Procedural generation with GLTF assets

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Procedural generation with GLTF assets

101convexcaves

I'm using the GLTF assets from Kenny's 3D suburban city pack. My initial plan was to create a procedural neighbourhood, by positioning randomly selected house GLTFs in a grid, with roads in between.

With some googling, I have found that making a MeshLibrary with GLTF files doesn't really work that well, since Godot interprets GLTF as scenes instead of one whole mesh. I'm not comfortable with switching over to the OBJ format (which is apparantly more compatible with MeshLibrary), so here is the only method I can think of:

Create inherited scenes for every GLTF model I plan to use.
Instantiate and add the chosen GLTF scenes as nodes to the main scene when generating the neighbourhood.

It's going to be a lot of manual work, with the number of assets there are. I don't think this is great for performance either, especially if I increase the neighbourhood size and more scenes need to be instantiated. I guess I'll get around that by using chunk loading?

This seems like a time-consuming and clumsy solution, so I was wondering if anyone had any ideas or suggestions.

Godot version is 3.5.1.

Thanks!

UPDATE: putting this in an edit since I don't think it's worth a comment, but I gritted my teeth and spent about two hours just converting the assets for easier use like I mentioned in the plan above, and it's quite alright performance wise! My GPU is an Intel UHD so the meshes sometimes flicker black, but otherwise I think diving in headfirst with the tedious option might have saved time after all. Thank for reading and good luck on your projects!

pkowal1982

Why do you want to create scenes for every gltf file instead of instancing them directly?

cybereality

You should be able to use a MeshLibrary. I only work in glTF and I believe I tested it before. You just have to set it up as a scene. Like there is a parent scene (this will be your library) and it has a layer for each sub-scene (which will be an individual glTF model). I don't see why that wouldn't work. You can also do it manually with code, but I think using the editor function will be easier.

underdog32

You can make your own mesh library in code and manually add all the meshes to it. I gave up on trying to use meshlibrary/3d grid and just wrote my own mesh combining code. I needed better control over UVs and such, but at one point I had a .blend file with all my models, which meshlibrary couldn't directly support, so i loaded it as a scene in code and iterated the meshes and added them to a mesh library. After that I was able to use the grid by setting the model index just as you would expect.