that you have a budget of several hundred thousand dollars to actually make it good!
Yeah, ive worked at EA where they brought in a guy to make us a road tool for 300k. Im not thinking of going that elaborate. Just something a bit more than a standard spline>spline. A lite version of a road tool. Think of it more like a tool to assist us in the selling of art, rather than us artist dressing up a fully featured tool.
“it should be easy to use for large interstate highways, and down to small suburban avenues” and “smart intersections” is as close to fully featured road tool as it gets The fact that you are going to use it just for selling art doesn’t decrease the inherent complexity a single bit.
Ill be honest, I think you guys are making this more complicated than it needs to be haha. The issues we have with the landscape tool is that it requires a landscape obviously, and theres loads of bells and whistles we just dont need. Point a to point b, mesh swapping is 90% of what we need. Swap from interstate asset, to suburban road asset. Most complicated thing I can think of is wanting to do a blend pieces. Example, having a 4 lane transitioning into an overpass. I have a 4 lane asset, a 4 lane overpass asset, and a blend asset. Just having the ability to transition between the 3 without making 3 spline assets.
Intersections, on ramps, road transitions etc. would be done via art assets that snap together. No fancy code trickery or procedural stuff. Ive used many of road tools in the past, I am not intending to get one of them. Hence the title being more directed as a ‘spline’ tool. I watched some spline and road tutorials, and I feel as an artist I could follow along and do a mediocre job with blueprints, but I dont want to sell that in good conscience. So I just figured getting some help by someone with more know how would be the best route with my time is best spent making art.
They tell you this is complicated because in fact it is; this requires development of Editor extensions and the Editor C++ API is a complicated beast to work with.
The fact that you are going to use it just for selling art doesn’t decrease the inherent complexity a single bit.