This is looking really cool, keep up the work! If you release it to the marketplace I’ll definitely buy it. And thanks for doing this. I’m not much of a coder, so anything that’s super hawt and is a plugin is awesome on my books.
[MENTION=887]ioFlow Studios[/MENTION] - How demanding is this tech / tool that you are currently developing on the hardware?
It was fine up until last night when I discovered the planet wasn’t ticking 
Ouchy wouch, first big performance hit of the project. On the up side, finally now, the real work can begin.
The good news is that what has been running breezily up until now, is UE4 rendering the amount of procedural meshes I needed it to (if that wasn’t working it would have been a major blockage).
So the next bunch of work will be all about slow grindy methodical testing, debugging and optimizing of the mesh calculations and generation. From there, I’ll have a much more accurate picture of what UE4 will and won’t be able to do as far as planetary terrain goes.
Wow this is really cool! I can’t say I truly understand all of the math behind it, but seeing your progress over time and how you explain each section certainly helps toward it!
Seriously, this is awesome - keep up the amazing work 
Well, I am working on getting a demo ready as soon as possible. Once I’ve got that I’ll put in an application for a grant
Thanks for the suggestion, franktech. The Unreal Dev Grants program is still in full swing, and we encourage anyone who is working on really awesome projects in Unreal Engine 4 to apply. No single person holds the key to decision making on who receives the grants, but I’ll make sure the team has an eye out for the submission.
Thanks again.
Quick note for those of you following along… false alarm with the performance hit, found another id10t error, and it’s all nice and smooth again.
YAY for false alarms
Wow ioFlow Studios you’ve been working on this for more than half a year now!
Teach me your ways, Sensei.
Anyway, great stuff and good luck to getting this packaged and in the Marketplace!
Needed a small break from coding 
Thought I’d play with some art stuff for a week or two.
Here’s a short video showing a workflow I’ve developed in blender for modelling sci fi ships (you can see I’m using it on the model from the eden videos).
Hey Simon, this is looking great!
This has always been a great interest of mine. You’re doing great! Would love any information you could give on how you did some of these? I always had huge trouble with seams and normals. 
This looks interesting - Going to need to try it. I use blender as well
Yeah, it’s getting there… the workflow is still quite time consuming but progress is steady (albeit slow).
Having said that I have been getting back into edens code, she has a few dramas at the moment and I’m just patiently working through them for an hour or two each night.
Any news on this?
Yep. Had a break for a month or two - think I burned out for a bit and had to do some art (hence the ship above) - but have been back at it for a week or two again now.
Basically I built all of the above stuff without checking along the way that it could cook or build to an executable, then when I finally did try it, it wouldn’t work <insert facepalm>
I also ran into a deep structural problem that wouldn’t let me change the number of octaves on the fly in the editor (specifically, you can only use CreateDefaultSubobject in a constructor).
Because of all this I’ve been rebuilding and refactoring the code in a clean project (testing building as I go) which has yielded a nice little grab bag of benefits:
- let me migrate to 4.12 (yay sequencer )
- moved over to the (awesome) Runtime Mesh Component
- much better code/execution flow structure and debugging (phew)
I don’t have any new screenshots of the terrain yet because I haven’t quite got the terrain mesh up and going again but I do have some more pretty screenshots of the ship above fwiw (helps me not go crazy when I’ve over coded):
I got the first stages of meshing going again (roughly):
Good stuff:
- Can change resolution (number of octaves) on the fly now
- Octave movement snapping much finer now (down from 25% of octave width to two polys)
- Cubic blending added in to help people see how the whole thing works under the bonnet
Buggy stuff:
- Still wrangling with what I call octave cropping, you can see near the end as the octave goes off the left edge of the panel it doesn’t crop properly (yet)
- Also need to re-implement the bit that chops a hole in the middle of the octave that fits the next smaller octave
But, it’s sort of going again and the structure is much cleaner and faster so yay
Size
Using clipmaps lets me do much bigger planets.
Okey doke, fixed up panel/octave interlocking issues mentioned a few posts back, did a little demo video just as proof of life:
Few more bits to fix up then on to reintroducing the height again.
Take my money!
Ok, got height going again, now I’m looking at implementing some nicer noise than basic sine waves.
I really like the way this guy does it with a node editor (disclaimer, this is NOT eden) :
But I don’t know if there’s a way to implement a custom node graph like that in the editor… any suggestions?