README.md

February 14, 2018 ยท View on GitHub

PerlinNoiseComponent

This PerlinNoiseComponent is an abstraction layer of libnoise to use in Unreal Engine 4. It is compatible with blueprints and properties can be modified in the editor.

More details in my article about it.

Installation

  1. Link libnoise to your UE4 project. See my libnoise-UE4-ready repo for installation of libnoise
  2. Drop PerlinNoiseComponent.cpp and PerlinNoiseComponent.h somewhere in your project Source, and regenerate visual studio project files
  3. Change the UNDERWATER_API name in PerlinNoiseComponent.h to whatever your project's API name is.

Usage

  1. Add the PerlinNoiseComponent to any actor
  2. You can now use it in blueprints/editor to get noise values.

API

Settings

There are getters and setters in the form of GetMyProperty / SetMyProperty for the following noise properties:

  • float Frequency
  • float Lacunarity
  • PerlinNoiseQuality NoiseQuality
  • int OctaveCount
  • float Persistence
  • int Seed

The settings themselves are private and should only be modified by calling functions and/or changing values in the Unreal editor before running the game.

You can also use SetOptions to set all of them at once:

void SetupOptions(
	float Frequency,
	float Lacunarity,
	qualities::PerlinNoiseQuality NoiseQuality,
	int OctaveCount,
	float Persistence,
	int Seed
);

GetValue

To get a noise value, you need to call GetValue:

float GetValue(float x, float y, float z) const;

It takes the x,y,z coordinates as input, and returns a noise value (that should be between -1 and 1) as an output

Warning: The noise functions don't work with integer values. If you give integer properties (even floats with no decimals) it will always return 0. A simple way to avoid this is to add some number like 0.1 to your GetValue calls if the input coordinates you're using are whole numbers.