Easy Procedural Overgrowth Tutorial with PCG in Unreal Engine

what's up guys in this video I'll show you how to do this overgrowth effect using procedural content generation in Unreal Engine 5.2 so we'll take a look at how to procedurally generate this overgrowth effect and you can see in here I'm actually using few of the nodes so you can get started very easily from scratch and we can control the amount of overgrowth just using few notes so to get started let's jump into Unreal Engine 5.2 [Music] all right to get started what we'll do is we'll go to the 5.2.1 and launch that after that is launch then we'll select the third person template and then you can give a name whatever you prefer to use in there and yeah just create a new project and then yeah I should launch the Unreal Engine we have this basic Unreal Engine that we can run around and do stuff very basic third person template that we have in here and only thing we need to do is we'll need to go to edit plugin and then type procedural content and then you should be able to see that procedural content generation framework make sure that it's checked and then it might ask you to restart your Unreal Engine go ahead and restart the Unreal Engine once that is done then what I will do next is actually um go ahead and create a new level so I'll go to the basics and then start a fresh level and then I'll go ahead and click on the add content and within here the from the quick so I'll go ahead and download uh maybe a 3D wall or something so it's up to you you can download anything from here you can bring your own sketchfap model whatever you prefer but for me I've I think I've already downloaded a 3D asset in here so I'll go ahead and select one of these modular wall and then I'll go ahead and just add to the project and once that is done another thing I need is also some sort of overgrowth plant so I think I've already downloaded before as I was prepping off for this tutorial um you can download any plant that you can find in here as long as it is small plant so I think it was called yellow artundle so I downloaded that and then basically added to my project and once that is done uh you should be able to see in your content browser there's 3D assets they are like the the stone wall and also the plant so only thing we need to do next is to go ahead and drag the stone wall and make sure you are in the reset the position to zero zero zero and the scale so that it's easy for you to work later when we add in the PCG graph in here so next we'll create a PCG graph so go to right click and then type PCC and PCC graph I'll rename it to the pcz underscore maybe a growth um this is pretty much the basic PCC that we have looked earlier in this channel as well make sure to actually check out that video as well but you can still follow even if you didn't know anything about pcz previously but the general idea is using some nodes to actually spawn the items but for this purpose we will actually use mesh to points so we'll use this but the only thing we need to do is in the blueprint type we need to actually use mesh to point so we'll select that as our blueprint type once that is done then what we need to do is actually grab a reference to our static mesh on which we want overgrowth so this is the stone um the wall so I'm just checking to make sure the name of the asset is correct and then that's what I'm gonna go ahead and select that in my static mesh and then I will get a reference to that static machine here for the mesh to point um once that is done then what I can do is I can go ahead and apply the pcz graph I'll go ahead and drag my PCC graph but I'll make sure the PCC graph is actually reset to zero zero zero as a position so that it is applying to the at the same place where my wall is and then I can go ahead and right click and do debug and you can see there are lots of points in here that I can visualize it um yeah these are all the points of the mesh I think right now it might be from the triangle mode which I will talk about later as well but for to actually for the points let's do a scale method to relative um and then what I can do is maybe for that you can see that it's a lot of points because it's the size of the point is 1.0 so I'll probably go ahead and change it to 0.01 or 0.002 depending on what you see maybe 0.001 might be two less to see so let's go ahead and do 0.001 and we can see a lot of points in here and yeah we can basically visualize all the points on which we can populate the items and another thing is um the on the PCC here we can actually check to see if there is point R from vertices or from the triangles but I found that the triangle uh is better than the vertices from mesh to point then we'll do a static mesh banner and you know the deal we just have to put in the static mesh I'll go ahead and add the static mesh reference for this I'll just put on a plant and then I plan on using the two plants so that we have a variation of the overgrowth so I'll get a reference to the another plan so there are different the essence of the plant and then I'll just type in plant inserts in here and then after that is done you should be able to see that we have a lot of growth within the wall which is kind of cool right we don't have to place it manually it procedurally places itself in the wall itself which is pretty nice and as you can see right now it might be too much so if we want to change what we can use is another thing called density filter and using this density filter the idea is to filter out the amount of growth but density filter by itself doesn't do any change even though I will try to move my the density filter it doesn't do anything actually for that because you need to convert the from normal to density which I also hear shortly as well as you can see I'm trying to change the growth and stuff of course it will either go from not having anything to having it completely there's nothing like change in variation that we can do at the moment and I'm still playing here to show you that it doesn't do anything now for that what I will do is go ahead and add a note called normal to density and once that is done we should be able to see some variations with the density filter the only thing we had to do was add that and now right over here you can see that there is some change and the wall doesn't have completely filled with the leaves or if you think of it as a marsh overgrowth so not all parts of the wall is completely chill now I can sew here using the few nodes we can actually change how it grows you know on the wall itself you can see I'm changing and the parameters and it is affecting the amount by which it is growing on the wall also another thing what we can do is add the transformation uh transformation points uh transform points node uh just so that we can actually change the shape and variation of the node oh sorry of the overgrowth itself so I'm changing the size uh you know from 0.2 to 1 and then maybe angle from 0 to 180 degrees and you can see that it will change it will give some Randomness basically two or two more control in terms of what you want to create yeah and this is about it you just need few five six or seven notes and you can create what you want hopefully this was helpful to you um leave me a comment or concerns or anything you have for me if not subscribe to my channel and watch out for further videos till then stay cool and keep learning this is

Channel: sappydev

Views: 27,869

Keywords: Procedural Content Generation, Unreal Engine, Tutorial, UE 5.2, UE 5, Unreal Tutorial, Moss Effect, Unreal Engine 4, procedural art, procedural generation, learn unreal, sappydev

Id: 8seJpPS2fMc

Length: 10min 20sec (620 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 27 2023