How to create procedural outlined minimap texture in UE

Disclaimer: This is not a guide about creating a minimap system but rather how to create a texture for your minimap system using the plugin OMC.

One of my favorite gaming genres is Top-Down ARPG. Games like Diablo, POE, Last Epoch, and many more have always inspired me. While I developed my own game using Unreal Engine, I reached the point where I needed a minimap that would be generated by code when the game started, so I wouldn’t need to paint it manually in Photoshop each time I created a new level or did a tiny change to my level.

For a long time, I wondered how to create an algorithm that create outlined minimaps for my game. It took me a lot of work and research to finally get that to work easy and simple.

So I’m very excited to share my plugin “Outline Minimap Creator” (OMC) which will generate a texture for you using navigation data.

How it works?

The plugin uses your navigation mesh data to build a static mesh that we could later scene capture that mesh, and using material nodes, we can create an outlined minimap texture - that’s it.
So no matter what your level design is, or what changes you decide to make later, you wouldn’t need to re-create manually that texture each time.

Where to start?

Get the plugin from the Unreal Engine marketplace: Link.

Follow this tutorial:

I hope that some of you will find that plugin helpful, I wanted to make it as simple as possible so any indie developer could create good-looking minimaps with ease ;)