Procedural Content Generation UE 5.2 - In-Depth Overview & Building Forest Environment PART 3

[@stevietee3878]

An excellent tutorial series! Following your videos has enabled me to create my own PCG forest, and more importantly, understand how it was created. I still obviously have much more to learn in this exciting area. Please continue to upload more tutorials of this great quality.

[@exit-simulation]

Thanks for the feedback! And yes there will be more :)

[@MPRX87]

Excellent series, probably the best intro on PCGs. You also helped me solve a few quirky issues. A little bit of a side rant, but another big tip and topic you could address in the future is using baked masks for placement. Not to be confused with making new landscape layers that would normally have materials applied to them. Instead of having to do a bunch of heavy computation updates constantly, while working in editor, for the filtering to place things like cliff rocks, you can bake all those areas out as masks from softwares like Gaea/World Machine/World Creator/Houdini and import them as vectordisplacement maps (they have to be in r8g8b8a8 or g8 formats, with no sRGB and no mipmaps). From there, you can import them into your PCGs and use them for masking and be a few small filtering steps away from getting what you want vs all the computation involved solving angles and falloffs and whatnot. One big annoying thing though is having to do the math on setting your PCG volume to exactly cover your landscape bounds, so that the texture mask projects 1:1 with the landscape, you just have to know the standard sizes like 2017, 4033 and so on and might have to take the midpoint of that to center it over the landscape. Hopefully they add an automatic "scale bounds to fit actor/landscape" button like with the VHFM tools. Anyways, /endrant and I hope to see more from you in the future!

[@exit-simulation]

Thanks for the feedback. So you mean not reading the masks from landscape layers as we are doing here but directly from within the PCG graph? I will look into it

[@MPRX87]

Correct, you read them with the "get texture data" node, but like I mentioned, it's highly specific with the format for now. I imagine they will iterate more on them because they are really awkward to work with right now. They can essentially be used like a decal with your bounding box, but where you have to scale and place it to match your landscape. Also, be careful with the texel size, since it directly determines the overall grid resolution and if you have a big landscape, it can be in the millions range real fast. So for some types of detail, that don't call for an actual whole landscape layer, you can use these masks to place stuff. Like if you baked simulated areas for rockslides near cliffs in Gaea, but don't need a whole new landscape layer for it since you already have some cliff material and some dirt/grass material, and you're only looking to use it to place some rocks and debris. Landscape layers are brutal on performance, so avoiding adding more is always a plus @@exit-simulation

[@exit-simulation]

Very interesting, thanks for sharing

[@claudioivanferrazzi546]

I'm using gaea with this pcg setup. Can you explain how to make a mask in Gaea, that not include all the landscape, and export it ? @@MPRX87

[@Dakb1000]

Love these videos my man. Really helped a lot more than other tutorials to understand the fundamentals of it. I hope you keep creating. I've seen that the content has slowed down but I subscribed!

[@exit-simulation]

I just released the first two episodes of an intermediate PCG series. Check it out on my channel if you like!

[@roshanthapa1297]

Your Video was really helpful for understanding PCG. Regarding the (6: 30) mesh entries ease,, it might be helpful, I normally first add the required entries like 10 or 20 then, shift click on the mesh entries arrow, that will expand all the slot at once (also works for collapse), then assign the static mesh by scrolling.

[@gufranyesilyurt]

Awesome tutorial. Do you also know how to use lightweight instances instead of spawning static meshes? It would be very helpful to make trees and rocks interactable. Or do you know any other methods to implement this without losing performance?

[@ValkCode]

Hey, I have implemented this system in my game (with some adjustments) which pretty much doesnt Impact performance at all, and allows you to to virtually everything with your Foliage: kzbin.info/www/bejne/jn6ud4ewm7WkjtUsi=21d-uYpfd9CoMKX2

[@kleestrat1237]

Hi! Great tutorial, thank you. How many FPS do you receive in the end? I'm trying to create a similar environment but am always stuck with around 25 fps while running the project on a 4070ti. Do you think that further optimization could fix this or is it simply unrealistic to gain around 60 FPS in a procedurally generated environment with lots of assets, no matter what Nanite and turning off wind animations do for the performance?

[@exit-simulation]

I will do more tutorials on PCG optimization soon!

[@olodum111]

Hello, Did I miss the creation of the PCG_MaskSamplingSubgraph? Can you point me back to that section, please? So far, I am blown away with the capabilities of PCG. Thank you for all the tutorials so far!!

[@exit-simulation]

Hey thanks for the feedback! I created this graph in the first part of this tutorial series where I give an overview of the PCG framework. You can find it from my channel!

[@olodum111]

@@exit-simulation I thought it was one of Tut. 's #1 examples. Thanks for the quick reply and for confirming that for me

[@grizzlyspank5150]

I may have missed something but at 7:45 when i add the subgraph_sampler node in 5.3.2 i also had to add a surface sampler node with bouding shape connected to the transform points above, then a transform points before the subgraph sampler

[@exit-simulation]

Thanks, certain techniques might change from one version to another as the framework is still pre-release

[@FraztheWizard]

Amazing Tutorial series, thankyou

[@invic24]

Your tutorials are awesome, detailed and informative. I hope You will make more tutorials about environment art :)

[@exit-simulation]

Thanks! Yes, probably!

[@Pharoah1224]

Great vid. Question. How do you make a split path with pcg pat splines

[@exit-simulation]

You could check the 'multiple' checkbox on the GetActorData node. Then your PCG graph can sample more than one spline path

[@pingazzz4909]

Amazing work, is there any chance you could make a tutorial on how to use houdini? With making the maps? Or a link to a good tutorial.

[@exit-simulation]

Thanks! Yes I am also planning to post some Houdini related content in the future! In general I recommend the official tutorial series on heightfields on sidefx website

[@juanmilanese]

Amazing content! I'm very new to procedural generation but you sir look like this is not your first gig... so I'm just going to ask. PCG in its current state... is viable to use for man made stuff like buildings? or its currently geared towards more "organic" distribution and stuff? or maybe is just a case of "it depends how you use it"?

[@exit-simulation]

Thanks! So PCG can definitely be used for anorganic stuff, there's no limits that would prevent you from using it for procedural buildings etc, plus you can also incorporate custom blueprints. I saw the UE 5.3 preview and it will include features to sample external data, like point clouds, very interesting and I am planning to experiment with it once it's out

[@Josh_Alfaro]

PCG is the future, so much better than the foliage spawners

[@akymam]

замечательная работа чувак

[@pingazzz4909]

When I have a lot of assets like the cliffs they tend to disappear and reappear is that because its not a megascan?

[@Mr.Mirage_YT]

spawning around the lake isnt working in 5.4