I am experimenting with photogrammetry city models on the Earth in UE4. Currently there is manually placing them or loading them via Ion. Manual placement becomes obselete if you shift geolocation, as the models move out of place.
Ion is sweet, but then we lose functionality of basic UE4 control with those meshes, such as LOD or referencing/interacting with them via blueprint.
I am wondering if there can be a sorts of Anchor Null that we can place on the Earth and then anchor it to that geolocation, so if we parent objects to that Anchor Null, the child objects will always load in that relative orientation. This will allow us to interact with our photogrammetry models fully, being placed in UE4, as well as if we change the geolocation of our scene, the placed models will move accordingly to their new relative placement of the Earth.
I am making interactive cities, so this would help greatly, for example if you approach a building we have in more detail, it will swap the photogrammetry model for a handmade model with more blueprints, game-specific character interactivity, and advanced materials, etc, and this doesnt seem accomplishable with tiles. I planned to serve detailed city content through hotloading PAK files over AWS as we do with DLC already, but without some sort of anchoring system, this seems to be an obstacle.
If something similar exists and I am unaware, please let me know!
An Earth Anchor would be sweet!
Thank you,
-Brandon