You’ll need a pencil, an envelope (scrap of paper, etc.), some sort of camera (iPhone was used here).
1: Sketch out your height map with the pencil. In this case I was making a river valley in a desert, at least that’s what I was picturing.
2: Use an online editor like Pixlr (free Online Photo editor - Pixlr.com image edit) or ANY program that modifies images. I cropped the image and played with the contrast, few other things but didn’t draw anything new on purpose. Purely image adjusting.
3: In UE4, go to Create New Landscape under the terrain tool tab (the mountain). Select Import From File, choose your image you saved. Import. Play around with the Z value.
After I imported I put a fairly simple angle blend mat on it, rest of the assets are freely available on the web, water is from the Epic truck demo I think? Palm Tree is a free sample off Speedtree site.
Finally I spent about 5 minutes with the plateau and erosion brushes hitting the shapes for a little definition.
You can see from this top down shot the envelope seal line, the dark groove at the top of the image.
Finally the mat- super sloppy setup there are much better ways to do this but maybe it will give someone ideas:
Enjoy!
