Say I have a map that looks like this:
What would be the most efficient way of creating the landscape and road system?
First I tried outlining the roads in Blender and then exporting it as an fbx. But, it wasn’t really pretty or efficient. So, I want to know your thoughts. Should I create the terrain in World Machine? Should I just eyeball it? Or is there another method? Please let me know. Any feedback is very much appreciated.
Thanks!
-David
Did you end up figuring out a method of doing it?
You’d have to do it all by hand, there’s no terrain info there, though you could probably find a height map of the area, for the roads there’s nothing to do other than manually place them. Though realize that in the case of New York City, that’s massive, and the games that have NYC in them are not full scale, so attempting to do something that big is unrealistic.
If it’s a real world location and the roads haven’t changed much, you might want to use OpenStreetMap to get the data you want without having to recreate it by hand. I’ve seen some plug-ins and tools for UE4 to use Openstreetmap data.
Combine that data with some terrain data from various online height map services, and you’ll have a decent starting point.
Sounds good thanks
There is branch from Mike Frickers StreetMap plugin that downloads SRTM heightmap data for the OpenStreetMap area you load in. (thanks Richard) Seamless roads merged into the terrain is the tricky part here, where still much work is to be done, but its a great starting point for procedural generation from real world data. Try checking it out here:
Github Fork
Ideally it should be combined with procedural building generation like in this magnificent work:
Github Project (Forum Link)
I didn’t have the time yet to get into it, but it should be possible to generate lots where the buildings spawn with the OSM road network as an input. Fell free to try it out and share your results.
Another approach could be UtyMap, for which I did an (now outdated) Unreal port some time ago.
Merry christmas! 
