topic Re: Getting reflections on CityEngine generated mesh in UE5 in ArcGIS CityEngine Questions

Getting reflections on CityEngine generated mesh in UE5

CODEWYR — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 06:01:55 GMT

I just started using CityEngine with UE5 and I'm already loving it. After playing around, I wanted to know how I can add reflections to generated mesh. Similar to what we can see in this demo for CityEngine. It looks beautiful.

Re: Getting reflections on CityEngine generated mesh in UE5

BenjaminSteger1 — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 08:58:21 GMT

Hi,

The easiest way to add reflections to your scene is to decrease the roughness value on your building materials (I got similar results to the screenshot when I set them between 0.05-0.1). This can either be done in Unreal https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/Resources/ContentExamples/MaterialNodes/1_4/ or already in CGA https://doc.arcgis.com/en/cityengine/latest/cga/cga-material-attribute.htm
Improving the reflections can be done in multiple ways, I would suggest to look at the following website https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.3/en-US/reflections-environment-in-unreal-engine/

Best,
Benjamin

Re: Getting reflections on CityEngine generated mesh in UE5

CODEWYR — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 09:28:36 GMT

I appreciate your response on this. So if I go in to the generated mesh > then materials > I see a bunch of materials there. What I also see is a Parent Material (opaque). I can go into each material and set the roughness value from there but that would take a lot of time, because that would take ages, is there any way I can adjust the roughness for all those materials. I'm sorry if this is a noob question.

Re: Getting reflections on CityEngine generated mesh in UE5

BenjaminSteger1 — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 10:02:42 GMT

The easiest way would be to already set the correct value in CGA, this would create all material instances with the correct value.

Otherwise a slightly faster approach directly in Unreal would be to open the Parent Material, delete the connection to the roughness value in the material and connect a constant value node with the desired value.

Another approach would be to use Editor Utility Widgets https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.3/en-US/scripting-the-unreal-editor-using-blueprints/ to adjust all the materials via blueprint scripting, but it would probably take some time to get started with this approach.

Re: Getting reflections on CityEngine generated mesh in UE5

CODEWYR — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 10:44:22 GMT

Thank you. It works.