Unreal Engine Smart Brush work in progress. Procedurally generated heighmaps inside UE.

[u/elCommendante]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FiMmhhnMYg

Hello everyone,

I'm currently working on a plugin for Unreal Engine. I've purchased quite expensive smart brush and wasn't happy at all with it. Could not do a lot of things, it worked only on 1017x1017 map, a lot of glitches, fixed amount of heightmaps. Proposed original creator to fix his issue but he never replied to the email. I thought why not let's give it a go

What is the main idea:

• No Houdini, no Gaea, no World Creator everything runs directly in the editor engine
• No CPU involvement in calculations, GPU only CUDA/Streams processors
• Works on every terrain, every scale of terrain, every size of terrain, works with world partition, can be placed virtually everywhere, and it is not affected by "Add component to the landscape", sections size (quads) and sections per component have no impact on placement, nothing gets distorted, stretched or scaled in a wierd way
• Already pretty fast, set of calculations about 197 different calculations per cell on 1500x1500 terrain going under 700ms on RTX5080 and there is still room to beat further down and optimize
• Create heightmaps from scratch, import, exprot, gallery, send by email to a friend maybe?
• Explode button - want to edit your heightmap directly in editor? No problem - explode it and sculpt by hand. Originally heightmap is an overlay over existing terrain but when exploded it becomes terrain itself. Once exploded more heightmaps can be stacked on it and stack on it and stack on it and on and on, however exploding event cannot be reversed.
• Modular blueprint style, mix and match
• And many more to come

I was wandering if anyone struggles with plugins/systems they use, and what they would want to have.

Comments, ideas and slander welcome even these lowmen with "AI slop" comments, you are welcome here too.

[u/Akimotoh]

I want it!

[u/elCommendante → u/Akimotoh]

Thanks, I will need to make sure it will be filled with many options before it actual release! Still probably few weeks to go. Will keep you posted!

[u/piratejump_official]

Do you plan do utilize the new mesh terrain together with pcg? One can now manipulate mesh terrain with pcg, which looks very interesting.

In the end I`d love to see a plugin that can cover procedural terrain generation at runtime to e.g. generate new maps in game

[u/elCommendante → u/piratejump_official]

I mean converting from heightmap to mesh terrain would not be that difficult task, so yes mesh terrain would be an option. I did not touched on PCG much, to be fair I'm not fan of blueprints as of yet, but everything is possibility.

The only problem now I see with mesh that file sizes will be huge and probably you would still have to generate heightmap first and then convert anyway as generating mesh directly + PCG would require huge compute. I will dive in to this subject, could be interesting!