Feature Request: UE Anchor to Earth Null

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

Hello Brandon,

We have a georeferencing system that is usually able to handle these types of cases. In case you haven’t already, I would recommend reading our placing objects tutorial, particularly this section.

Typically to georeference non-Cesium actors, you can attach a CesiumGeoreferenceComponent to them, this essentially “anchors” them to the world as wanted. In situations where an entire group of actors needs to be georeferenced together, you can create a dummy parent actor that has the CesiumGeoreferenceComponent and you can attach the entire group as children of the dummy parent actor.

If this doesn’t address your use case please let us know!

-Nithin

100% Exactly what I was looking for! Amazing, thank you so much!