Hello guys, welcome back to another video. In this video, we'll be checking out
the new PCG Biome Core plugin, which is a brand new multi biome PCG plugin. The PCG Biome Core plugin is a
data driven biome generator built entirely using the PCG framework. The Biome Core plugin shows you how you
can generate multiple unique biomes for a massive open world environment, while
still maintaining artistic hand control. The PCG Biome Core generates
different biome foliage based on the provided landscape, and datasets. Currently it features
five different biomes. So we have a broad leaf forest biome
that populates most of the map. You have a carnivorous forest biome. We also have this little desert biome. So you can see a little cactus
here and a landslide biome. So you can see there's lots of different
rocks on the side of the mountain. And then finally a mountain forest biome. So these pine trees. That are all spawned at
the peaks of the mountains. And of course, these are just
a few of the examples included. So you could go in and create your own
custom biomes if you wanted to add more. Now the hand controls that this
Biomcore plugin includes are the ability to modify or spawn in a
biome or forest based on a spline. So you could manually add in or
create a forest wherever you'd like. And this is implemented in the plugin to
show you how you would use it for adding even extra details like a field of crops. It also includes things like a spline
path that you can use to cut a pathway through the forest if you want sort of an
area that your player can walk through. There are many different foliage
types that it comes included with like rocks, trees, and bushes. And you can use this PCG graph as the
base for creating and adding your own new biomes or you can do things like
swap out the simple placement meshes for things like realistic nanite foliage. This is an incredible tool as
it even showcased a lot of the new features coming to PCG in 5. 4. Things like recursive subgraphs,
dynamic attribute tracking, and a handful of the brand new nodes. Now if you guys are interested in
PCG, in my multiplayer survival game course, we cover over the basics of PCG. Of PCG and we even create things like
our own multi biome PCG graph that spawns in different biomes and foliage
based on our landscape material. So if you guys are interested, check out
my multi player survival game course. I'll actually be remastering
the course in Unreal Engine 5. 4 soon. So stay tuned for that. Head over to smartpoly. teachable. com and check it out or visit the
link in the description below. Now, without further ado,
let's get right into the video. Okay, so the first thing that you
need to do to try out the new PCG Biom Core plugin is you need to first make
sure that you have Unreal Engine 5. 4 downloaded and installed. So currently I'm using Unreal Engine 5. 4 preview one. So this is sort of like
the beta version of 5. 4. Then you want to create a
brand new project and then you want to go to the plugins. So go to edit and And in here, we want
to search for PCG and you're going to see these two new plugins pop up. So we have the PCG biome core, and
then we also have the PCG biome sample. So you want to go ahead and make sure
that you enable both of these plugins. Basically the biome core is the biome
tools and the generator and the PCG biome sample is the sample map and all
the sample assets that are included. So go ahead and enable both those
plugins and restart your project. Now, once you've restarted your project,
I'm going to show you guys where you can. biome core assets, because by
default, it's not going to be inside of your project folder. So first up, you want to open up your
content browser and you want to make sure that you can see this engine folder. If you don't see this engine folder,
that means that we need to go ahead and show the engine assets. So under this little gear icon,
you want to click on settings. You want to make sure that
you have show engine content. And also show plugin content. I want to hit the checkbox
for both of those. And now we should be able
to see the engine folder. And in the engine folder,
we have this plugins folder. So double click and open that up. And these are all the assets for all the
different plugins inside of the engine. In our case, we want to look
for the PCG biome core folder. If you scroll all the way down, we
should have PCG biome core content. And PCG biome sample content. So if you open up either one of
these, you can also search for PCG in the plugins, but if you open
up the folder, you can see that we currently have two different folders. We have one for the PCG
biome core content, and then we have the sample content. So I'm going to explain really quickly the
differences between both of these folders. Basically the core content comes
with the biome core generator. So this is the main. PCG graph and all of the things
like filters, the setups, the blueprints and all of the sub
graphs and the sample content. This basically comes with the map. So the demo map that showcases this graph. It also comes with all of the meshes. So all of these stylized simple meshes
geometry and all the setup for the demo. So let's go ahead and check
out the sample content. So first things first, we want
to go to the maps folder and open up this biome sample level. And so this is basically the
sample level that showcases the different biomes that you can
create using the biome core plugin. So first things first, let's
go ahead and showcase all the different biomes in this level. So down here, you'll see that we
have things like a desert biome. So there are spawning in cactus here. We have sort of these dead
grass spawning around it. And then we also have things
like these rock clusters that spawns in the desert biome. We also have these different forces. I'll get into these here in a
second, but let's just cover the different biomes that we have. So we have the desert biome and over
here we have sort of this forest biome and in the forest biome. We have things like little
bushes that spawn in here. throughout the different forest. And then what you'll notice is on
these mountains that are sort of color coded in white, we have trees
as well as some different rocks that will spawn in, in between the trees. But mainly over the mountains, we have
these pine trees that are spawning on the peaks of these mountains. We also have a different biome, which
is called the landslide biome, which basically showcases all of these
different rocks that are sort of just spawn on this side of the mountain. Now this is sort of an interesting thing
that they included because me as a game developer, I would use this to maybe spawn
in some sort of rich metal nodes area. So if you were creating things
like a survival game, the player could come to this area to
harvest maybe certain iron ores. Metal ores so you could add in sort of
a rich resource heavy area and then over here something very interesting that I
want to Show you guys is the fact that you can even add in hand placed or certain
custom defined areas in your biome So in this case, they've added in this crops
field So you can see that is spawning in these different rows of crops and these
straight rows of crops On the landscape and this sort of cuts out a chunk of our
forest and spawns in this area for crops. So it's very interesting that they
included this because it shows you that you can still have the hand control
that you need over something that is procedurally generated on your map. And this is even a spline. So if I select certain
parts of the spline. I can move this around. And if I wanted my crop area to be a
little bit larger, you can see that it removes part of the forest and
spawns in those rows of crops wherever I want to modify and add that in. Okay. So this is just a neat example that
they included that because again, it is allowing you to not only procedurally
generate large open worlds and populate it with foliage, we'll still maintain
that artistic hand control that you need to add in certain elements to your world. Now, a couple of other different manual
controls that you get in this PCG graph is this spline spawned in forest. So this forest is
generated using the spline. So again, this is some more
manual controls that you get. So say I wanted a forest randomly
in the middle of this desert. I could spawn in this forest
using the spline and I can modify things like the spline points. Now we'll go ahead and
generate a forest around it. I wanted this to be a little bit smaller. I can go ahead and move things around. Like the spline points in and you
can see that it reduces the size of this forest that we have spawned in. Okay. So again, this is just more about adding
manual controls that you might need based on the needs of your project. And again, this is another
example of spawning in a forest. In this case, it's using just a square
volume box to spawn in a forest, whereas this one was using a spline
that you can add in using the curves and it gives you a little bit more
control than just, you know, a volume. Now, over here, we also have another
manual control, which is this spline path. So if we go ahead and select the
spline path, you can see that this cuts a pathway through the forest. So if we take one of these spline points
and use alt to drag it, I will go ahead and cut a pathway through our forest. So if we wanted to add a pathway that
our player can walk through or say you wanted to remove certain foliage,
like these larger trees in a certain area, you could use something like this
blind path that basically just cuts a pathway through the trees being spawned. In this forest. Okay, so that is the biome core plugin. Let's actually take a look underneath
the hood So if you go to the content drawer in the biome sample content,
what you're going to notice is the biome definitions folder So if you go in here,
these are the different data assets that define the different biomes in our
biome sample level So in our case, we have things like the broadleaf forest,
the coniferous forest, the desert, the landslide, and the mountain forest If
you open up any of these definitions, basically, this is just a simple data
asset that has things like a name and a color defining the different biomes. So you could go in and add another
custom biome in here, but there's also different biome assets. So we go to the biome assets folder. If we open something like the. Desert biome. If we open up that data asset, this
will show you exactly what assets are used in the biome generator. This is how you'd add your
own custom assets to that specific biome that you assign. So in our case, in this biome
assets, we have an array. So we have index zero. So if you expand that, it'll show
you exactly how this is designed. So you can see here, we have things
like a generator, so you can specify the specific PCG generator that you
want to use for this particular asset. In our case, we're using this mesh PCG
cactus, and we're using this shared trees generator or generating where
we want these cactuses spawn in. If we expand the other indexes, you
can see we have things like boulders. Again, we have another
different type of cactus mesh. Now, another thing you might
notice is this big boulder asset has also this child assets. So these are things like the
small boulders that we saw spawned around the larger boulders, as
well as things like these dead grass clusters around the cactus. That is using these,
these child data assets. And so this is sort of like a
sub generator that generates those smaller assets along the
sides of these larger ones. Okay. Now you can go in and dig into
all these other different biome assets like the broadly forest. And again, it's going
to show you the array. Of all the different meshes in that biome. So again, you can do things like
specify what type of generator you want for that specific mesh. And this is a very modular and advanced
way that epic designed this and it's very flexible and data driven So you can
specify exactly what type of generator you want to use for which specific mesh
You can even add sub generators for smaller assets that you want to spawn
around it Now one thing to note That this is not even a framework class. This is just a data asset. So if you look at the parent class, we
have things like the biome sample asset. So if you wanted to expand on
this framework and add in your own custom variables or assets,
this is all implemented using just data assets, blueprints, and PCG. So this is all done in blueprint
and you can completely customize it and build upon this framework. Now, if we actually look and dive into
the graph itself, if you go to the PCG biome core content, This will actually
show us the biome core PCG graph. So if we double click and open this up,
this will pull up the actual PCG graph. And what you're going to notice right
off the bat is that there aren't a whole ton of nodes on this graph itself. And that's because they're using a
lot of the new features introduced into PCG in Unreal Engine 5. 4. Things like subgraphs and a lot of
the new nodes that are introduced. So for example, it doesn't have
all of the nodes For generating specific biomes for those. If you go into the biome
generators, you're going to notice that we have a graphs. So there's these different sub
graphs and these are again, brand new features introduced in 5. 4, which allow you to sort of nest
sub PCG graphs into a main graph. That way you can allow
for more modular control. And also this allows for
reusing this in multiple other different PCG graphs as well. So you'll notice that they
also have things like filters. So they have graphs for
filtering certain things out. Another thing you'll
notice are the blueprints. So these are the different
blueprints that we saw for adding things like a spline path. You also have things
like a exclusion volume. So if you wanted to exclude. certain areas in your level. In our case, we are excluding
things like spawning in foliage at our water bodies or these lakes. If I hide this plane, you can see
that it doesn't spawn any foliage or trees or any rocks wherever we
have these water bodies located. And again, that just has to do with
the way that they have the PCG graph to exclude certain areas in your world. Now, this is just a brief
overview of the Biom Core plugin. Again, this is a very data driven
and modular plugin, and it's very advanced in the way that they set this
up because it allows you to add in a specific generator per whatever asset
that you want to add in your biome. Now that is pretty much it for this video. I just wanted to showcase the PCG Biome
Core plugin that is new in Unreligion 5. 4. There's obviously still a lot more to
break down from this plugin, like how you would go in and add your own custom biome. Or even doing things like swapping
out some of the assets, but as you can see, it's a very complex and a
data driven tool that showcases a lot of the new features and nodes
coming to PCG in Unreal Engine 5. 4. Let me know what you guys think
down in the comments down below about this biome generator. Is this something that you'll be
interested in using in your own projects? Let me know down in the
comments down below. Also check out my multiplayer
survival game course on smartpolly. teachable. com. Again, I will be remastering
the course on Unleashing 5. 4. So stay tuned for that. And as always, I'll see
you guys in the next one.
