Gods of War Check-In 3: Grass, grass, and more grass

 This sprint was focused on improving the PCG system to make the spawning of the ferns more natural. Also this is the sprint where I added the ability for grass to spawn as well.

The grass was my nightmare. Because of the number of points that need to be calculated each time, I have spent well over 6 hours in total waiting for debug cubes to generate. Eventually, it did all come together though. The grass is using a point grid and a distance node to create a radial effect of being smaller the farther away from the center it is. 

The large and small ferns are now combined into a single spawner, and have a cluster applied to them to make them spawn closer together. It's not much, but it's honest work.

There was no update to the tree spawning other than the mesh that was replaced after I took my renders.

Also, I have learned the amazing power of the Named Reroute Node. It allows you to be super clean with your PCG code and not have wires everywhere. Editor parameters have been added for quick iterations.

Radial Grid Grass Spawning

Grass Spawning Based on Normal

Grass-Only Render

Fern New Clumping Locations

Fern + Grass Render

Close-up shot of environment spawning

Editable Parameters in Editor

Clean Blueprint (No wires)

Gods of War Check-In 2: The PCG Era

 I took a step back from doing the asset manager because it was repetitive, and instead moved towards a more procedural direction. Using Unreal's PCG system, I have been working on creating a procedural environment for our scene. I used multiple different techniques to achieve the environment including self-pruning, spline sampling, normal to density conversions, spatial noise, and a lot of difference calculations.

For the meshes I used a single conifer tree mesh, three large fern meshes, and three small fern meshes.

This is the base I was working with.

Surface Sample (for Trees)

Post-filter and upper/lower bounds (for Trees)

Normal-to-density calculations (keep only flat surface)

Trees rendered (from above)

Large Fern Density Sample

Fern + Tree Difference Calculation

Large Fern Render

Small Fern Density Sample

Small Fern Render

Tree, Large Fern, and Small Fern Render Combined (from above)

Tree, Large Fern, and Small Fern Debug Combined

Spline added to create non-spawnable section

Render + Spline

Main Spawning Blueprint for Foliage

Applying Spline Data for non-spawnable area