Advanced terrain creation in UE4

Development Asset Creation
1

Hello!
I am about to make a switch from Unity to UE4. In unity I have been busy creating a very detailed landscape that makes use of tesselation so one can really ‘feel’ the rocks and stuff. Now, I am bouncing against the limits of Unity here and believe that UE4 is the better choice to make some real quality content.
Now the version I have in Unity stil looks good, but I am missing some real organic kind of feel to the terrain. World machine seems to fill in that gape…but the terrain only looks very nice from far away.
I think I am not suppose to create a 8k terrain for 100m in order to get back the fine details…beside, I would have to create about 16 x 16 x 200 tiles to do so. Sounds like a bad idea.
so my question is: what is the ‘correct’ workflow to accomplish this? How does one make use of world machine to get the a real nice nature feel like terrain and continue make it absoluty stunning in UE4? Much like the new Star Wars battlefront terrains.

Summary:
Close up shots: build in Unity very nice with tesselation, but looks to tiled, less organic
Far away shots: build in WM: very nice flow, erosion, very organic and less computer

What to do inbetween??

Hopefully this all makes sense.

This is an early version of my terrain:
As you can see, the rocks are displaced very nicely but it al looks not really organic.
http://www.millionviews.com/mobile_v5/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/mars2015_WIP.jpg

Looking forward for your ideas!
Best regards! Tom

2

One of the big reasons tesselating landscapes isnt really supported is the huge load it puts on levels. The way I overcame it was to create a bunch of landscape brushes with rocks etc and to paint those on the landscape.

3

Welcome to you Supporter,

I"ve used unity off and on, then came here to get serious stuff done, various reasons, & from what I"ve seen your terrain looks nice and the non organic look I can comment on directly if its ok:

The rock formation front and center looks nice enough, only first two levels going bottom > top, as the very top is the unorganic looking area, its too formulaic, that’s where you lost your ‘natural’ look, the rest is ‘ok’

Also, again from a artists POV, the rock formations could have been larger, longer perhaps portraying a more organic look , but then the Earth is a vast and complex living thing, so many patterns exist :wink:

World machine, or even ‘l3dt’ which I’m trying atm ( which can also export tiles ) can import , say, srtm realworld data which often is semi rough quality from my experience anyway and always needs to be made into a heightmap of course, which can then be enhanced with erosion , blah, as you already prob. know.

I am doing what you are doing, trying to not go to WM or l3dt too quickly and concentrate on natural scenery but MYmade LOL

I like the idea of ‘new’ worlds designed by artists, with fallback positions to enhance and create a bit less work , so you can concentrate on other areas of your game.

How do you get the tessellation, is that a dx 11 feature somehow ?

I’m rather newish to game dev myself at least advanced topics such as that.

Cheers

4

Yes, that would be my workflow as well, only in this case, I would have to paint about 200 chunks where 1 pixel = 1 meter. In unity I have converted the terrain to a mesh and used LOD. Then I was able to do tess. Indeed, it is a performance killer, but the results are just really nice.

5

Heey, thnx for the feedback so far!
The tess is indeeda dx11 feature. Actually, I am trying to get to World machine earlier. I noticed in my heightmaps that I have been reling to much as they are indeed really rough. WM gives me some very nice erosion, but more important, the correct maps to create organic sand, flow etc.

I guess, what I am trying to figure out is, should I try to use WM to fill in the real rocks at a scale of 1 meter or should I use textures with tess to fill in these details?