Tips to create a large urban landscape

[anonymous_user_50221a61]

I am creating a business park that is made up of a large number of warehouses. The warehouses themselves are essentially quite modular, so they are quite easy to construct in UE4 from a sort of ‘kit-of-parts’. However, I am now onto the landscape areas and am not sure of the best way to go about creating this.

The landscape is quite flat and is made up of a few site roads, car parking areas, areas of grass, areas of planting, trees, footpaths etc. I attach a snippet of a typical landscape for this sort of thing:-

What would be the best approach in creating something like this? It can’t really be ‘modularised’ very easily, so any piece of footpath (for instance) could be very long and thin. A road going through the entire site will also be long and narrow, so lightmaps (I guess) aren’t going to be very efficient.

What is the best way to create this sort of terrain for UE4? For normal architectural visualisation, we wouldn’t need to worry about this sort of thing too much, but - as far as I can tell - UE4 works better with a more modular-type setup.

Would you overlay a grid (like a 10x10m grid) onto the whole landscape and break each element (road/path/grass etc) into grid squares?

Tips and best practices would be very much appreciated.

[jonimake]

Don’t go crazy with the modularity. If you have a large flat wall, try to use a single mesh instead of multiple ones. You’ll get better lighting with lightmaps and it’ll be faster to render than multiple smaller modular pieces. For roads I’d use landscape splines, or maybe program a BP class that did the spline placement.

[DarkS474]

If you need to mantain the highest possible framerate with highpoly 3D models for large areas then you should look into level streaming and layers even if you are not using world composition. Avoiding to load the whole map with all high poly objects but divide it into levels and loading them as needed when moving can improve performance a lot.