The plugin is now working with Unreal Engine 5.2 Preview 2. You can try it by using the branch 5.2 on GitHub. The plugin adds a new PCG node called “OGR Filter” which filters out PCG points based on Open Street Map data. This can be used to have the PCG graph spawn forests on their real-world locations.
I plan to make a formal release on the marketplace in a few weeks.
The new PCG node “OGR Filter” can be used to filter data points of your PCG graph by using real-world OpenStreetMap data. See three minutes demo below:
Oh wow! @LCombinator , this is fantastic. As a map maker, this thrills me to see such a plugin exist. I like how much attention you’ve put into it and I’m very curious how it all truly works.
Thank you for making such a handy plug-in for personal use! Do you plan on going commercial in the future?
Yes I will go through the publishing process soon. I don’t have much experience on pricing plugins but I’m thinking it will be around 100€. It will remain open source and free for personal use on GitHub!
I’m afraid it’s not very stable as not many people tried it, so I need to do a bit more testing the next few days. The interface might also appear obscure or hard to use, I’ll work on improving that.
If you try it, I would love to hear what you think! Are there some features that lack documentation, or are there new functionalities you would like to have?
I think that’s a perfect commercial compensation for something that can be expanded on in such a way. Keeping it free and open source really helps with feedback and letting people see how it works before deciding if they want to go commercial or do a few small things on their own.
I would love to try it. I’ll have to get it all set up and mess around with it. Might be a bit though as I’m currently struggling with 3d modeling for my personal project. I cannot guarantee a time frame but will certainly let you know what I think and what I feel about it as soon as I get the chance to play with it!
I was curious re-watching and looking over the video, I was curious if there was certain criteria that needed to be met for the water to be brought in? I might’ve missed it when looking it over again to which I apologize if so.
I think that’s a perfect commercial compensation for something that can be expanded on in such a way. Keeping it free and open source really helps with feedback and letting people see how it works before deciding if they want to go commercial or do a few small things on their own.
Thanks!
I would love to try it. I’ll have to get it all set up and mess around with it. Might be a bit though as I’m currently struggling with 3d modeling for my personal project. I cannot guarantee a time frame but will certainly let you know what I think and what I feel about it as soon as I get the chance to play with it!
Of course, and good luck with the modeling!
I was curious re-watching and looking over the video, I was curious if there was certain criteria that needed to be met for the water to be brought in? I might’ve missed it when looking it over again to which I apologize if so.
The plugin actually doesn’t support water, sorry if the video gave this wrong impression. The heightmap that I imported using the plugin is flat at the location of the lake, so I just added a simple cube (and a cylinder to cut out a part) to make the water. I edited out this part by mistake when doing the video.
However the plugin can import “paths” or “ways” from OpenStreetMap, so I guess you could import landscape splines corresponding to rivers and then do something with these landscape splines.
OpenStreetMap also has data for lakes and water bodies, so even though this is not supported at the moment, the plugin could do something with this data. (Tell me if you have something in mind!).
Hey there @LCombinator! Sorry for the delay in reaching back out. Busy week, haha!
Thank you so much for the clarification on that. I think I did get perhaps a bit confused to which I do apologize for that. At the moment I don’t have anything in mind but I certainly have this post saved for when I do mess with the plugin a little more!
This is fantastic piece of work, it looks so promising !!! I can’t wait to find some free times to give it a try, and the stand alone availability of the “splines foot print 2 building” that’s a cherry on top of a christmas present really !!!
I’m just an unproductive hobbyist but this sir is a dream coming true !!!
well and I’ll start complimenting you here because YT has started bugging me because of adblocker, I guess in a very short future it will try to blackmail me to access it, and I won’t bulge, so here I am @pierrecadeot
Wow this is so kind, thank you! What else do you need?
Next I’ll be working on improving the interface, to avoid having to enter coordinates manually.
be aware I’m speaking like if we were having a nice chat drinking by the end of the day on the seaside
so what do I need ? well not much, rather let’s say what i’m dreaming about ?
perhaps it is already the case, and if it is then wow
If not, let’s say I want to import huge landscape, that need to be processed by the plugin chunk by chunk, and translated into unreal via world partition… in a manner that automagically, stuff are imported, and tailored down to meet standard RAM capacity, like culling and LODs so, the processing won’t try to load everything at once, but automate the process of importing, decimating lods or converting to nanite, saving in the project then unloading the area when complete before working on another, the size of which would be proportionate to available memory…
My toy/dream example target experiment project, to be concrete, would be to render my island, at full scale, with max res (1m) heightmap, of course it’s impossible to load a 72000x72000 heightmap as a whole, neither with nice OSM content on top of it, but, would something approaching this could be processed ? (and it’s quite ok if processing takes a week)
well, you asked for it
beyond that, your plugin could explore some addition to flirt with water plugin, ocean project or fluid flux to name a few, in the same automagical scale processing
perhaps it is already the case, and if it is then wow
Unfortunately no, this plugin is still not there yet!
This is the best you can do right now:
One limitation is that the RGE API only allow for 10k pixels heightmaps.
So you can make manually 7x7 = 49 different landscapes to get 70k pixels.
You would import one landscape, then save, unload, and then do the next one. Very tedious!
Also the problem with this is that you would have many landscapes instead of one, which might be annoying to deal with. They should align properly, but it’s possible that the border will be visible, and it will be annoying for roads or other assets which are crossing landscapes.
Another possibility is to manually download the RGE tiles for your area, and I believe they are 1k tiles. So if the area is a 70km square, then you would have 4900 tiles. You can try importing all the tiles as is, with the default import method of Unreal Engine, but I don’t know if Unreal deals with that many files properly. I had the impression that everything was loaded into memory at once, so it wouldn’t work. Perhaps this is something Unreal will improve in the future, or maybe it already works?
I opened an issue here to keep track of this feature in my plugin:
