Cesium for Unreal: The World in 3D

hi everybody Jonathan here and welcome to an exciting exploration of the groundbreaking plug-in cesm for Unreal Engine now I've been looking forward to getting into Unreal Engine for a while and this is the very first video I've made for the channel so I hope it's uh something that you're finding interesting if it goes well I'll plan to make some more in the future so in this video we'll be delving into into the inative integration of cesium which is a plug-in that Unreal Engine has that allows you to create Virtual Worlds basically this is seamlessly integrated with geospatial capabilities for dynamic terrain generation the czm plug-in owers you to develop and basically look at real world environments and it's amazing in that you can have the entire world in your computer so if you're an architect or designer looking to do context studies or Urban Design or just get a feel for the context you're designing in the CCM plug-in could be something that's very exciting for you so let's embark on this journey and push the boundaries of what we can do with World creation inside our computers if you are new around here please join the channel and subscribe as ever and I look forward to you uh giving me comments and feedback on this video so thanks for watching Everybody Let's jump into the video so let's get started with this new tutorial on cesium for Unreal Engine so the first thing you're going to want to do is go and download Unreal Engine which is free software for both Mac and windows which is pretty amazing in its own right for such powerful software in the Epic uh Marketplace you can basically search for the application czm so here we go czm for unreal and you can see this is totally free so available again for mac and windows supported platforms so go ahead and download that um it's a fairly decent sized download so it will take a little while but basic that will install into the version of unreel using I'm using version 5.1 at the moment um 5.3 I think is the latest unreal um they keep updating it with lots of new features all the time okay so you can see we're downloading the plugin in the background and then once that's downloaded um we a few more steps before we can get up and running so just follow these carefully and you'll be with me in a few minutes up and running in this amazing New World okay so here we go we've installed the plug-in so now basically we can open a copy of a project or if we do want to we can go on to perhaps the games and just start a new blank level so that's fine I'm just going to go for a blank level on the game rather than a recent project okay so Unreal Engine will begin the process of launching can take quite a while and when it does you'll notice that it's already opened with a blank level so the very first thing you need to do is go into your um plugins within Unreal Engine and now you need to actually check cesium is installed and then the next time you launch unreal it will be available for you so it takes a few minutes to get this up and running so once you've checked the CDM plugin and uh unreal restarts you'll notice that now immediately on the left side we've got CM for unreal available so the very first thing we're going to go to do is go and create a new level from our content browser and basically we're going to just pop in there let's rename that cium and we can basically double click it and click save selected to load that new level now at the moment there's uh really nothing in there okay so the next step is to actually connect cesium um using uh perhaps your unreal epic games account or another login um it's up to you really so basically I'm just going to go through this process as I'm using my un real account it will ask me for some Verification codes and within a few seconds we're already up and running now if you do want to you can also sign into to CM itself to create an account and that will kind of keep you up to date with new developments and information and maybe something that I would also recommend as well fantastic so we've already now signed in the very first thing that I'm going to do is click to add a cesium sun sky and you'll see that lovely sky now comes into our world just to give us some illumination essentially into the Unreal Engine otherwise it you know beig totally black if there's no lights or anything at this stage okay so you can see I'm moving around in a sort of world where there's nothing else good okay so the second thing I'm going to do is go to Google photorealistic 3D tiles click on the plus sign and all you need to do here is just enter a default token is absolutely fine in those dialogues we'll do the same in that one and basically click use uh to connect to your project now immediately just let it load you'll notice suddenly um seom is now connected to Google and basically loading in a sort of generation of the world I'm just moving that sort of floor grid up and down but as I pan around you can see it kind of loads in the various tiles of the landscape and I'm in this amazing sort of I don't know kind of like mountainous sort of landscape already but already you know it's pretty impressive and we can navigate around using the traditional sort of um arrow keys on the keyboard or when we're in gaming mode the wter keys so I guarantee that when you first load in cm you will spend a few minutes like I did just exploring the world where you land okay so the next thing we're going to do is try and get some geolocation so just go into your favorite internet browser and search for Google Maps and here we are we're looking for London so right on the Tower of London I'm going to right click and that will be enable me to generate a copy of the coordinates which I can then paste in my browser to get exactly those coordinates up on screen and you can see there we are right in the center of London at the Tower of London so the next step is really straightforward just go and copy the longu value and click copy go back into unreal scroll down until you find the um J referenced uh czm plug-in and basically in the longitude paste in those numbers so you'll have to go back now to your browser just repeat the same process again so this time I'm going to copy in the latitude value so everything to the right copy those numbers there and we'll go back into unreal paste those into the latitude value within the ccmg reference plugin and we can just paste those in there we go paste those in and as soon as you click return you'll be amazed you'll be transported and your world takes a few seconds to load but here we go we are in London suddenly and you should notice the center of that world is actually where we basically typed in the Tower of London so let's get down a bit more to an eye Lev View and have a look at this world in a bit more detail so here we are exploring Central London um using the CCM plug-in in Unreal Engine and I'm going to basically just pop up to my camera increase my speed a little bit so now when I use my um arrow keys on the keyboard to navigate around I'm just going a bit quicker you can see the world is absolutely uh massive and I'm sure some of you recognize this amazing building seber ax by Foster and partners one of my favorite Architects and probably one of the most amazing iconic buildings in central London and you can see here we've got the sort of city of London so you know even if you're not an architect to designer and you're just wanting to explore as a virtual tourist I think this plugin is pretty amazing amazing um it's really really fun and I basically found it extremely quite useful the resolution does take a while to load in but you can see once it's loaded the quality of the resolution is amazing so for those of you in uh other countries or all over the world who've ever wanted to visit um the castle or the Tower of London here we go we're doing a virtual tour just let it load in and we can kind of get inside the tower to places where you just simply can't visit normally so it gives you whole new perspective on things like the city of London the Tower of London um you can see the river and its connection as well and all these really amazing buildings in that sort of center of the city so this is one of my favorite parts of London in terms of you know big buildings and Tower buildings um and as you've seen some of my other vets videos I'm sure you know I've been really enjoying modeling up some sort of uh fictional notional Tower buildings recently and you know they look amazing once they've loaded in particularly so now I'm going to basically go up and add another visual effect and I'm going to add some volumetric clouds now you can see that um one of the amazing things about these clouds in Unreal Engine is the incredible amount of variety and variance and things that you can adjust just to make those really realistic sort of skies and things like clouds in the background there just looks even nicer with those in next I'm we're going to go up to add to project go to visual effects and I'm also going to add in some exponential height fog and we can really play around with this fog and you can see um it looks even more realistic once you get a bit of fog and a bit of cloud and some of those sort of Reflections are actually coming off the buildings by look of things as well so this is definitely something that makes it look a lot more realistic um as I say apart from the loading time um do remember that I'm on an internet connection which could be a bit faster so it's not bad actually um depending on your internet speed you should find things will load a bit quicker as well but as long as you pan around relatively slowly uh the full resolution model seems to have loaded very adequately um it's only really when you spin around rapidly that you kind of like really notice bits that aren't loaded in um too fast like over there on the other Bank of the river takes a second to load that geometry and that's fair enough now you can do some adjustments which will increase the uh number of tiles and things which we'll have a look in a minute so let's have a look at one of my other favorite buildings which is of course the wonderful Shard by Renzo Piano Architects so The Shard which is actually London's tallest building is a 72 story mixed use development super tall skyscraper and basically forms a part of The Shard quarter development in London now it really is an amazing building if you do get a chance to visit it you can go right up to the top and there's amazing viewy Tower there as well that I recommend so you can see that I'm having a bit of fun playing around with the um sort of sun sky and things like that just to see what we can do in the background and you can get some really nice images here so if you do let the uh geometry load in and basically you move the camera nice and slowly what you'll find is you can almost get a level of Animation um that basically looks quite adequate for your kind of visualization so let's just zoom in we'll let that load in a second as you can see I'm adjusting things like the maximum screen resolution and space editor as well there's a lot of adjustments actually you can make in cm and I'm just beginning to learn what the best ones are but you can see that if I move the camera like panning across this River potentially let's just go quite slowly okay so let's slow the speed down a little bit and basically go a little bit more slowly along now you can see once the geometry is actually loaded that basically when you pan across nice and slowly um it actually looks really really realistic and really really cool so I think that's the key to uh creating things like animations with CCM um don't move around too fast because otherwise you see geometry like that flickering isn't quite loaded as well so as you spin around to the other view it does take a few seconds for it to load that new geometry in that's fair enough you know we've got the whole world inside our computer here and basically this is connected to the internet so it just downloads the tiles that you require as needed um obviously we haven't got the entire model of the world loaded but basically that will load fairly conveniently as we move around in the background you can see things loading up as well but I really love the way that you know because it is actually a 3D model you can navigate right down to sort of almost eye level um spin around and just get different points of view as maybe a virtual tourist or decent development studies as an architect or designer just to get a feel for the context you might be designing in so this is one of the things that I think would be amazing for architecture without having to visit this site um I can spin around and I can get a really really good view of the particular model of something like the Tower of London that I'm unlikely to be able to kind of get access too um and also if I was designing a new sort of tower building within that City I'd get a really nice understanding of the context and sort of environment that I'm actually going to be working in so this you know even if you don't use it for actually placing your model which is something that I would definitely love to explore in future videos just being a virtual tourist and understanding the design precedence around the context the site would be extremely valuable in my view so you can see I'm just sort of playing around with some of the uh basically values in the CM plug-in setting just to see if I can get this loading a bit quicker or faster um and you notice that you can increase the number of tiles but of course what that does it means that the resolution of those tiles is a bit less in the distance as well so all of this is probably worth playing around with uh depending on your internet speed and so on just to see what the requirement is for your particular model loading so if you did like to go into completely full screen you can basically open up the view in a brand new editor and again it does take a few moments to load in the geometry and the resolution as you can see once it does here we are in complete full screen mode in Unreal Engine live moving around the entire city of London on my little computer uh for wherever you are in the world so unbelievable and you know really quite mind-blowing the first time you experience this technology I think um this is something that I think is going to be more and more useful for designers and Architects all over the world and means that you can literally design in context without having necessarily to visit the site which isn't always possible straight away so I thought it'd be fun to end this video by transporting myself to a new part of the world I'm hoping to visit New York sometime later this year as well so here I am transporting myself via cium for Unreal Engine over to New York and we're just letting that load in certainly a lot faster than getting on the plane and traveling there maybe not quite as exciting but you know what a great way for me to kind of get a bit of a feel for the context and understand some of the things that I want to have a look at and visit but what a brilliant way also just to improve your understanding of geography and architecture all over the world now I think this is just an incredible uh thing that you can do this for free cium and unreal are both free for everybody to use they're quite complicated uh you know Unreal Engine is not for the fainthearted that's for sure is a complex bit of software but the power that you can uh basically achieve with it is unbelievable and as you've seen from this small tutorial it's not hard for you to do these very simple steps in order to be able to actually get the entire world in your computer so I'm definitely looking forward to seeing uh what else I can achieve with cesium for unreal and as I say this is the first Unreal Engine tutorial I've made so far as you all know I'm a massive fan of the other realtime rendering software like twin motion um so this is a real dabble into what the paravan real engine can offer me above uh what twin motion can do well everybody I really hope you've enjoyed this video as much as I have making it I think this is incredible software and I'm really looking forward to uh explore it further in more detail in future videos so as ever thanks for watching everybody and I'll see you in the next one [Music] bye-bye [Music]

Channel: Jonathan Reeves CAD

Views: 4,512

Keywords: Unreal Engine, Cesium plugin, virtual worlds, geospatial capabilities, dynamic terrain generation, architect, designer, context studies, urban design, computer, software, download, installation, project, level, geolocation, Google Maps, London, Tower of London, virtual tourist, visualization, context, resolution, full screen, New York, free software, tutorial, power, Twinmotion, real-time rendering, software exploration

Id: 5TKP3Hsrovk

Length: 16min 25sec (985 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 19 2024