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Covering extremely large areas
Default settings are designed for rooms and hall sized areas, but Volumator will attempt to adjust Min Point Distance and Resolution during detection if it determines values are really far off.
However, if you are attempting to build a volume over a very large area like an entire town (shown on the right), you'll get better performance and results by changing the following:
Detection Settings
Min Point Distance: 200 or higher - reduces data, improves performance
Detection Distance: 2000 or higher - detects further away
Number of rays: 5 - less rays improves performance
Generation Settings
Mode: Perimeter
Resolution: 1000 or higher - less jagged, detailed volume, improves performance
Simplify Concavities: 1 - lowers complexity in a safe way
Drone Settings
Max Drone Scans: 5000 or higher - carries out more scans
Auto Stop Building: 1000 or higher - wont stop so early
Auto Stop Testing: 2000 or higher - wont stop so early
Drone Distance: 2000 or higher - drone will move further
Height Variability: 500 - traverses uneven terrain (if applicable)
Remember you can usually TYPE more extreme settings than the sliders allow.
For very challenging shapes, it can be better to pilot a builder than to rely on drones which will spend a lot of time in the middle of the space. With piloting you can purposefully navigate around the extremities which results in less data to filter out from the middle of the space.
You can also experiment with a 0 ray pilot, which uses only your flying locations and doesn't detect anything; set Number of rays to 0 to try this out and fly on the absolute extremities.
Dealing with extreme concavities
Extreme concavities, like a large U, M or W shape can be extremely difficult to deal with, as deep concavities are hard for the perimeter detection system to parse.
General good advice is:
Use voxel mode - deep concavities are no issue for voxel mode, but do a thorough detection
Simplify Concavities: higher - to filter out less important points
But in extreme cases that are very stubborn, such as the M shape on the right, it can be easier/faster to Force Convex Shape and then to manually cut out the concavities.
As you can see on the right, the shape as generated is messed up with walls 'jumping sides', creating cut ins. Normally this can be resolved by tweaking resolution (validation can do this for you), but in this extreme case the concavities are just too deep to solve automatically.
Below you can see the best way to solve this as a three step process.
Firstly, by forcing concave, the shape is gift wrapped so the whole shape is covered, but the concavities are lost.
Then we create our separate cutout volumes. You can pilot with 0-rays, which will result in a volume that matches the path you flew. Alternatively you can use Manual Path Building if you prefer to add explicit points.
Finally we select the original volume, then subtract the two cutout volumes one by one. The resultant volume fits now has the perfect concavities.
The above 'cut out' solution also works well to create the hole in donut shapes too.
Adjusting Volume Height
Volumator is designed to work with uniform height volumes; it was a hard enough challenge to solve as it was and trying to tackle full 3 dimensional shapes was going to be too problematic.
If you need to adjust height uniformly, you can tweak the 'Volume Height' setting (Generation Settings) and regenerate it ensuring the 'Regenerate Changes Height' setting (Generation Settings - Advanced) is enabled. Or you can simply scale the volume using the usual UE scale widget.
If you need to manipulate the height in a non-uniform way, e.g. make one side taller than another, then you can use the Unreal modelling tools to do this.
Open the Modelling tools via the top left Mode selector
Select Model, then the Brush Component, then PolyGroup Edit to enter the manipulation mode
Use the widget to adjust the shape of the volume and accept your changes
After adjusting the volume, if you're using the Volume Visualiser feature (on by default), the component will not have updated because Volumator isn't aware. This is just cosmetic, but to fix it, simply toggle off/on Opacity in the Volumator Toolbar
The modelling tools can be used for any kind of manipulation, not just height. However, be aware that regenerating the volume in Volumator will lose these changes.
Unreal Detected Infinite Loop, or Why Is My Volume Failing?
In Perimeter mode, this is usually related to finding the appropriate Resolution setting and the system correctly determining the perimeter.
If set too low or high compared to the detection data, it's possible for the perimeter detection system to fail to find the perimeter. Below shows how the system works:
Here are the detected points generated from a cylinder, in top down view
If we zoom in, we can see the 2 sets of points. Geometry points and Interior points. The volume (yellow line) is inflated by the Expand amount to keep points inside the volume.
The system filters out the geometry and interior points, trying to find the perimeter. Above we can see how an appropriate Resolution setting is finding the perimeter well.
If the Resolution is too far off this ideal, then the result is the system can make poor decisions as to where the perimeter is. Here the Resolution is set too low, resulting in the wrong shape. In more severe cases, it's unable to correctly create a volume as the perimeter crosses over itself as we're unable to automatically resolve that.
Changing to Two Pass generation mode can help greatly here as it has a much lower chance of creating buggy volumes like this.
Alternatively, adjusting the Resolution is often a good solution. A value of around 4x to 8x the Min Point Distance setting (Detection Settings) is a good range.
There is an auto-Resolution adjustment system that aims to keep you on track, but there have been extreme cases where this can trip up the validation system as the two sort of compete. If you're having real issues, try disabling Validation and see what the result is.
Another solution can be switching to Voxel mode, as that doesn't do perimeter finding at all, but the result will be blockier.
Volumator does a good job in the vast majority of cases, but it's hard to know what content people are going to throw at it. If you find any good cases where it's repeatedly failing, please let me know (ideally with images) so I can improve the system.
Starting Depots In Specific Data Layers
In very large levels spread over multiple data layers, you may find yourself with a large number of depots. In this case, perhaps you only want to run certain depots in specific data layers. You can do this easily by selecting all actors in the required data layer, then simply Start Selected Depots in Volumator. Even though the selection set will include a lot of actors, Volumator is smart enough to filter out the non-depot actors. It's also not a problem if the data layer doesn't contain any depots, it'll just give you a warning to say that's the case.
This can make running subsets of depots in very large maps much more manageable.
How to run depots on specific data layers
The Data Layers window can bve found in the Window menu (obviously)
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