now that arch viz has grown a bit and marketplace has also grown quite a bit, i’m starting a thread in this forum topic to get feedback if there’s any interest in this procedural escalator i’ve built. I tried submitting this awhile ago, but was rejected because i needed to include more content in the pack. i’ve already received a lot of pm’s here and on you tube, so figured i should follow through with this concept. what else would go well in this pack? was thinking procedural elevators as well (with full functionality including button panels etc.). any other thoughts?
if you want to test the current asset which i hope to wrap up this weekend, please pm me and i’ll send some blueprints along as soon as they’re ready to deploy.
Could I ask what materials maybe changed, sometime the sides of the escalator are customised with logos etc or colour coded. Also the escalator tread may need customised i.e. yellow safety lines drawn and also the side of the tread is usually coloured yellow.
-this escalator uses a lot of overhead. I’m looking into this, and time permitting, i’ll see what i can do to lower the impact on the scene
-going over three stories really starts to hit framerate
-after about 6 escalators in the scene at once, framerate is hit really hard as well, so limit how many tick during a frame
-please don’t resell…this is a work in progress, and if things go well, i’ll only sell this for like 10 dollars free anyhow
-materials are really basic. per previous comment, will see if i can find a way to make material choice really simple and flexible
-open to any ideas!
ya, width is fixed at 200cm at the moment (most escalators are between 6 and 7 feet wide, so conversion to metric made 200cm seem like a good number. i can actually split the side meshes off to make width adjustable if that’s desired for more custom control. scaling is not supported at the moment and probably won’t be as it throws off the tread/midsection calculations. custom width means i’ll have to write a different shader with world coord uv’s, but seems doable.
as for starting in a different location, what do you mean by this?
i’ll look into this tonight. probably a good idea for me to build in some visibility toggles for the meshes so people can just use the parts they want. as for the tread placement, i haven’t run into this, but will try and reproduce this. Escalators are always at a 30 degree angle, so as long as you are only adjusting the height variable that’s exposed in the blueprint to meet your floor-to-floor needs, everything should be lined up.
I found the issue, the problem is that when u move it on Z it gets all crazy, but seems to work just fine by moving it on X or Y. I think is the Point Pivot. Also theres a tread that overlaps once and awhile but not a really an issue.
good thoughts. so like a custom conveyor belt system integrated as well. i’ll probably start to tackle these ideas after the epic game jam. (come to think of it, i think something like this was mentioned in the response to my submission when I first created this content). shouldn’t be too tough to implement. i’m wondering if epic is going to release bullet train assets at some point. it looks like they had some of that content in their level design, but wasn’t sure if it was procedural.
just an after thought, being lazy in reality is one thing, but being lazy in virtual reality? that takes it to a new level…this could be called something like ‘the ultimate lazy person’s people mover pack’
awesomeness! would be fun to try and figure out a procedural version of this. probably won’t be anytime soon on my end, but pretty cool stuff.
yes, i’m putting together a customizable elevator to go along with it, and optimizing the current escalator, and will resubmit to marketplace for review. thanks for the interest!
If you are using a procedural mesh component, my advice is not to. They are too performance heavy when you have collision turned on. I actually just converted the escalator mesh from the Subway environment into a working one. I use a full set of steps animated in a loop. Works perfect. So, for a procedural escalator, my ideas would be to have a mesh for the ends of each rail. Use a spline mesh, or meshes, for the middle of each rail. (You don’t actually need a spline for this, because you just set the start and end locations and tangents) Use sockets on the end meshes for points to make a spline and use the spline length to calculate how many steps you need. Add a mesh for each step, might be able to use a hierarchical instanced component, and update their transforms in tick to move them along the spline.
Just my idea of how I would approach it. Good luck.
