Speckle Unreal POC (v2)

Making Speckle
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Hi @Community, just ported over the Speckle Unreal connector for v1 to v2 (thanks to @markcichy
& @pablothedolphin for the initial work!). It reached a workable POC state that we can share around:

Source is here.

We’d be really keen on feedback from you. We’re by far not experts at game engine development or use-cases, so lend us a helping hand! There’s many many ways in which AEC can make use of Unreal - let us know if you’re interested in having a chat.

6 Likes
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Hi,

we have tested and it works !

Just some comments

  1. Content should not be in a folder, just in a root actor to allow easy editing
  2. It should obtain the latest commit or out of a list of available commit ids. Not the commit provided explicitly. We can do it also ourselves with a curl question to speckle.xyz if you want.
  3. Sending data I assume are in the todos
  4. We are also making a GUI for fetching commits inside VR (So we can help also here)

Thanks and we seek a possible collaboration. Panagiotis is a watcher in Unreal Speckle (panagiotismigo@gmail.com), can you add him to this repo ?

Thanks,
Dimitrios

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Nice, glad to hear! (I’ve moved your reply to the unreal connector discussion thread - felt it’s better). All your comments are spot on.

Re (1) we have no real experience, so if it makes your life easier, we can look at doing things like that. Regarding (2) - it’s just a POC implementation currently, so that can definitively be implemented. Our ideas here were to follow the implementation of our grasshopper and dynamo clients, and have a little url parser in front that dictates what’s happening:

(3) Is a longer discussion, what would be the data you have in mind? It’s going to be particularly difficult, as Unreal works with meshes: what you would be able to send out is just that. Some properties, such as volume, length, etc. will be lost. Nevertheless, we’ve found that this is usually good enough for a review process.

(4) Totally, yes please!

Re contributions: our policy is to accept PRs from other forks of our repos. The workflow would be to fork our repo and submit PRs upstream whenever you are ready to do so. It’s good to raise issues in the parent repo so we can follow along, discuss and coordinate on changes. And, as well, please give the contributions guidelines a quick read!

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Hello all,

I managed to create a first draft version of a mechanic called root actor spawn. This particular one places all the imported meshes under an actor (ideally an empty actor), so to make transformations easier, mostly in game mode.
In particular the current version of the plugin, places all the meshes under a folder in the world outliner. If I have a complex structure such as a building with 100 static meshes and I need to scale/rotate or move the whole building I need to select each submesh individually or through the folder “select” actions.

However, it seems easier (especially in runtime mode) to have all the speckle meshes under a root actor, so transformations are applied directly to all the children of this actor. Please take a look at this video:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/19u7a6rMr07rb0AbCEEC8pRz8Fecu54Gf/view?usp=sharing

Overall, this is not a feature that changes dramatically the functionallity of the plugin. Therefore I started this discussion to check if it makes sense to proceed with PR and so on.

Let me know your throughts on this.

Best,
Panos

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Hey @PanMig, great suggestion! Feel free to open a PR for this and we can continue the discussion there :slight_smile: :+1:

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to do this (with video!). We really appreciate it :partying_face:

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Hello everyone,

I introduced some new changes to the unreal plugin. You can now open a dedicated speckle window from the UE4 editor’s toolbar. The speckle window is influenced by the rhino connector, with all the respective capabilities (fetch commits, import, etc.). Moreover, with the new editor window you can import objects and fetch commits from different speckle managers with just a dropdown selection, in case you wanna play with different streams as shown in the video below.

Demo vid : https://drive.google.com/file/d/17Rv9Wtdu3RYAM6RHoT6URDibkPbyw03U/view?usp=sharing

I hope it aligns with the scope of the unreal plugin. Looking forward to your comments and ideas on this.

Best,
Panos

P.S : Pushing commits from UE4 is still under development.
P.S.2 : The UI is far from pretty, so we will try to incorporate new icons and styles.

Speckle_screenshot.PNG
Speckle_screenshot.PNG1928×1048 339 KB

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Amazing work, it’s exciting to see the community pushing the Unreal connector forward :star_struck:!!!

1 Like