The ADT Link plugin and this sample content was developed by WSP in collaboration with Microsoft and Epic Games in order to demonstrate how to integrate Azure Digital Twins (ADT) with the Unreal Engine. This sample shows you the "backstage" of the downloadable and playable demo hosted here. If you just want to see a playable sample of the integration, feel free to walk through that demo. If you want to know how it works and recreate it, read on.
NOTE: We are very interested in your feedback related to this sample. Whether it is feedback about its usefulness, architecture, or if you find a bug, please let us know by filing a github issue here
In this sample, you will:
A high level architecture of the sample is shown below.
This documentation will get you set up with an example scene of a WSP office building digital twin, with pre-determined sensors and settings. Going through the sample will inform you how to replicate the results with your own digital twin or IoT sensors.
At this time, the ADTLink plugin is primarily intended to assist with the creation and publishing of an ADT digital twin from a 3D model in Unreal Engine. If you already have an operational ADT solution, this will not be plug-and-play at this time. Through this guide you will learn how to define your own models in UE and use that to define your new digital twin, but support for existing ADT instances will be limited.
To start the process of deploying the demo, you must first work through a few pre-requisites.
With the pre-requisites installed, you are ready to begin work on the demo
As the focus of this sample is primarily on the integration, we've automated most of the setup of the Azure components of the solution. If you want to better understand the components involved on the Azure side, you can walk through the hands-on labs and MS Learn modules.
At a high level, the key Azure components are:
Follow these instructions to deploy the backend Azure services involved. Note that there is a configuration file that will be generated during this process that you will need to download and keep for the next step.
Following these instructions will get you set up with the ADT Link plugin for Unreal Engine and walks you through steps required for establishing a connection to ADT and creating virtual sensors in the example scene.
The next step is to simulate device data from our building IoT sensors. To set up the simulated devices, follow the instructions here.
After following the three guides above, you should end up with a playable office scene that visualizes live data coming from your own Azure Digital Twin instance. You can then define and deploy your own virtual sensors to customize it to your needs.