Sacha Benamou | Portfolio

Technical Designer

Minimap Plugin – Unreal Engine 5.6

I started developing a Minimap Plugin for Unreal 5.6.1 in August 2025 – the project is therefore in active development.

Here are my objectives for this project :

  • Create a system and workflows adapted to levels or worlds of all sizes
    • Minimize the amount of work required to setup and maintain the system
    • Create a procedural waypoint generation solution to maintain scalability
  • Provide tools allowing users to change the appearance of the UI elements depending on their project’s needs

In the following sections, I’ll describe my process to reach these objectives. I’ll update this page as development progresses.

Genre

Plugin

Engine

Unreal Engine 5.6

Status

In progress

Last update

August 12, 2025

Development

Note : a few of the videos and images you’ll see below use art assets created by other developers. Here’s a list of their names, and links to their work :

Procedural waypoint generation

I started by creating a PCG Graph capable of instantiating waypoints in Levels with or without World Partition.
For now, the Graph uses splines placed in the Landscape to know where to instantiate these actors (eventually, I’ll also add the possibility to instantiate them along static meshes).

Waypoints can be generated using an Editor Utility Widget that you can see in the video below. The tool also allows users to save the locations of all the waypoints in a Data Asset.

UI

I then started working on the minimap’s interface. Being initially unsure of the best way to capture a simplified representation of the world, I first prototyped a few different ideas, like using a camera that follows the player, or taking high-resolution captures of the scene that I would then clean up in an image editing software.

After digging into the topic a little bit deeper, I decided to use a Runtime Virtual Texture for a few key reasons : in our use case, it’s not very costly in terms of performance, it’s easy to implement, but also much easier to maintain than the approaches I mentioned before.

Here’s a short video that demonstrates its capacity to delineate zones that the player can reach.

Next steps

Here’s the list of features I plan on adding over the next few weeks :

  • Adding a waypoint navigation system
  • Adding support for instantiating waypoints along static meshes
  • Adding support for displaying cardinal points on the minimap
  • Adding support for displaying objective markers on the minimap
  • Adding tools to customize the look of the minimap UI