Altermesh -- Blender Geometry Nodes in Unreal Engine!

hello ladies gentlemen it's mike here at game from scratch and if you're a regular on this channel you know that i'm pretty excited about blender geometry nodes if you have never heard of blender geometry notes wow you're in for a treat today because of two things first i'm gonna give you a quick introduction to them and then i'm gonna show you how you can go ahead and use them in unreal engine and then you're going to start seeing the power here it enables you to basically create tools you can create uh item generators that are procedurally driven and you can actually then use those blend files directly inside of unreal engine using alter mesh but first a little bit about geometry notes here you can see one of the sample files don't worry i'll show you how to go ahead and get this in a bit but this is three cupcakes and each one of these cupcakes is actually being procedurally generated using the same geometry nodes network you can see the controls over here geometry nodes are added just as a modifier geometry nodes like so and then you select the geometry node type that you want to use i'll show you the geometry node network in just a bit but first i want to showcase what they are capable of so here you can see um three different cupcakes once again some sprinkles all around it and what you can do is procedurally control so if we want the radius to go up we can do so i want to bring it back down we can do so want to change the dough surface height we can do so there we want to change the amount of cream on the top of our guy here we can do it right there so you can see how you could use this to create trees um bushes shrubs buildings uh basically anything that you can procedurally define you can do so using this guest so again let's let's uh let's remove the sprinkles we want less sprinkles oh wait no we want more sprinkles and each one of these is a separate instance so each one of these can be controlled so we want a fat cupcake there and a skinny cupcake over here basically that's the procedural aspect of it really powerful stuff a quick look at what geometry node network looks like we'll just bring this guy up there is a new editor as of blender 2.93 i think by the way this is blender three and there were a lot of re-architecting and change node names between two point nine x and three so you probably want to use three especially with alter mesh because it doesn't seem to like some of the 2.93 stuff so you can see this is the node that is creating the cupcakes so you can see here you can find a number of inputs uh these are values that actually like what you're seeing right here that can be specified by the way all of these are animatable as well which is pretty awesome and then you go through and you kind of just create everything using those inputs like so we just walk on through so you're probably creating the underlying cup the dough inside the sprinkles that go around it and so on and it's just basically a series of nodes that are chained together and ultimately joined up and outputted as a set of geometry in terms of nodes there are a ton of them available that you can work from and using this combination of nodes you can basically procedurally create just about anything and the nice thing is since it's parametric you can add whatever properties you want to this guy and then again control them at your will so this is some pretty powerful stuff especially in the world of game development so let's say you want to bring this over to unreal engine well that is where this is the star of today's show comes in by the way if you do want to check out this scene or others it is available um the blender has their demo files section it's available at forward slash download four slash demo dash files scroll on down and you're gonna find a number of examples i use them all the time in my videos about blender because they're way better artists than i am you'll see here they have an entire geometry node set section including the cupcakes we just saw in action okay so now what we're going to look at is ultramesh now ultramesh is a new plugin released just a couple days ago for unreal engine that enables you to use geometry nodes from blender directly inside of unreal engine and it does a really good job of it now by the way this is still under development cool thing here is there is a free version that's what we were looking at today the personal version for non-commercial projects and you can get it for free there is also a commercial version so personal free commercial for commercial projects also comes your source code that'll be 100 bucks which is quite reasonable in my opinion so basically you want to grab it come on in here say yeah i want this guy say the amount you want to pay say i want this put in your email address and it will download a zip file zip file content extracted look like this basically just go ahead and import the you project file into blender sorry into unreal engine and you are good to go and that is where we're going to continue now by the way it did not work in mac os which is kind of unfortunate all right so here you see it once you load it up this is what you get now there is some work you've got to do now first off you can see here no example and if you want to see that example you have to do some setup by the way if you want to walk through a tutorial showing you how to do all this it's not really intuitive but what you do is come here to this guy right there and you say start tutorial and then this will walk you through step by step what you need to know here you want to open up the documentation click here open documentation and it will bring you basically to their website there's no extra information but hopefully in the future there is better information available there but if you want to run through the tutorial click that guy and you're good to go but i'll show you everything you need to know first thing you're going to need to do is go to your project settings so settings project settings or edit project settings scroll on down here it is installed as a plugin called altermesh now notice example nothing there now what you need to do is tell it where your blender is so mine quite obviously is in my downloads folder because of course it is uh so i'm gonna just go here pick it out grab the blender exe this is blender three by the way and then once you have defined that you're done that is it for setup and you'll notice poof our example just showed up so now let's go take a look at that example in action and you get an idea of exactly what this guy is capable of so here you can see a procedurally generated city it's it's created a number of different buildings and so on i'm going to go ahead and select this guy and then what you're going to see here is you've got parametric control which is pretty cool you'll also be able to find it down here uh so that is under the examples city generator and right here you can open that one up and you can edit the effects here and you can also re-import it i'll show you how you can bring blend files in it is super super easy so this guy is controlled right here any one of these guys it's just like you were back in blender controlling those various different parameters so let's say we want our city to be taller i could set this to 30 floors max instead and then boom our city procedurally updates we want to change the size of it all right so let's make this six width there boom wider city so you can see how you could use this thing to create just about any kind of content you want and have it procedurally driven so you can have someone that creates basically these tools or templates inside of blender using geometry nodes and then you can instance them directly in your game engine so pretty cool stuff on the whole by the way if you want to go back to normal you can do a restart instance okay maybe i'm wrong on that by the way if you want to create more of them literally just drop one into the scene and boom you have a next instance of it which by the way is completely separate so here let's make this one short you're gonna see it instances separate from this one now in terms of examples there are a number of other examples here so example they've got one that is spline power and i'll uh show you so this example uh where are you physically located okay uh it is using geometry nodes to create this thing but you're gonna notice it's still using splines and it's still compatible with the unreal engine spline system so what i can do is i can come here and i can add a spline point in the middle for example and we move that around like so but you've also got the the controls like you would expect uh from otherwise you also can hook up a number of different ways which is kind of neat you can have blueprint control so for example this guy right here there is a blueprint behind so this is again an instance object from uh blender but it is being controlled by blueprints so you see over here standard blueprint uh is handling uh parametric updates so we can change the radius and the height and so on using blueprints in this example and those are available right here so and you've even got animation support and play or simulate to run let's do a simulate come on come on okay i'm not sure how to run that demo so we will uh oh there we go all right so you see uh you can do animations as well so that is another example that's available right here and there is an and um there's a blueprint controlling it as well so here's the the animation control blueprints on that guy um you've got uh control over materials so i'm gonna do a control e to open up the blueprint and you can see the material definitions for that guy uh pretty cool stuff i have to say now in terms of if you want to bring in your own example now this doesn't seem to be flawless by the way because i think it's a blender 2.9 versus a three so i'm not getting materials immediately but let's go back to that example i was showing earlier this cupcake one let's bring in a cupcake so go over here i will go to my downloads folder i will go cupcakes.blend once again you can grab the example from uh that uh that website i showed you earlier on switch over here and just drop the blend file into your scene you're gonna notice that blend file is imported as an alter mesh instance we can open that guy up and have control there's the default parameters and so on if we want to bring it back in we can re-import it to our heart's content but now we can go ahead and create us some blueprints so to create a blender object uh geometry nodes object we're using ultramesh in unreal engine you drop it in and you drop it in your scene that's it we're done the one thing i have found though the pivot points seem to be off i'm not 100 certain why and then the other thing that i'm finding is i don't necessarily get the materials they're defined all of the various different materials that were there uh so the sprinkles the dough and so on but for some reason they don't carry over and i don't know again if that is a blender two point x versus three point x thing or something i'm assuming that eventually it would just work flawlessly uh but these every example i brought in seemed to be just a little bit off um from that other uh folder so i think they might just need to be updated but again you got procedural control over here so you want a fat cupcake create a fat cupcake it will update uh you want to change the amount of cream on said cupcake uh let's make the cream wider and then we want to change the number of sprinkles on the floor let's do so and all the little scattered sprinkles we shall have more of them and to duh more cupcake folds at the bottom or less let's do less so they'll be bigger there you go so you can create just about any kind of procedurally drivenable drivable drivable geometry that you want so you can see how you can create like these really cool extensions to uh unreal engine but do it entirely in blender and then hand them over to your artist and they can just do things to their heart's content and by the way they again once again can do blueprint controls on them animations and so on uh it's a pretty darn powerful tool as you saw probably from this example this one probably showcases it the best you can create some pretty elaborate geometry node networks you can see how you can create again cities or roads or buildings or whatever and then you just basically instantiate them just like any other object literally just drop them in the scenes and you have new instances so boom that one's in or we go back here once again let's make another city and that is all that was required to create another city so really really a powerful set of tools i love geometry knows i think this is the future i also find them a little bit more approachable than like houdini which is like my white whale but uh the the way that blender is implemented maybe because it's such a small subset so far i do find it not as like i'll i'll admit when you first look at a geometry known network especially a complete one like this they look scary but they're really not that bad it is programming in a way actually it is programming just straight out and you can create multiple node networks that drill down into each other like you would with functions and code uh but really it's kind of straightforward you're setting a bunch of parameters in you're doing a bunch of things with them and then you're spitting out geometry that's it that's the idea behind it and you can take these blend files uh install ultra mesh and literally just drop your blend file into unity and sorry into unreal engine and just use it procedurally there pretty darned cool stuff so if you want to go ahead and check that one out uh it's available at altermesh.com again there is a completely free version that is what you saw in action today and this is a project that has a heck of a lot of potential let me know what you think comments down below i will talk to you all later goodbye

Channel: Gamefromscratch

Views: 11,756

Keywords: Altermesh, Altermesh Review, Blender, Blender 3, Blender3D, City Generation, Game Development, GameDev, Geometry, Geometry Nodes, Plugin, Procedural, Review, Unreal

Id: IvAZXnK8xcU

Length: 13min 6sec (786 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 13 2021