Embedded Files
Your starting point for building volumes, this is where you can create original volumes.
There are three tools for building new volumes:
Piloting
Drone
Manual Path
The resultant volume will be heavily influenced by Detection and Generation settings.
You can also Regenerate an existing volume, allowing you to tweak a previously created volume using different settings.
Finally you can recall settings from an existing volume and enable/disable the validation system.
As a reminder, each setting mentioned on here will have more detailed information in the appropriate Settings page elsewhere on this site.
Build Tutorial
Start Piloting
Piloting is great for manually controlling where the area to be created is, you literally fly the camera around to detect areas.
Press Start Build Piloting and fly around the area, focusing on the walls at the perimeter to be mapped. This will allow Volumator to better understand the edges of the area.
While detecting a 'Stop Building' button appears and pulses. Other buttons are locked until you finish.
Once you've piloted around the perimeter at least once, press Stop and Volumator will process the scanning data and create a volume. This post-detection phase is called the Generation phase.
One of the differentiators with Piloting mode is that in addition to detecting geometry, it also uses the path that you take as data too. This is because it's assumed you are being deliberate with your flight path, unlike the drone mode which is pseudo random.
The benefit of this is that you can fly into empty spaces without geometry (e.g. exteriors) and the path you take can also contribute to the extent of the volume, even if Volumator detects no geometry there. It's therefore great for mapping out open areas, such as a path along a cliff edge where one side is open to infinite space, as in the example on the right.
Start Drone
Drone mode allows a drone to do the scanning for you, saving considerable time over the other two modes.
Position the camera somewhere appropriately in the middle of the area and press Start Build Drone. A drone will spawn, rapidly flying around the area taking scans. If the drone hits an object when moving it'll turn around and continue scanning.
Drones have their own set of settings (Drone Settings) allowing you to configure their behaviour, such as how far they move each scan and when they should complete.
This mode is designed for areas defined by their geometry or walls, so enclosed areas like rooms, tunnels or courtyards. Any open doorways and windows can easily be blocked using the Barrier features to ensure drones don't fly out.
However you must ensure that there are no large gaps without barriers leading to other areas. Blocking open areas is also important for Piloting mode too, but it's especially important for drones to stop them flying into unwanted areas. See the section on Barriers for more info.
How Are Volumes Created?
When creating volumes via piloting or drone, there are two stages involved. The detection phase comes first, and is where you or the drone are navigating the space. Detection rays are fired out from your (or the drone's) location, these in turn fire secondary and tertiary detection rays in order to better capture corners. All these points are trying to find the extremities of the space and are stored in a perimeter array, along with the normal (angle) of the object they were hit. At the same time, your (or the drone's) location is also stored in a separate array that is used to evaluate the internal space.
Once detection has been completed, all this detection data is stored into a component that's added to the volume, allowing you to repeatedly regenerate the volume using that same data. It's also used for testing the integrity of the final volume, as we know that those locations should be inside the final volume.
Then the second stage can begin: generation. This happens fairly quickly; the detection data is fed through to the generation system and (a lot of) processes are run on it to turn that dectection data into a final volume. It's also at this stage that we can run the validation system to try to minimize the number of detection points that are outside of the resultant volume.
Thanks to this two pronged system, we can easily tweak volumes multiple times by running the generation process with different settings. However, if the geometry in the world has been changed, it's obviously best to delete the volume and redetect the space.
Detection
While you are piloting or droning around during the detection phase, Volumator will give you feedback on how many points have been detected and the maximum height of the area (see left). Once you click 'Stop' the detected data is locked and the Generation process begins using that data.
The Detection carried out by the Piloting and Drone modes define areas by continually searching for walls and objects to determine the perimeter. As a result, this is great for the inside of buildings or exteriors that are enclosed by geometry, which is the case for most game areas. Piloting also uses your path location as potential perimeter data too, as it's assumed you're being deliberate in your flight path, unlike the drone which has totally random movement.
In Detection Settings you can modify how Volumator handles detection, such as whether Volumator uses simple or complex collision. Simple is usually preferrable as it's coarser, resulting in cleaner, less detailed volumes while retaining consistency with what the player camera will interact with, but it's reliant on good quality simple collision. You can also specify what type of traces are used, either Visibility channel, Camera channel or Objects (world static and world dynamic objects), this choice will help filter out various objects based on your needs.
On the right you can see a small subset of the Detection Settings, allowing you to specify how the detection phase is carried out. Each setting has tooltips with info and this website has a separate Settings page explaining them, with various images to better understand the options.
As Piloting and Drone modes use geometry to detect areas, how do we handle openings such as doorways and windows that bridge different areas? This is where Barriers come in. They are used to constrain detection and drone movement to the area you'd like to detect, e.g. stopping drones and rays flying out of doors into the next room.
It's important to understand how to handle these areas. Please consult the section on Barriers for more info, it only takes a moment to set them up but is important for Volumator to work the way you intend.
If your area contains doors that are closed, e.g. doors that are Blueprint actors that are default closed, then typically you won't need to worry about these as the closed door will act the same as a wall.
Start Manual Path Building
In cases where you need to differentiate between areas that do not have geometry separating them, such as exteriors or infinite spaces like cliff edges, you may need an alternative solution. This is because Piloting and Drone modes are more designed with enclosed spaces and will not be able to detect an 'edge' to the area if there's no geometry. This is where Manual Path Building mode is helpful.
With this mode we pilot the camera similar to Pilot mode, but instead of continually mapping we instead manually add individual points where each corner should be. Any shape can be made, so it's good for being hyper specific with shapes.
When entering the mode 'add point' and 'finish building' buttons will be displayed. You can edit the point locations after creation using the features in the Edit tab explained elsewhere.
It's a good system for open areas that only need broad strokes defined.
It's important to note that there is no 'detection' phase with this mode, the point building effectively is the detection and the result is simply the points you create. This means Volumator has no detection data to play with, so some features can't function (e.g. Quick Tests) and shape tweaking through regeneration is minimal. However, it's still a great solution for spaces that have no geometry to detect.
A simple volume made from adding 5 points in Manual Path Building mode.
Which mode should I use for my area?
You can of course use any mode and it's worth experimenting, but here are some guidelines:
Mode Enclosed area (e.g. room, walled courtyard) Fully open area (e.g. field, forest) Semi-open area (e.g. cliffside path, side of ext building)
Pilot Good Good Good
Drone Great Not recommended Not recommended
Manual Path Not recommended Great Good
Manual path isn't recommended for enclosed areas simply because it's a bit fiddly and time consuming to do; you'll need to fly inside of geometry to correctly place points within the geo.
Drone isn't recommended for open areas because it'll fly off infinitely and likely not detect much. In these cases you need a manual touch to define the extremities. However, you can set up barriers to artificially enclose the area for drones if you want, and this would be a good solution for the automation/depot system as it always builds using drones.
Regenerating Volumes and Recalling Settings
Regenerating allows you to rebuild the selected volume with new widget settings. Volumator provides a huge amount of adjustment to the shape and definition of the volume. By regenerating we can optimise our volumes to suit our needs. The below is some examples of what can be changed:
Height
Simplicity (3 different methods)
Size (expand/contract)
Force to concave shape
Various error reduction techniques
Regenerating a volume with Resolution at 200
Regenerating a volume with Resolution at 500
Note the complexity difference between the two volumes as a result of regenerating with different resolution.
This change can be achieved by a simple button press, no need to rescan the area again
Regenerate always uses Volumator's current settings when updating the selected volume. However, you can recall the settings that were used to create the volume using 'Recall Settings From Volume'. This allows you to tweak only the values you care about, by recalling settings and then changing only what you need.
Recall Settings will update Volumator's settings to match that of the volume, specifically most of the Detection, Generation and Generation Advanced settings. Other settings not related don't get updated, such as Validation, Drone, Tester and Widget settings.
As a use case example, lets say we open an existing map that has volumes we created on a previous day. Those volumes had a high resolution setting and we want to change it. So, we select the volume, press 'Recall Settings From Volume', which updates Volumator's settings to that of the volume. We then tweak the resolution as required and press Regnerate Volume to update the volume to a different Resolution setting. This way, we know that the volume has retained it's previous values and we've only adjusted the Resolution amount.
The Z-axis and height
Volumator is designed to build volumes where verticality is consistent and walls are straight, like the majority of rooms in games and real life. If you have walls that are angled vertically, you will need to keep this in mind and determine if an area requires attention.
For example, if piloting, ensure you cover the areas the player/camera/etc can get to vertically. If using drones, you can change the 'Drone Height Verticality' setting, to cause the drone to modulate it's height more as it scans the area.
If you don't take this into account, the volume may not cover the extent of the area, as shown on the right.
The height of a newly created volume will be the current 'Volume Height' value in Generation Settings (see right top).
By default, Volumator will continually detect the height of the area during the detection phase (see right 2nd from top), and will update the Volume Height value when detection is complete. You can however disable Detect Height in Detection Settings, and instead just use the current Volume Height value.
You can of course change the height of the room afterwards using Regenerate Volume, although you must have the 'Regenerate Changes Height' setting enabled in the Generation Settings Advanced, as usually you do NOT want to update the height as it's a value that changes a lot in the widget, so it's been made a non-default setting.
When testing a Depot, the log will report on any difference between the height of the Depot's volume and the height that the tester detected (see right bottom).
The Volume Height setting, in Generation Settings. This is used to set the height of any new volume.
Any regenerated volume will only change it's height to this value if 'Regenerate Changes Height' is enabled.
While detecting, Volumator will update you on the currently detected max height.
Volume height will only be updated if Volumator detects something above AND below at any point during it's detection. This is to stop areas without a roof or ceiling from creating short volumes. In these cases it doesn't update Volume Height and the current value is just used.
Height detection and setting of the Volume Height is only carried out if Detect Height is enabled. Otherwise Volume Height is not updated during detection and it's current value is used.
If testing a depot's volume, we can compare the volume's current height value with what the tester detects. In this case, the tester has detected a height difference of -23, or in other words the tester detected a height 23 units less (smaller) than the volume. This is a tiny amount and unlikely to be a problem.
Drones have additional control for their height movement. Each scan they take they will attempt to move either up or down from their current position by a random amount. The max of this random amount is the Drone Height Variability setting.
Effectively, increase to have the drones wibble up and down more. They will check if there's anything above or below them, so usually don't fly out of skylights etc. But if you set this too high in an area with no roof (e.g. a courtyard) they can naturally fly right out, so it's usually best to keep this setting reasonable. It's handy to have some variability to ensure they look above and below objects, as well as navigating bumpy terrains or inclinations.
As always, there's more info in the Settings page for Drones.
Generation Mode
There are a ton of important settings related to building volumes, and it's strongly recommeneded to check out the Detection and Generation settings pages. For example, one important setting is the Generation Mode, which changes the algorithm used by the generation process. At the time of writing this, there are three modes: perimeter, two pass and voxel.
Check out the Generation Settings page for more info on the different modes, but briefly:
Perimeter - Classic mode, attempts to find the perimeter and builds the volume using that
Two pass - An adaption of Perimeter mode, results in less bug-prone volumes but is slightly less accurate
Voxel mode - Totally different approach, resulting in blockier volumes, but will always result in zero warnings/errors and can work very well with spikey shapes.
Perimeter mode works really well with curved shapes and is the default mode
Voxel mode results in blocker volumes which may not suit curved shapes
An example of where the voxel mode can shine; these pokey, spikey shapes are handled with ease by the voxel mode
As with all generation settings, you can try out different modes after building the volume. You're not locked to anything, so feel free to experiment.
Google Sites
Report abuse