Crop Disease Blueprint

The Crop Disease Blueprint is a custom, parameterized Unreal Engine Blueprint that simulates disease transmission spreading across agricultural terrain at runtime — driving precision-agriculture and monitoring scenarios. This page covers how to download it and use it in your own Unreal project.

Download

Package being finalized

The Crop Disease Blueprint will be published as a Blueprint package on the HERCULES releases page. Until the zip lands, this page already documents the requirements, install procedure, and sensor integration.

The package contains the HERCULES-authored Blueprints and support assets (disease-state materials where self-made) only; third-party crop/terrain assets are linked, not shipped — see Using Blueprint Packages.

Requirements

Requirement	Notes
Unreal Engine 5.2.1	Version HERCULES is built against
HERCULES AirSim plugin	For sensing integration (install)
Crop / farmland asset pack	Linked from the release notes; any static-mesh crop field works

Install into your Unreal project

Follow the general steps in Using Blueprint Packages:

1. Download and unzip the Blueprint package, and copy the contained folder into your project's Content/.
2. Install the crop asset pack from its store link (or point the Blueprint at your own crop meshes).
3. Restart the Unreal Editor and assign any unset asset slots (healthy/diseased materials, crop mesh) in the Details panel.

Usage

1. Drag the crop-disease Blueprint actor into your level over the agricultural terrain.
2. Set the initial infection site(s) and configure the transmission behavior.
3. Play / run the simulation — the disease state spreads across the field at runtime and is observable by the robots' cameras.

Parameters

Parameter	Description	Default
Initial infection site(s)	Where the disease starts	—
Transmission rate	How fast the disease spreads	—
Field extent	Region the disease can affect	—

Sensor integration

• Disease progression is primarily a visual phenomenon (material change), observable in RGB captures; per-plant ground truth is available through instance segmentation when the crop meshes are registered (static meshes only — foliage actors are not supported, see the limitations).
• Crops classify as vegetation (293 K) in the thermal camera via the plant/grass/vegetation name keywords; diseased-vs-healthy thermal contrast can be modeled with Overrides entries if your diseased meshes are named distinctly (e.g. "Match": "diseased").

See the Dynamic Environmental Phenomena overview for all phenomena in context.