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I don't think the plugin needs to directly support those features, as they are already in the engine natively. The engine supports generating meshes dynamicall

by TrevorJ 10y ago

I don't think the plugin needs to directly support those features, as they are already in the engine natively. The engine supports generating meshes dynamically at runtime: https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Procedural_Mesh_Generation https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Procedural_Mesh_Generation It is also fairly easy to generate random or pseudo random levels using blueprint (Unreal's visual scripting API) or C++ If you have any other questions I'd be happy to help.

malux85 10y ago
Thanks for your response, great info. The reason I ask is that I have a large dataset that I would like to visualize. The ideal situation would be: I could use python to create a giant flat plane, and then iterate over the dataset to generate the level (which initially would just be quads on the 2d plane). The dataset would be too large to do in-engine in realtime, and the quads are static - I would like to generate the level as a 1 off process, and then have Unreal do any optimisations that it can by "compiling" the level (e.g. frustum culling, quad tree calculation etc) I might have some of those optimizations wrong since my knowledge of engines is still stuck in the Quake 1 era, but you get the gist :) Do you think this is possible? If this tech doesn't exist, I would pay someone to develop it for me....
- TrevorJ 10y ago
  anything is possible :) How many total datapoints are you trying to represent at once, ballpark? My first instinct is that it would probably be most efficient to feed the data into Unreal and build the physical representation there VS importing a large monolithic 3D model, because then you could make use of instancing, distance culling, etc. This would also mean you could animate the objects separately as well, and manipulate scale, color and the like in realtime. Again, probably depends heavily on the specifics. In general though, modern gaming GPU's can handle just an insane number of polygons so either way, you should be able to represent a ton of datapoints. As far as getting data into the engine, it supports .csv importing where you can define your own row types etc: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Gameplay/DataDriven/ https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Gameplay/DataDriven... I believe there's also a SQL lite support module for the engine as well, if you want to deal with really massive sets of data, though the documentation there is sparse. My contact info is in my profile, feel free to hit me up if you have any other questions, happy to help.

by TrevorJ 10y ago

malux85 10y ago

Thanks for your response, great info. The reason I ask is that I have a large dataset that I would like to visualize. The ideal situation would be: I could use python to create a giant flat plane, and then iterate over the dataset to generate the level (which initially would just be quads on the 2d plane). The dataset would be too large to do in-engine in realtime, and the quads are static - I would like to generate the level as a 1 off process, and then have Unreal do any optimisations that it can by "compiling" the level (e.g. frustum culling, quad tree calculation etc) I might have some of those optimizations wrong since my knowledge of engines is still stuck in the Quake 1 era, but you get the gist :) Do you think this is possible? If this tech doesn't exist, I would pay someone to develop it for me....

TrevorJ 10y ago
anything is possible :) How many total datapoints are you trying to represent at once, ballpark? My first instinct is that it would probably be most efficient to feed the data into Unreal and build the physical representation there VS importing a large monolithic 3D model, because then you could make use of instancing, distance culling, etc. This would also mean you could animate the objects separately as well, and manipulate scale, color and the like in realtime. Again, probably depends heavily on the specifics. In general though, modern gaming GPU's can handle just an insane number of polygons so either way, you should be able to represent a ton of datapoints. As far as getting data into the engine, it supports .csv importing where you can define your own row types etc: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Gameplay/DataDriven/ https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Gameplay/DataDriven... I believe there's also a SQL lite support module for the engine as well, if you want to deal with really massive sets of data, though the documentation there is sparse. My contact info is in my profile, feel free to hit me up if you have any other questions, happy to help.