The bing map labels are great and allow a play to easily place themselves on the globe. Its ideal for our demo. However visually it is nowhere near as compelling as googles map data and on the bing map label version and the textures have an issue with having long lines down vertical buildings where there is text. So we’d unfortunately need to stick with google. However we’ve been trying to find a compromise/workaround…
4 questions in order of preference:
1: Does google have a map label version too?
2: Is there a way to superimpose the map labels on google somehow
3: is there a way to have the bing map material placed vertically on top of surfaces, but google’s textures on everything with height or angle. So from above you can see the labels but from the side the quality is still there
4: is there a way to dynamically swap the map version in game? So from a menu the player can choose google or bing maps depending on their preference. Swapping from ion asset id seems to do the trick in the editor. How would you recommend setting up a blueprint to be able to access that from UI in game for the player?
An example of why the labels are great is when changing distance the labels change.
For example in this screenshot you can see the higher you get, the data dynamically changes to fit the context:
So overall, a google maps with a dynamic label somehow would be awesome! If you could recommend a way of doing so and/or methods to answer any of the aforementioned numbered questions above, that would be much appreciated!
Thanks for answering so many of my queries at once, we’re in the final stretch to get everything in for demo and the write up. So we’re trying to fill in all the gaps for what’s viable as well as plan the last additions for the demo and what we’ll list as a future spike as well as their base details
The difference in visuals with/without Bing Maps is due to the nature of raster overlays. Raster overlays are imagery layers—2D images—that you’re using to cover a 3D tileset. You can think of it like a projector. When you project an image onto a white box, you’ll see the image clearly on top of it, but not on its sides. There’s no way to wrap the rest of the image around the sides of the box. Hence why you see these streaks on the sides of buildings; there’s no way to really wrap the Bing Maps imagery around them.
Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles has really high quality textures that are specifically mapped to the 3D model. That’s why each building looks good from each side.
To answer your four questions:
There isn’t a version of Photorealistic 3D Tiles that includes labels, to our knowledge.
You can’t really isolate the text labels from the rest of the imagery, but you can try a material effect to blend the two in a meaningful way. You’d do this by copying the MI_ThreeOverlaysAndClipping material from the plugin, and changing the Blend Asset associated with the Overlay0 material layer. But I don’t have an exact formula for you to implement, so you may have to do some experimenting.
I think you could try and fake this in the material. You could try to modify the Blend Asset (as described above) to use the normal to determine whether or not to show the Bing Maps labels. If the normal points up, then show it; otherwise, show the normal textures.
You should be able to enable / disable the Bing Maps overlay, which will toggle whether or not it shows on top of the tileset.
I know these are short answers, but I don’t want this response to turn into a novel, so please let me know what areas you’d like follow-up on and we’ll focus on those.
I appreciate the clarification Janine!
Apologies for not responding earlier, we had so many variables up in the air at the time that I forgot to get back to some messages.
