New and Improved Procedural Skyscrapers - Unreal Engine 5.3 PCG Tutorial

[@MasterPiffy]

an hour and a half for something that will pretty much never achieve over 30 fps isnt really worth using unless its for something non real time

[@MichaelRoyalty]

That's why I watch tutorial videos at 2x speed 👍

[@MasterPiffy]

​@@MichaelRoyalty speeding up this tutorial still wont help you get over 30 fps lol

[@MichaelRoyalty]

No, but improvements to nanite and lumen might.

[@Nelis1324]

@@MichaelRoyalty Somehow the Matrix tech demo seems to run pretty well. What did they do different? I think they didn't use PCG. I think they used Houdini to create all of the buildings. Unreal Engine, Blender are trying to do what Houdini is doing, but Houdini is better at it. I would suggest to build it there. There are also plugins for Houdini in Unreal Engine.

[@MichaelRoyalty]

Yeah, the matrix demo pre-dates PCG, and the buildings in it are hollow. It wouldn't be too hard to spawn cubes in PCG and slap building textures onto them. I think the big challenge the matrix demo solved was in how it lays out streets in a customizable grid. In this video I'm not going for efficiencies, I'm laying out lots of static meshes to block out the building, basically pushing PCG to excess. These are two very different goals, even though the end result appears similar. Also I'm not kidding when I say improvements to nanite might help -- the big slowdown seems to be because nanite can't break the walls down into larger triangles at a distance, so it gets overwhelmed. If it gets the ability to merge different ISMs together it would grant a massive performance boost.

[@danjmaurer]

This video is exactly what I needed to stack up groups of points. I had started with a spline and a grid, but when you showed how to create a single point and build from there....absolutely gold!

[@MichaelRoyalty]

I'm glad it helped! I worked on this problem a while to get things as efficient as I could.

[@g10118]

Thank you Michael! I know you've been working hard on this and I really appreciate you for taking the time to explain to us what you've learned!

[@MichaelRoyalty]

You're welcome, I hope it helps or gives someone inspiration!

[@ohchristusername]

Great to see the whole workflow and ways to handle each issue, thanks!

[@MichaelRoyalty]

You're welcome, glad it helped! I like to show how I run into problems and how to solve them when I can.

[@willembuiting]

Genius! 😂

[@TheMetaEducator]

Nice vid, man. Really appreciate it. Liked. Subbed. Commented. Saved vid for watching again later!

[@ArchAi3D]

thank you

[@TheGiakaama]

Good Video, though skyscrapers have different floors at the bottom ( shops, markets etc ) than above :). There's a difference between the ground floor and 1st floor . Also, I would like to see how you can generate lights inside the bulidings.

[@MichaelRoyalty]

That's a good point, but this video was getting long enough already. I figured I'd deliver enough to make the shells of buildings. Noted for the next video though :D I'm not sure of the best way to do the lights. I'll have to brush up on my indoor/outdoor lighting techniques. It wouldn't be hard to add a volume that adjusts the lighting parameters, since I've already created a box collision with each building, and then individual light actors could be spawned for accents. But that's really getting into interior layout, and it'd be fun to create a few different interiors to load in on a per-building basis.

[@WsEKond]

Do you plan to continue this project like in your showcase video as result with these terasses? And maybe you can add stairs, so you can walk through every etage? Thanks for this wonderful tutorial!

[@MichaelRoyalty]

I'd like to, but figuring a building layout that will support stairs is a challenge! I'm muling over the best way to design full room based interiors, and with that I should be able to support stairs and elevators. Any update I will do will take a while, it's a complex problem to solve.

[@WsEKond]

@@MichaelRoyalty if it would works, would it be a separate tutorial or based on this tutorial? And thanks for the answer!

[@MichaelRoyalty]

I'll try to make it based on this tutorial. It's possible I'll have to take a different approach and start from scratch, but I'm pretty sure this is a solid base. If you hand created some stories and interiors and saved them to assemblies, you could reuse those to create the building interiors. Just copy the assemblies to the vertical spline and you're done!

[@WsEKond]

@@MichaelRoyalty ok thanks! You make really good and highquality videos! Thanks for that!

[@keefman85]

so damn cool

[@DiddlingDwarf]

Wanted to share that after using @TheLazyContradiction 's tutorial you had linked, I found that by adding the inverse of the blueprint actor's location to an absolute transform points node, I negated the points adjusting from world origin. Can share more detail if desired

[@MichaelRoyalty]

Thanks for the offer! I believe it's one less operation to create the points at 0,0,0, which is why I went with this method.

[@DiddlingDwarf]

Have you run into an issue where you cannot affect the z axis? I made a mesh within UE, using the width for the 400 length, and depth for the depth of the wall (since width is along x axis which is the forward axis that made most sense). However that puts the walls at a 90 degree offset when generated along the spline. Would be fine if I could get the Z rotation on Transform point to work, but it has no effect, while XY adjustments do. By the way, thanks a ton for sharing this. It would have taken a long time to familiarize myself with PCG enough to achieve this. Will help really progress my project!

[@MichaelRoyalty]

You're welcome! I'm afraid I haven't run into the problem where Z rotation doesn't work. Generally when my meshes don't line up with how I've created my points, I can add a transform points right before the static mesh spawner for the final corrections from mesh to what I've built. @TheLazyContradiction has started a PCG buildings series, and he's going about it in a slightly different fashion from what I've done. You should check the videos out, they might give you more ideas for your project. kzbin.info/www/bejne/gZ_Xop9rhp6ilZo

[@DiddlingDwarf]

@@MichaelRoyaltyEspecially considering you adjust the Z successfully yourself. I can't figure what the issue is unfortunately. I ended up just adjusting the depth for length rather than the width for now. Thanks for the link! More knowledge is always beneficial! And people complain about UE5... hahaha

[@TheGiakaama]

Another thing I've found. After creating the whole thing the Navmesh Needs regeneration for AI to work. Do you have any ideas how to do that ? :)

[@MichaelRoyalty]

Interesting! I'd imagine this won't work well with Navmesh because buildings at a distance don't have collision. I might look into adding a Nav Modifier component to the Target Actor (BP_BuildingHolder in this video).

[@oussamachobah5339]

I have an issue at the 33rd minutes. When I try to change the property of the maths multiply node for the input Source 1 to Last YZ, i have an error and i dont know how could I solve it. Does anyone know how to solvve that?

[@mattseaton5832]

You only got 30 fps? Did you use mesh instancing?

[@MichaelRoyalty]

Yep, all instanced. I think I was running into some issues with nanite? I haven't loaded up this project in 5.5 to see if things are improved. If nothing else, in 5.5 I could spawn these entirely through the GPU in 5.5.. but 5.5 has additional support for making buildings, so it makes more sense to recreate much of this system from scratch, using those updated systems.

[@Mr.Keygar]

Esto no esta en la 5.2 no veo el PCG

[@雨里-i7j]

the video that so long，I'm Zzzzzzzzzzzz😪