Migrating from Unity to Unreal -- best system for foliage spawning and splatmap generation?

Alex_J · Oct 2019

Hello, I have begun a new game project and before I go too far with it I want to test things out in Unreal.

There is one third party tool I use in Unity that I believe I would need a counterpart to in Unreal. Vegetation Studio is is a robust tool that lets you define biomes, where they go, what spawns in them, automatically creates billboards and batches things for better performance. Also gives you lots of non-destructive global control over your vegetation and terrain textures.

In short it's an open world nature spawning system.

So, there's got to be something like this in Unreal? I am searching all the tag words I'd expect but not finding anything on the market place.

Any help is appreciated.

Obscura · Oct 2019

For foliage, you can try this. It spawns instanced foliage based on splat maps.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/OpenWorldTools/Grass/QuickStart/index.html

Or this, but this works with volumes so I think the first one is closer to what you want:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/OpenWorldTools/ProceduralFoliage/QuickStart/index.html

Alex_J · Oct 2019

Thanks @Obscura I am checking these out now. Seems like enough that I can work with. One thing that was nice about vegstudio is you can draw out a polygon that snaps to terrain and use this as a biome boundary. Looks like I can acccomplish same thing with the volumes just by duplicating and shuffling them around.

I wonder if I set up spawn rules based on terrain textures, then I could easily and nondestructively just paint where I want my biomes to go and also control blending of them. Then, if there is way to bake the vegetation into storage I could then swap out my ground textures?

Obscura · Oct 2019

Look into blueprint scripting. It will really open up a lot of opportunities. Even though Unreal had a decent toolset by default, it highly relies on blueprints. So if you find some missing tool or feature, sometimes you are better making your own and you really can. If it doesn't exist already on the marketplace.

Alex_J · Oct 2019

thanks @Obscura . you're the man. I've been learning a lot from your threads lately. Putting a lot of stuff to use in my game project regarding foliage. Shader stuff is really hard for me cause i got a stupid monkey brain that won't do math, but it's so much fun when you get it to work.

Migrating from Unity to Unreal -- best system for foliage spawning and splatmap generation?

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