Geopogo: Cities

For the 3D architectural visualization company Geopogo, I was contracted to create a runtime mass foliage placement tool for use primarily by architects.

Current Prototype tested on San Francisco.

The Task

Geopogo contracted me to make a Foliage Placement tool that, expanding upon their existing placement framework for individual 3D models, allowed mass placement through lines, squares, and painting of foliage across uneven terrain.

Additional features were requested as the project progressed, including search functionality and multi-selection of foliage.

Process

One of the largest initial challenges of this project was working with a large, complex, and high-dependency blueprint base that already existed. One of the first steps I did, before even pseudocoding or scripting was familiarizing myself with the systems I would be interacting with - the player pawn, controller, HUD, and creating a branch where I could safely test changes and interactions with those systems.

Once I felt comfortable working with the existing project material, I started sketching out the minimum viable prototype of placing clusters of foliage (due to project requirements, otherwise instanced static meshes would have been preferable).

I then made a basic prototype to test circle, square, and line placement of foliage with adjustable brush settings.

Above: Using Line Traces to visualize the placement distribution of foliage at different densities.

Once I was confident in the placement distribution, I made a basic version of the tool that allowed single, circular, square, and linear placement of Foliage, but without paint functionality.

Code Snippets

Some screenshots show integration with code that is not my own, such as the sections from the Player Controller.