Work Log

Biomes pt.2     I'm back, and today I have almost finished the basic biome system; in that I have different colored areas of the planet based on "latitude". I say "latitude" because the colors are currently actually generating the biomes from the west pole to the east instead of south to north but I can still rotate the entire planet so that it looks like south to north.      I started off this process by looking into the biome tint to see if I could get that working first. In my last blog post I showed how the tint percent didn't seem to be tinting the planet all the way. After looking at the code, the first clue came to me in that where I was trying to pass in the color, the key was requesting a float not a color. Some more messing about later and I finally realized that the UCurveLinearColor's keys were a vector4. This then immediately clicked in my mind as RGBA. This meant that the mistake I was making was trying to give the red value of the vector a

Biomes pt.1     This will be a small update about what I have accomplished before I go away again for a few days. I have been focusing fully on trying to get the biome system implemented.     The main thing I am trying to do is to get the tint working. This is more of a debug tool than anything, but it will allow me to see that the system is working properly. It is supposed to color the part of the planet belonging to a specific biome a solid color. Also if I can manage to get that to work then all I have to do is replace that solid color with a gradient and the whole job is essentially done. Here's what I have so far for that: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 void ColorGenerator::UpdateColors() { ColorSettings->Atlas->TextureSize = TextureResolution; ColorSettings->Atlas->GradientCurves.SetNum(ColorSettings->BiomeColorSettings->Biomes.Num()); TArray<UCurveLinearColor*> BaseCurves;

Texture Automation     First off, I haven't updated this blog in a few days. That's because I was out of town for some time, and until I go back to school that will happen a few more times, mostly over the weekends. Regardless, I have managed to make at least some progress today in the realm of texturing these planets.      The one thing that I wanted to accomplish today was to automate the process of creating the curve atlases. This was to catch up to the tutorial series in which  Sebastian Lague creates a texture based on the color gradient. But as mentioned in previous blog entries, this approach will work in Unity but not Unreal.      In Unreal I decided to just use the atlas directly instead of trying to create a genuine texture. This meant that I had to fill all gradient curve slots in the atlas with the gradient that I wanted to use. The problem with this is that the atlases must be square. So if you want a texture resolution of 256 so you get the most color detail, that