Procedural Textures to replace satellite from close-up

Cesium for Unreal
1

Hello!
I’m trying to make a combat sim in UE5 with Cesium, but I’m not sure how I could implement using tileable textures based on the pixel color in the satellite image. Is it currently possible?
Thanks in advance,
-Knedlik

1 Like
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Up ! :]

3

A World-Aligned Texture node (google for how to use and apply) should get you the independence you need from uvs. How to apply it would depend on your setup of course. If you are overlaying satellite imagery with your detail textures, you’ll need to copy the Cesium materials to your project and modify it as necessary :slight_smile:

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I’m not sure if there’s not a misunderstanding. I want to use textures based on the satellite image’s colors.

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You can. That’s what copying the Cesium materials allows you to do. Those materials can be edited and you can add texture functions that blend detail textures with the satellite images.

6

I do not mean to just blend them. I want to for example apply a sand material/texture where the satellite image is yellow, and do this only when the camera is x away from the ground otherwise lerp them until it’s y from the ground.

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Gotcha. The lerp can be handled by a distance-to-camera function. The other bit about applying a sand texture where the image is yellow is more complicated, depending on your level of fidelity required. You can use some sort of a color function to determine if the incoming color is yellow, and use that to drive the blending alpha, but note that “yellow” comes in a large range of RGB values that also already have textural detail in them, so the hard part is determining what is “sand”, “rocks” etc. I don’t know if there’s a good easy way of doing that yet. If you find it I’d love to hear more about it :slight_smile:

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Do you by any chance know how to get the color as a vec3 in the graph? If that’s possible, then I think I can handle it.

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I do not at the moment. For my implementation I am currently running a line trace at runtime to get a color value for wheel dust, but this is obviously not feasible for what you are trying to do. Would love to hear if you figure out a solution!

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Update: Seems that editing the baseColor in the raster overlay layer allows what I’m going for. Now I wonder if it’s feasible to release it with an edited raster overlay layer and not break any rules.

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I believe that is the whole point of allowing a raster overlay :slight_smile:

Good luck!