Beginner guide to Procedural in Unreal Engine

hey today I want to talk about one of the new features of Unreal Engine 5.2 procedural content generation last week I made a video about a plugin called IA scatter while the new PCG system is similar but gives you full control and a ton of possibilities like the geometry nodes in blender you use a node graph to generate and modify geometry this is still in development so it can be unstable and some features are not working yet but I will show you how to get started with a basic scattering system that you can use right now first you have to download the new 5.2 version preview 1 then go to the plugin section and enable the framework [Music] now you can right click in the content browser and create a new PCG graph then drag it into your scene take the landscape information from the input and plug that into a surface sampler that will scatter points on top of it hit D on the Node to enable debugging and see the points that are generated now plug this into a transform points node where you can adjust the scale and rotation of the points [Music] foreign [Music] and that's it now we can turn the points into meshes with a static mesh spawner [Music] [Applause] turn off debugging and reduce the number of points in the sampler [Music] cool so now we have scattering but to make the trees look more realistic we need to be straight we can do that by turning on absolute rotation give them a more natural look with the X and Y values [Music] ok but what if you go to a very deep slope there shouldn't be as many trees so let's get back to the graph after the surface sampler add the normal to density and the density filter node it will look at the normal data from the landscape and filter the points automatically you need to tweak the settings a little bit personally I like to disable the meshes with E and enable debugging to better see what I'm doing thank you [Music] [Laughter] now that looks good you can add more trees to add variation and even add other machines like rocks and foliage but there's another problem in some cases you can have meshes spawn in two other meshes to fix this we need to look at the bounds of our objects they are basically the points that we see in debugging add the bounce modifier to fit them closer to the shape of your meshes [Music] then add the difference node and set it to Binary to Output only points that are not intersecting with the others [Music] well it's perfect now except what if you have some structure blocking the top of the trees with our actual system we just clip through it as a great node we cannot to solve this problem the get actor data node it's a way to retrieve data from a selected actor in your world in my scene I created a simple Cube that I want a PCG system to interact with to do that you need to switch it to all World actors and use a tag to select your mesh in your mesh properties scroll down to actor and add the tag [Music] the same tag name in the node to reference it when plug it to a different node [Music] to get this working we need to make sure the bounds are set correctly to represent the tree's height as you can see here there are trees that should be spawned if we didn't check for Collision once it's all set up the trees will be removed if a collide with a selected mesh well that's it for this overview of the basic scattering using the new PCG system if you haven't watched my presentation of the Ia scatter plugin I still recommend to check it out because it's pretty much Plug and Play you can get to work really fast and don't have to reinvent the wheel every time however this new feature is very promising and will be a complete Game Changer once it's released and Polished we can only expect more use cases out of it thank you I spent a lot of time trying to get a mesh to point Cloud working a technique I always find really cool but I didn't manage to get a good result yet as you can see the basis is there but a lot of notes don't work as intended or don't work at all there isn't any documentation for now so it's very tough to actually understand how to set it up I hope this will be properly documented when 5.2 is live because it's kind of a headache at this point anyway you can expect more content on the features of 5.2 and PCG in the future so please consider subscribing to the channel also if you have any requests on the specific subjects you want me to cover or any feedback of this tutorial please let me know in the comments below oh and a bonus for you if you made it this far you can simply copy and paste my whole Note 3 by following the link in the description thanks a lot for your support and see you soon bye [Music]

Channel: VLRN | Valerian

Views: 85,593

Keywords: unreal engine 5, ue 5, ue5.2, pcg, procedural, unreal game creation, unreal tutorial, nanite, lumen, Gamedev, Procedural unreal, Procedural game, Procedural level, Unreal engine guide, Unreal engine beginner, Ue5 beginner, Ue5, Pcg guide, Pcg tutorial, Pcg basics, How to procedural, Unreal engine how to, Unreal engine feature

Id: ojsoKpX9AzE

Length: 5min 59sec (359 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 29 2023