I’ve been playing around with UE4 the last 3 days. Today I started on a procedural mesh generator blueprint written in c++ (Even though I’ve never written c++ before).
It’s still pretty basic, but I’m having fun and learning a ton!
Looks like something similar to what is coming in 4.8 - they showed the BP in a video, it has a little more settings like a random seed for instance but great job!
I did this mostly to learn since it’s coming with 4.8. I must say I learned a ton of stuff the last few hours!
I decided to start over and make my own ForestGenerator blueprint in c++ based on the one coming in 4.8.
Hehe…looks exactly like the procedural foliage tool to me I had the chance to actually get my hands on it and this will really be a huge changer for how we populate large environments with stuff. So yeah…dont know all the specifics of your feature, but I would also suggest you check out the tech stream about procedural foliage to get a better feel for what it does. Maybe you dont want to invest loads of time into something Epic has already implemented in the next update Here is the stream Foliage | Live Training | Unreal Engine - YouTube
Added a “dead tree” property that lets the generator remove a certain percentage of the trees. This creates some interesting open areas and some variation to the forest. This is starting to look good!
New iteration and testing out some resources from the kite demo
Here is a breakdown of the steps taken: Test map - Album on Imgur
It’s 1 forest generator and 8 foliage generators that make up the scene. The whole thing took about 10 min to setup.
Our premier game is going to have vast forests and foliage and we have yet to begin on populating these areas so it’s promising to see what can be done within BP and C++ already, not to mention the procedural trees coming in 4.8!
Nice, there could be some more smaller trees in between and some bushes, to improve the scene. What i noticed with the foliage tool, is that sometimes it adds small plants on top of trees, and when i use it, all the plants are one big instance. Would test your tool …
Started on v2 of the forest generation based on my tiling-work for the foliage.
The image is a set of rocks that are generated in a grid. You can see that it’s slightly square in the edges because it’s supposed to tile over. (Player is always in the center)
I think this method will rock for procedural landscapes!
Not sure if you want such input but why not modulate the floor grass when it is in the perimeter of a tree too? This would further improve realism and reduce time, which would otherwise be required to manually model each landscape part where trees/bushes are spawned. Thus a material with somewhat of grass and more sand-stone would be required (maybe even just blending in some gravel), or moss depending on the climate.
I forked the UnrealEngine source and look and behold! I now get no freezing when I update a lot of instances.
I wonder if my pull request will be accepted.
Current vs. modified source code. (Frametimes is how long it takes a frame to render. 17ms is about the same as 60 fps)