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 ;)