Best Way To Create Open World Terrain?

Development World Creation
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1

Hey guys,

I’m pretty new to UE4 (just switched from CryEngine, actually, I couldn’t make my terrain big enough) and I’m not exactly sure the best way to go about creating terrain for an open world game. I just want a simple sandy planet (just a desert with dunes, pretty much), but I can’t figure out how to go about that. Any height maps, etc, I try don’t seem to work. AND I have the terrain almost maxed out in UE, so it would take a very long time (given the max brush size) to do it manually.

That’s the other thing, if I could increase the brush size past 8196 then I wouldn’t even MIND doing it manually, it’s just so small in the map size.

Open to any suggestions you may have, as long as it isn’t World Machine. :stuck_out_tongue: I don’t have the money to spend on it, sadly.

Cheers,
Charlie

2

I would prefer do it in 3ds max or maya.

3

Yeah, but that’ll still take a lot of time for the terrain size. I was hoping there was just a bit of a quicker solution, but maybe not.

4

Everything if you want quick require money. World machine just a little bit money to me but does it really worth it to buy. I still no idea yet. You can also try Autodesk Mudbox. But it still need money. I will try to take the autodesk. does your mountain just for sightseeing or walk in ?

5

I was just about to say World Machine (Free to use and learn unless for commercial.) with the World/Level Editor to tile it all together and use level streaming and pre-computed visibility volumes.

Technically, you can have an infinite world size, but that’s another story.

If you wanna go berzerk in the editor, keep the components simple, try these methods.

Quick Unreal Engine 4 Cave Entrance Scene:


Quick Unreal Engine 4 Desert Scene:

If you wanna use a specific Modeler and for commercial usage, try Blender or a program like Hexagon for manual approach, Hexagon isn’t actively developed anymore for some time (I think those guys made Cinema 4D, can’t remember) but it’s only $20 and license covers any usage of it, it has sculpting with high poly models, but it’s only 32-bit, I’d recommend Unreal Editor Landscape Tool working with small pieces and very few assets at a time, and if you wanna go for more later when you can afford, use World Machine, Unreal Landscape Editor’s a great starting and mid-running point, it just requires a bit more manual material setup than using World Machine which auto-generates the basic textures for entire landscape for you, you’d still add the details in Unreal Engine for everything else to make it look even more realistic, mainly focusing on texture surface coloring and layers, while painting in more details in Landscape Editor, and the road placement using splines is very nice.

6

Create individual assets in program like Blender, paint in a PBR based paint program or custom created or use PBR materials you’ve acquired online or wherever, best place for PBR Materials right now is GameTextures for PBR Materials in bulk on the cheap, the ones already in Unreal Engine and provided from GameTextures make for a great starting point.

If you own tool like Substance Painter or have pack you may have access to a package of textures from GT besides the ones they include as well.

These textures can be used and painted with inside Unreal Editor, the Landscape Tool, and other things such as Blender and even DAZ Studio Pro 4.7.

GameTextures PBR Materials (The price is reasonable.):

For regular textures and/or normal maps already made you can use some free sites, just be sure to check the authors licenses to verify commercial usage and any credit requirements they may have:
http://opengameart.org/textures/all

Don’t use Roadkill or old tools like Hexagon to just UV Map, use Blender instead.

Blender is becoming more and more compatible with Unreal Engine 4 and it may somehow end up being integrated sometime in the future, possibly by a plugin, which would be nice if true.

You can create assets like tree’s in Blender, Grass, and Greebles, etc:


Fast way to make rock asset and place randomly across level before landscape editing to bring the brush and rise the rocks up vertically and you’d retain the original rock shape as much as possible, or scatter and drop em based on PhysX, via editor, using foliage tool with a few settings, or vector field mesh based particles like you would for a space asteroid scene:

Goodluck!

7

Wow… Thanks for taking the time out of your day to be a nice guy. :slight_smile: Good suggestions, I actually have 3ds Max, and I’m debating on buying the Quixel suite (It has a lot of awesome textures, all PBR materials, it’s a lot like Substance Painter. as well. Suite comes with DDO (Substance painter type thing, a bunch of textures, and a normal map creator.))

Another simple thing is that in that desert scene video, he’s fairly far above the ground and you can still see the sand texture. For me, unless I’m right next to the ground I can’t see the texture. Is it just my PC? I mean it’s pretty old, still a quad core processor (AMD though) and an awesome graphics card though. Is it just a setting I’m missing somewhere?

Anyway, again, thanks for taking the time out of your day to be a nice person. :slight_smile:

Cheers

8

@KnightTechDev you said

Don’t use Roadkill or old tools like
Hexagon to just UV Map, use Blender
instead.

Why that? Is there a technical reason? an incompatibility with UE4 ? Or is it just a personal preference ?

Roadkill is a good tool (IMO) for UV mapping, probably others too, Personally I don’t like the Blender interface and I prefer work in Maya or 3DSmax…

Cheers

9

well i just found this sweet little badboy to help us poor students who want to make open worlds but dont have the time to model them manually and dont have the money for world machine.
it’s called scape and is free and honestly pretty niffty. obviously it’s not world machine but with very little effort you can get quite satisfying results. it also gives you those sweet sweet 16 bit png heightmaps without being complicated about it :wink: