LogInStephen Phillips released a new great tool and shared a detailed breakdown explaining how it was made.
Solution Architect at Epic Games Stephen Phillips has recently shared a great new tool that expands on the capabilities of Cesium, an Unreal Engine plug-in that lets you add Google Earth's data to your projects, and enables you to clip out sections of Cesium's Cartographic Polygon Actor and procedurally fill them with Geometry Script.
For those unfamiliar, Geometry Script is an Unreal Engine plug-in that comprises a set of Function Libraries. These libraries grant the ability to generate and modify mesh geometry through Blueprints and Python. Geometry Script can be employed in Editor Utility Widgets and Asset Actions to fashion bespoke tools for mesh analysis, processing, and editing. Furthermore, it can be utilized in Actor Blueprints to create "procedural objects" and execute complex geometric queries.
"I've been on an automation and scripting kick lately, so I was looking for opportunities to extend the Cartographic Polygon Actor in a way that could work within a bigger system," commented the developer. "If I needed to cut out a large number of plots of land and have each plot associated with a bunch of metadata, managing loose cartographic actors is a lost opportunity."
In a nutshell, Stephen's tool works like this:
- A custom actor that can quickly be dragged into the scene,
- Automatically assigns itself as a clipping polygon for the primary tileset,
- Fills in its clipping volume with solid geometry,
- Contains a relative origin point for an associated Datasmith import,
- Holds identifying information that can be referenced through scripting later.
Moreover, the developer shared an enormous breakdown, thoroughly explaining the intricacies of the tool, how to install it, how the "filling in" process works, and much more. You can read the full tutorial and download the tool by clicking this link.
Previously, Stephen also shared a comprehensive tutorial on getting any actor to automatically and smoothly follow a spline in Unreal Engine 5. Moreover, the creator authored a Blueprint component that can achieve this functionality quickly and easily. You can learn more here.
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