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2D Tooling & Development In Unreal Engine 5

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  Image courtesy of https://cainos.itch.io/     It's been a minute since I've made an entry on the blog, and the reason for that is simply due to work and burnout; I've just had my first break from work in 4 years and realized that burnout has been with me like Thor setting his hammer on someone's chest. The thought did occur to me that I could have worked on planets or any development related interest over my winter break, but said thought also made me want to run for the hills - I just really needed to step away for a bit before touching the computer again. That said, anyone who has been in the industry for some time or even just burns the midnight oil for years will tell you that 2 weeks is not enough time to fully recover from burnout, which is why I'm hoping that this post will be a sort of warm up for me before I dig back into planet work. Now I know some of you may have expected the next post to be about procedural planets, but as t...
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Journey to Procedural Planets in Unreal Engine 5 - Part 2

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At the end of the last post, we left off with a single triangle. Everyone loves a good David vs. Goliath story, but our little triangle alone does not make for good terrain. Therefore, we must go deeper...to the grid! It's all about the grid, man. At this point in the journey, I was getting a little nervous as the process ahead was clear, but still intimidating. We've got a triangle and now we need a full quad. That's very simple - you add 1 more entry into your vertice array, 1 entry into the UV array and 3 more entries into your triangle indice array. That looks like this. At this point, it's pretty clear that we can't simply keep manually adding entries here if we want to progress in a reasonable manner (preferably in our lifetime). So we need a formula or algorithm to help us sort all of this data out for us. Luckily, generating a grid of points is not terribly difficult to do.  Let's start off very simple in blueprints, ...
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Journey to Procedural Planets in Unreal Engine 5 - Part 1

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  This photo is from my final iteration of procedural terrains with PMC, which these posts will catch up to eventually.   Why am I writing these entries? I need a way to hold myself accountable in continued development towards these planets, and documenting my ongoing journey towards procedural planets should not only solidify the concepts of the content being presented here, but also serve as a way to showcase successes and failures of said journey. It's important for budding developers to understand that knowledge and success are not reserved for the perceived rockstars of the industry, but rather are concepts unique to each individual.  To explain that last statement, let me provide an example. There is a 17-18 year old developer who has achieved very detailed planets in Unreal, yet I do not let this deter me or get me down. It would be quite easy to look at hi...
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