Paint PCG! Using Textures and Landscape Layers with PCG in Unreal Engine 5

🎮 Drive Procedural Content Generation with Texture Maps
🌍 Utilize Gaea and World Machine Output Maps for Complex PCG Graphs
🖌️ Master the Combination of PCG and Landscape Layers for Powerful Creative Direction

PCG TUTORIALS
⚡ ZELDA LANDSCAPE - (coming soon)

CONNECT WITH THADDAEUS

GEAR

COMPUTER

[tmaintv]

Very thorough and solid info in a really watchable and understandable format. Great video, it’s appreciated

[FPChris]

23:50 Yeah. That's what I want is to be able to paint pcg. Awesome tutorial.

[carlbjorndal]

Very good and pleasant tutorial. Thank you

[onkarnagapure]

I want to learn gaea in depth, it will be great if you make a series on it for beginner .By the way you explained the PCG concepts very clearly in multiple short videos.

[Unreality]

so glad you worked this out excellent work thank you

[RickHenderson]

Such a great video. All your tutorials have been great, I love learning from someone who worked in games and film. This tutorial is packed I'll have to watch it a few times. 😊 I'd love to see a tutorial on using Gaea to produce the different landscape masks and height maps.

[yaschan]

One of the best tutorials. You got natural talent for teaching!

[geoffrey]

Thanks for the great video. This incredibly helpful and we cannot thank you enough to share all that knowledge with us. If anyone else does have the issue where the mask do not subtract: 1/ in the difference node, set density function to "binary", 2/ in the Get Texture Data in transform, location, z-axis move the point (personally -15 fit for me), you can also check in the surface sampler node point extents and increase the z value. It seems if the point generate by the Get Texture Data do not overlap the point generate by the surface sampler, te point are not subtracted.
EDIT: all the problem could be solve by using a "ToPoint" node out the GetTextureData and the "projection" node out of the GetTextureNode solve the problem of the "floating point".

[El_Zapatito]

A gaea to unreal workflow would be amazing!!!

[ALLHmac]

Do you have any advice on how to stop texture tiling? I have some really nice textures that I have done but they have tiling that I haven’t fully figured out how to fix that!

[artbywaqas]

@azielarts I couldn't get the points to only apply to the grass layer. @24:43 Also I could not get the points to show up at all unless I set the Float Value to a negative number like - 0.2 or lower. As a result my trees are still growing in the adjacent Landscape Layer. Any idea how to fix this?

[kcc]

Around 25:00 -- why not use the inside-filter and outside-filter of the one Point filter as both inputs of the distance function?

Far as I see it, that would allow us to do grass-notgrass as opposed to grass-sand - then it would automagically work for areas of grass near cliffs as well.
I suppose it depends on what your intent is with the PCG foliage, but with the proposed implementation, we'd have the issues this tried to fix in cases of grass touching any layer other than sand.

[cr_cryptic]

Sorry I Like & Comment so much, I like your tutorials the most. They’re clean cut. Can you make one for 5.4 showing us how to make Procedurally Generated NPCs? Not like Monsters & stuff— more like… Your Prospector Character. That would be wild. Spawn the procedural world with procedural NPCs to give procedural quests. 🤯

[aerospacenews]

Another brilliant job teaching Thaddaeus! @azielarts To your question about desired tutorials, I'd personally welcome one where you walk through the process of exporting real world height maps and, crucially, the method to establish and preserve scale and accuracy.

By scale I mean, both the boundaries of that map and the relative elevations of features like hills, mountains, depressions, etc.

My use case is related to building animations of various flying machines depicted in real places.

After importing a quality height map, I've found the process of tweaking the Z scale very imprecise as I tried to get hills and mountains to look remotely realistic. I follow the resolution and ratio guidelines in the documentation but my results typically deliver unrealistic peak shapes and lower elevations with poorly defined contours - as if there was very large amounts of down sampling (or low resolution to start).

The other scale issue is how to end up with a world (map/level, etc., ) that looks remotely to scale with most of the models and characters one might place in them. I know there is generally going to be adjustments to scale of such items but it seems like I start not just on another planet, but from outside the solar system (a joke but you get my point).

I'm going for cinematic quality realism but not engineering-level accuracy.

Because things need to have room to fly and the camera needs room for wide shots, the map sizes need to be pretty big.

As ever, thanks for what you do here. I've said it before, you are a gifted teacher. 🌟

[DemiLovatosSpoon]

When I put the node in, Insert the texture asset and debug nothing is showing on the map

[MidnightshadeProductions]

I did not know pcg can do this i will try it later although my landscape has layers i cannot paint them due to it being a substrate but maybe it will work by just using the layers

[poladsaherart]

nice but how do I do the opposite?? how do I have PCG paint landscape?

[Vylocity]

Im looking for a way to use textures, but randomly choose the texture used at runtime/begin play. Think No Man's Sky with different biomes which wuold require different noise textures for the landscape/foliage separation. Any ideas? Can you set the Texture Data dynamically via blueprint and then refresh?

[PervaizAbbas-nn]

So I Wanted To do the same thing you did (2nd Part Of Video Where You painted layer and spawn meshes on the basis of painted material(Actually texture)) but with blueprint.. is That Possible ... If yes Kindly make video on that or if anyone knows the way let me know

[pantelispantis]

Hey, great video, i 'm using landscape layers with assigned foliage myself instead of foliage painting, now with your help i can also use pcg for the layers, thanx! one request though, you mentioned about a video for optimization, which I cannot see in the links