Category: Sheffield

The latest instalment of MrWhiz’s TPS version, based on the Advanced Locomotive System v4 has been released on their Patreon. In this video I try it out and implement it into the map

This video is a quick introduction to Cesium, a JavaScript library that makes it easy to work with 3D geospatial data. Cesium lets you easily create maps and globes, and integrates with other web mapping libraries and frameworks.

In this video, I’ve used the Unreal plugin to create a level of Sheffield, and used a photogrammetry dataset of Boston, MA.

If you’re looking for a step-by-step introduction, this playlist was the source inspiration for this video:

Vehicle Variety Pack
https://www.unrealengine.com/marketpl...

Music:
South London Hi-Fi – Sky View Well (from YouTube Audio Library)

Process

The first thing I did, after loading the Epic Launcher was to add the Cesium addon from the Marketplace, and if you’d like – you can download the free sample projects to have a look around, and see how it works.

I’ve not gone over them in this video, as I’ve wanted to keep it as short as possible.
When you’ve downloaded them, install them to your engine – and create a new, blank project and enable the Cesium Plugins by clicking Edit -> Plugins within Unreal and enable Cesium (this will cause a browser restart).

Next up, re-open your new project file and ensure that Show Engine Content is enabled on your Content Browser. If you scroll through the left panel, you’ll see a Cesium folder.
Open this and drag in the Dynamic Pawn blueprint, and a Cesium Sun Sky object onto the scene.

Then click the Cesium icon on the toolbar, and you’ll have a menu appear on the left of the place actors window, you can click the + icons next to the items to add them to the map, start with a World Terrain; this will be where you’ll be able to dictate the latitude and longitude, and the zoom level

[to be continued]

A composition of screencasts of the segments I’ve been working on the past few days.

I’ve been out and about and taken some reference photos (and borrowed some) of Park Bridge in Sheffield.

I’ve been exploring the elevation of the city; how some areas of the city are higher than others, and looking at walkways to navigate the map.

In this video, I work on the alleyway next to Argos that leads to the Dove and Rainbow, and make a start on the Natwest building.

Music: Unicorn Heads – Early Avril

I specifically chose this track, because when I saw Run Logan Run in Sheffield last week, they honestly blew me away.

How a drummer and a Saxaphone player can evoke so much emotion is absolutely admirable.

In short, I’m using a spline system to map out the roads of the Sheffield level. Sheffield is not a flat city, so I had to find a way of matching the terrain for the roads, and I’d almost given up – but having a musical two-piece in the background, as the soundtrack to my creativity – I couldn’t help but not use them.

Bristol based Run Logan Run produce some absolutely amazing music, and their no-vocal music style really helped me think, to the point where I’d call their music medative.

I’ve seen an awful lot of bands in my time, and I’ve seen a lot of awful bands. Run Logan Run were not one of those awful bands; they were absolutely astounding live.

I wanted to use their powerful music for my latest update; I hope they don’t mind (or strike me!) but watching them inspired me so much, I wanted to make them a part of it.

I’m not affiliated or sponsored by them, but if you ever see them playing live near you; do yourself a favour and go see them.

Music

Tutorial

I added a moving platform to the St. Paul’s Tower building so that it takes the player to the roof and back down again, and made a lift shaft out of the side of the building

I’m currently still working on it, and would like to have ~100 faces that you can tap and cycle through. All the faces are from thispersondoesnotexist.com; so are obviously not real people that can be doxxed.

I tried out the 3D Live Scanner app by Lubos Vonasek Programmierung, and at the time of posting this – it was still in early access, but I found it to be incredibly functional while scanning the front room I use as a studio.

It’s currently free, and technically unreleased: so grab it while you can.

I’ve only explored the one feature where you can scan a room, but hot dang – when I get a day off, you know I’ll be going out to Sheffield city centre, and trying to 3D scan some landmarks.

Play Store link to the Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lvonasek.arcore3dscanner&hl=en_GB&gl=

US Instant Meshes:
https://github.com/wjakob/instant-meshes

If you’re looking for a quick guide to Instant Meshes, I recommend the Peter France tutorial on it: though this is focused around scanning individual objects, not entire rooms – which is why I left it out of this video.

If that name rings a bell, it bloody well should – he was once part of Corridor Crew….
https://youtu.be/dKo0rWXVAlc

Music: Unicorn Heads – Dreaming in 432Hz https://youtu.be/bsFkZR7FVM8
This track is CC0 but I still wanted to credit it, as I always do. As an avid lucid dreamer who listens to binaural tones, this is the closest I could get without hypnotising my audience.

I found some accurate representations of 3D buildings on 3D Warehouse of Sheffield, and tried to export from Sketchup to fbx, with a view to import the textured assets into Unreal for the Sheffield game I’m working on.

I started the process in Linux, but had to actually dual boot into Windows to finish the video, with some help of some text to speech AI’s from https://play.ht

Music Credits: –
Mario Bava Sleeps In a Little Later Than He Expected To by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Source: http://chriszabriskie.com/vendaface/
Artist: http://chriszabriskie.com/

Geographer – Sky Scraper
Used courtesy of YouTube Audio Library, but this is a direct link to the track.
https://youtu.be/dXottFnsHv8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographer_(band)

R.LUM.R – Copycat Used courtesy of YouTube Audio Library, but this is a direct link to the track.
https://youtu.be/lDuVIdf3_SM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.LUM.R

I used the MyHeritage ‘Deep Nostalgia’ tool to animate paintings of prominent people from history.

The Deep Nostalgia tool uses AI to take a photo of a person, and create an animation of them moving around: quite akin to the picture frames in Harry Potter.

The tool is free, and you can find it at
https://www.myheritage.com/deep-nostalgia