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Watabou Bridge

Watabou's generators run right inside the editor, and their output becomes data you can build with. Watabou Bridge is a standalone plugin -- it does not depend on PCGEx or anything else. It does two things: an import window that embeds the generators and saves their output as Unreal assets, and two PCG nodes that turn those assets into geometry and attributes you can drive a graph with.


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The generators it ships with:

Generator

Generator

Generator

Generator

Generator

They run as their real web versions, embedded in a panel, so what you see in the preview is exactly what gets imported.


The import window

Open it from Tools → Watabou → Watabou Bridge. It docks like any other editor tab ("Watabou Import").

The layout reads left to right:

  1. Generator rail. Pick which generator you're working with. Each one remembers its own settings.

  2. Settings column. A seed (with a reroll button), the generator's parameters, and tag "pills" -- buttons that toggle the generation tags that generator understands. Everything you change here updates the live preview.

  3. Preview. The actual generator, running embedded. You can interact with it directly; the panel reflects changes back into the settings.

  4. Import controls. Choose a target content folder, then press Import. The current preview is captured, parsed, and saved as a Watabou data asset (including a thumbnail).

That's the whole loop: dial in a map, press Import, get an asset.

A few controls worth knowing

  • Reroll spins a new seed without touching your other settings.

  • Load from link lets you paste a Watabou share URL -- the panel picks the matching generator and restores the settings from it.

  • Recursive import chains generators together (see below).

  • Update is the only download path. Generators otherwise serve from the bundles shipped with the plugin.

Recursive seed chains

Some generators reference other generators. A city's districts can each point at a more detailed map; a building footprint can point at an interior. Turn on recursive import and the window follows those references, importing the children automatically. It's optional, and you can always import a single map on its own.


The two PCG nodes

Once you have an imported asset, two nodes bring it into a PCG graph.

Node
What it does

Stamps an imported asset's geometry onto your points. One asset in, roads / buildings / regions / markers out, sorted onto pins.

Reads the rich metadata behind that geometry -- names, types, tags, numbers -- and writes it onto the points as attributes.

They're designed to work as a pair.

Plugging them together

Generate takes your points as placement targets ("seeds") and stamps the asset's geometry onto them. Alongside the geometry it emits a small Feature Map -- a back-reference that says which source feature each piece of geometry came from. Load Properties takes both, looks each piece up, and writes that feature's details back onto the points as attributes.

You don't have to use both. Generate alone gives you geometry. Add Load Properties when you want to filter or drive your graph by what the geometry actually is -- keep only the "rooms," scale buildings by their floor count, color regions by their tag.

Recursively resolving seed refs

The one thing to understand first: inspect your data

The nodes process the imported data mostly blindly. They don't know that your particular city has districts called "slums" or that your dungeon labels some rooms "treasure." They just emit whatever geometry is in the asset, tagged with whatever feature ids and detail keys the generator happened to produce. Generators are rich and vary run to run -- so before you can route or filter anything, you have to look at what's actually in the asset.

Open any imported Watabou asset and you'll find two fields built exactly for this:

  • Identifiers -- a tally of every feature kind in the asset (e.g. rooms: 14, doors: 22, walls: 8). This is your menu of what you can route onto pins.

  • Discovered Detail Keys -- every piece of metadata any feature carries, and what type it is. This is your menu of what attributes Load Properties can surface.

Whatever you see there is what you have to work with -- no more, no less. Reach for a feature id that isn't in the list and nothing comes out; ask for a detail key that doesn't exist and the attribute is simply never written.

Once you've seen what's in the asset, the rest is bookkeeping -- point the nodes at the ids and keys you found.


Where to go next

  • Generate -- stamp geometry, route features to pins, control placement

  • Load Properties -- surface feature metadata as point attributes

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