Unreal Engine 5.2 PCG Tutorial - Landscape Material Sampling

[@frankfabry1458]

THX for the great tutorial. If in 5.3 someone is facing problems with the points not spawning within the closed loop spline, there is a property "Unbounded" at the Spline Sampler Node wich needs to be checked.

[@StrikerTVFang]

OMG thank you for this comment! I was stuck on this very thing. I love when people share their solutions in the comments!

[@ue4artguy385]

Not all heroes wear capes! Thank you!

[@JohanEnstam]

❤❤

[@Bunkitia]

Thank you very much ! I was wondering why there were no points being generated !

[@Gulzt]

or add some higher Z value for the spline.

[@MUBEENAHAMEDKABIRRIBAYEE]

0:38 69 unsaved files... a man of culture I see

[@NicolasCaplat]

Amazing ! thanks a lot for sharing ! FYI in Unreal 5.3, DensityNoise node was renamed into AttributeNoise node ;)

[@MichaelRoyalty]

Good catch, and thanks for pointing that out!

[@tarkbilgili929]

Landscape Bug at starting of the video that i search for months.Thanks a lot.

[@MichaelRoyalty]

5.3 preview just released and it's supposed to have fixed this bug, so you may want to give it a shot.

[@yanshuo9915]

thank you this is super helpful! i am a landscape designer, and just wondering whether PCG can be generated by Materials of imported land form geometry? For instance I have several surfaces imported from Rhino with different materials (lawn, woodland, marsh etc). And hope to generate plants by materials. Also, is this possible to remove some portion of the plants (manually), so I can do more detailed planting manually? Thank you!

[@xjuliussx]

just another great and vital tutorial!

[@Utopia2023Game2]

nice ... it was good example for begin thank you

[@yeohjo]

i seem to be having a problem where i can detect my landscape layer name when i inspect . Is there something i am missing?

[@zvylna]

Thank you so much for this tutorial! It helped a lot! I have a question that I can't seem to figure out, maybe you know the answer. Do you know if it's possible to change the color of an already existing asset that is in a spline's bounds with PCG? Do you think I need to make a custom blueprint node? Though I'm not sure how I'd access the material data of the assets in the spline bounds and replace/change it.

[@MichaelRoyalty]

I could be wrong but I don't believe so. PCG is focused on creating new assets and not modifying existing ones. I'm thinking using a non-pcg blueprint and using the spline as a bounds to find the actor and change its color would be the way to go, but it's possible I'm steering you wrong.

[@zvylna]

@@MichaelRoyalty I see! Thank you so much for the answer! I'll see what I can do! :D

[@mahnomix]

VERY COOL!!! 💥👋👍

[@abdulalgharbi8784]

Thank you. Very useful tutorials

[@arturrosa3166]

Your tutorials are excellent. Thanks a lot!

[@POPCORNGameMovia]

Hey Michael nice helpful tutorial, thank you :) I was thinking tho if it is possible to sample Procedural Foliage in PCG? (might be a stupid question but I am a newbie). Thank you!

[@MichaelRoyalty]

No clue, but there are a lot of ways to get data into pcg, it just depends how much effort you want to put in! How are you generating the foliage, is it through the foliage painter tool?

[@POPCORNGameMovia]

@@MichaelRoyalty Thank you for your reply :) I am not using the painter, for now I am exploring my options through PFS (Procedural Foliage) and Auto-Materials (just for grass, rocks and not interactive objects. The reason I ended up researching is because I am struggling getting good FPS on a 2k map with only grass on it. Played with PCG, PFS, Nanite, World Offset, Cull Distance and all the juicy stuff but still getting only 60-70 FPS. Tried playing with shadow casting etc. but the only thing that I did not touched is UltraDynamicSky :( which may be the main reason. In debug seems I have bottleneck on Rasterizing (NaniteVisBuffer and Voxel Trace). Well the sum it up :) Was thinking to make my life easier and have a Master PCG for biomes, and subgraphs for anything else in each biome foliage wise, so I can use PFS within PCG. Was thinking that PFS does a better job on scattering foliage more naturally, and then having patches of each PFS in PCG. PS: I think you can do it with file path using strings if any option available on a custom function in PCG." Sorry for long comment :) 18h of non stop research work makes me .... :) Any suggestions?

[@MichaelRoyalty]

It sounds like you know a lot more about these other systems than I do! Using custom PCG element nodes you can pretty much do anything you want inside PCG, but it may cause a performance hit.

[@wttrlabs]

amazing work! do you have a way I can get in touch for more specific questions?

[@MichaelRoyalty]

Not really, but ask your question here and I'll do my best to get to it.

[@MichaelEmbers]

Nice so practical and well explained thank you! I have one request if you could show us how to do terraform, the electric dreams has this thing that lifts the ground and it’s a spline.

[@MichaelRoyalty]

Thanks! I'll be honest, I haven't even looked at electric dreams yet. My plan is to eventually deconstruct it and attempt to rebuild it as a junkyard (if I can pull the assets together), but there's just so much to work through in the PCG tool! Once I knock a few more things off my list I'm going to dig into electric dreams, and I'll make sure to look at the terraforming, thanks for pointing it out!

[@MichaelEmbers]

of course keep it up enjoying every minute@@MichaelRoyalty

[@DzageRxDD]

Great Tutorial! You are my PCG Guru :)

[@GameArtTurntables]

Hi, Thanks for the great tutorial. I am just looking for this. is it possible to create this without landscape material for defining the area, by using alpha maps as masks? I have a requirement for creating PCG but without landscape surface. your input is much appreciated.

[@MichaelRoyalty]

I haven't had the opportunity to work with too many textures, but this tutorial might get you started. kzbin.info/www/bejne/i5bEgqukdrtqhZI You might also be able to use the world ray hit query if you want to use a surface sampler on a static mesh you're using as your land.

[@GameArtTurntables]

This is fantastic, thank you very much. @@MichaelRoyalty

[@legato3067]

amazing :) thx you very much

[@v8matey]

Great tutorial. But how do you assign a sea level so anything below that line is doesn't get spawned.

[@MichaelRoyalty]

You can filter everything on $Position.Z > (Your sea level value)

[@beyondkhan8459]

Thanks tutorial!

[@bruce21st]

Fantastic video Michael. I'm definitely going to experiment with this as I am now just getting into PCG. Is it possible to use PCG to sample materials on a mesh vs a landscape? I'd love some insight into this as well.

[@MichaelRoyalty]

Thanks! Yeah it should be possible to sample materials on a mesh, check out my "Sampling Landscape Auto Materials" tutorial. That one grabs the physical material from a landscape, but with a little tweaking you should be able to get the material from a mesh.

[@DronX_]

this is so fuc..ng awesome!

[@dalaitseren7987]

can i scatter object on static mesh(not landscape) using texture data? i can not get it done please help me

[@skilattutos6696]

awesome !

[@Slayer9299]

why doesnt my mesh go away when i tried painting a path just like yours? the mesh still remains when i painted a different landscape layer

[@Slayer9299]

it only updates when i deleted the blueprint and reimport the same exact blueprint

[@LFA_GM]

This is absolutely fantastic. You've just created a road system based on painted landscape layers. I'll give it a try as soon as I return from my trip. Thank you for sharing. How would you go about spawning small lake blueprints scattered across the landscape? Keep it coming. Cheers.

[@MichaelRoyalty]

Thanks! Yeah, I'm pretty happy with this effect. And I'm close to getting something working with Auto Materials, which I'm excited to share soon. If you already have the lakes in blueprint form, the first idea that comes to mind is to use a surface sampler across the entire landscape, set to only generate a few points, and just turn those into lakes. If you want slightly varying densities, you could make the surface sampler generate a few more points than necessary, maybe 4x, then use a density noise filter to trim them down and, if needed, crank their bounds waaaaaay up and use a self pruning node, to make sure that none of them are closer than you intend. Creating the lakes from scratch would be harder, I'd probably use my copy points node to create circles and then distort them out along their Y axis (so the points never cross backwards), then generate a spline from the points. I haven't looked into making PCG affect the landscape yet, so I don't know the next step from there!

[@LFA_GM]

@@MichaelRoyalty awesome, looking forward to seeing your next iterations. Regarding the lakes, I was originally thinking about spawning premade lake blueprints actors having the lowest height as filters for the placement across the landscape. However, I came across the concept of alpha brushes for terraforming, this is something that I want to delve into very soon. Keep up the great work.

[@MichaelRoyalty]

That's extremely intriguing. I haven't delved into any methods of terraforming yet, if you make something satisfying I hope you share it, I'd be very interested to see what you do and how you did it.

[@LFA_GM]

​@@MichaelRoyaltyI used Shader World when it was released as a free plugin. Also, I intend to test Terrain Magic very soon. Hope that helps.

[@MichaelRoyalty]

@@LFA_GM I'll check them out, thanks.

[@semmert]

This is cool, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't work on landscape auto-materials. Only on manually painted materials.

[@StrikerTVFang]

In 5.3 There doesn't seem to be a "Density Noise" filter. What should we use instead?

[@StrikerTVFang]

If anyone sees this and had the same issue. The new node is now called "Attribute Noise" it works just like the old "Density Noise" node.

[@MichaelRoyalty]

Glad you found it!

[@awakenwithoutcoffee]

your tutorials are a great aid to the community. Do you think this method is actually feasible for production ? I remember seeing a GDC talk about using Lidar data for masks to drive procedural content, this could be a dope topic for a video to see if its possible with PCG.

[@MichaelRoyalty]

PCG isn't ready for production, so it's not feasible yet. That aside, the more time you spend fine tuning the graph the better it'll be, but converting a 2D image to realistic looking 3D assets is always challenging. So as with a lot of answers, the real conclusion is "it depends". Taking real world data seems like an easy way to get amazing results. Another method of getting the Lidar data in would be to sample it using a Get Texture Data node, and not going through the step of applying it to the landscape, it really just depends on your workflow. I'm also stretching the limits of my knowledge here, I've been digging into PCG but I'm pretty new to the Unreal Engine in general :)

[@barbarossagdicandpartners]

Thanks.. I would appreciate it if you could prepare a tutorial that automatically ensures that trees do not form on that road when we make a road with Landscape spline

[@Vylocity]

There's node that lets you sample "spline data" and then within the details you can select the landscape i believe. and then use it with a difference node

[@tarasvideograf713]

How to invert the "instance end cull distance" parameter in the "Static Mesh Spawner" node?

[@MichaelRoyalty]

No clue! Maybe the "Reverse Culling" checkbox near the bottom?

[@tarasvideograf713]

@@MichaelRoyalty I did. It doesn't work.

[@tarasvideograf713]

@@MichaelRoyalty I need this so that at a great distance I can change the trees of my forest to simplified static grids. In my project, I can't use HLOD for the forest because the trees will be cut down in real time, or something else will happen.

[@MichaelRoyalty]

Hmm, I'm afraid I don't know how to solve your issue, sorry! I'm currently working on a video for interacting with and removing instanced static meshes though, maybe that'll be useful to your situation?

[@tarasvideograf713]

@@MichaelRoyalty I hope. I will be waiting for this video. Thank you!

[@bimodirty]

can we do this with vertex paint on a mesh too?

[@MichaelRoyalty]

I'm afraid I don't know anything about that. I feel like you'd need to create your own node for line tracing, and then you'd have more control over how you sample the mesh.

[@zeon3d755]

Does it have to be an alpha layer? It didn't work for me. It spawns in different place.

[@MichaelRoyalty]

Are you having the problem I go over at 0:31? Check to see if your landscape Component Subsections are set to 1x1 or 2x2. If they're 2x2 it won't work right, but it should be fixed in 5.3.

[@zeon3d755]

@@MichaelRoyalty yes 2x2. It works fine in ue5.3. Thanks.

[@astralstormgamestudios1259]

Point filter dont seem to work on nanite landscape , or it's because of a custom auto material

[@MichaelRoyalty]

An auto material will only have a single material, the auto material itself. You'll want to have the auto material assign physical materials, and use world ray hit query to get back the physical materials. If you're in 5.2 world ray hit query doesn't return physical material, but you can set up a custom blueprint to get the physical material.

[@astralstormgamestudios1259]

@@MichaelRoyalty im using 5.3.1. And I have no idea how to do that

[@MichaelRoyalty]

I go over a basic physical material setup here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/mouZd5R6a6iEhdE For anything more complex you'll want to look up a tutorial focused on it.

[@astralstormgamestudios1259]

@@MichaelRoyalty When I tried this tutorial my list is /engine/EngineMaterials/Default/DefaultPhysicalMaterial.DefaultPhysicalMaterial and nothing more, and the whole list is the same ..

[@MichaelRoyalty]

You should look up a tutorial on adding physical materials, it sounds like you aren't currently setting one in your material.

[@plasid2]

I dont get it why epic try tricks like a horse up a hill, make hunderd system, pcg, geometry script, blueprint, not using one system like geometry nodes Blender

[@semmert]

don't worry. all these features will be deprecated and replaced with half-done features that will then be deprecated and replaced with new half-done features, and so on and so on. The old Epic loop.....