Hi, I’m new to landscaping and level design in Unreal Engine 4. Today I found a free heightmap online, and then imported it as a landscape. After that, I made a basic landscape material with three layers- rock, grass, and dirt. I searched around on these forums, and came across a free asset pack containing meshes for trees, grass, and bushes. My GPU is a GTX 550 Ti: I tried my hand at the foilage mode and for grass things didn’t seem too laggy if I kept the density below 500. The trees, however, were a different story. They cause me to lag a lot more for some reason, even when there aren’t vast amounts of them covering the map. I’m only slightly familiar with these landscape tools, having only worked with most of them today, and there’s usually a better way to do things in any situation. In general, my terrain looks slightly plastic, I think it could use more detail geometry and texture wise.
The landscape in the video is most likely achieved using third party software such as World Machine, World Creator, or Scape (great free alternative). Using these softwares you can generate a whole heap of things, not just a heightmap but slope maps, erosion maps, etc. and that’s what gives you all the fine details you see in that landscape. On top of that, using landscape materials that change based on the height, slope, and so on, will make it look even prettier. For landscape materials, you can look to the marketplace, or look through a lot of different tutorials on these forums. There’s even a few landscape materials that people have made for free here somewhere
Regarding the lag…t hat is most likely due to your GPU. A 550 is pretty old these days and things like foilage and trees can be very taxing on them.
