Can anyone share their experience in making beautiful mountains?

[tancen]

I made a terrain with World Creator. It looks very beautiful when the whole terrain fills the camera, but when the camera is zoomed to the mountains, the mountains look very unreal (the higher and steeper the mountains are, the more unreal they are). I don’t know whether I should abandon the mountains made with World Creator and build them with 3D assets (I think this requires modeling all the mountains in blender or similar software and then making textures for them in Substance Painter. Or build them with some stones, but I think it is difficult to achieve the same effect as World Creator with these mountains), or add Landscape Layer to texture these mountains separately, or cover the surface of these mountains with some stones. I don’t know how most environment artists in the game industry will deal with these mountains. This problem has been bothering me for more than 10 days. Thanks to anyone for any tips.

[MostHost_LA]

If you use the engine called Cry then all the mountains will look “cry” from afar.
Its beautiful

Your problem is just a combination of the atrocious excuse thay epic uses as their landscape system to the landscape material that is being oversimplified by the LOD running on the landscape.

Best solution is to build everything in a DCC, import things as split up occlusion capable meshes, and ofc, pepper rocks and other assets around the scene for a more realistic feel…

[tancen]

Thanks for the tip, can you share some tutorial videos of the relevant workflow?

[MostHost_LA]

Nothing good comes to mind, but try looking for Houdini tutorials on generating landscapes.

Using the DCC is a much better (and portable) user experience.

[DomusLudus]

You just have to use static mesh for the more vertical walls, this trick can be done even with maps that don’t have to be realistic. It’s normal that height maps can’t handle such steep angles
You can buy them at any marketplace

[tancen]

Thanks for the tip. Cliff static meshes make vertical walls look nice. If the mountains have some slopes and some gullies, like the first one above (the gray area of ​​the mountains in the first picture is actually higher than 100 meters relative to the valley) and the third picture, do you have any suggestions for such mountains?

[MostHost_LA]

The base of the problem is the LOD oversimplification.
You cant just disable LODs, but you can make mesh replacements that are created specifically to keep the mountains looking similar.

If you glance into the fying trees to the left of the second screenshot you get an idea of just how bad that simplification is…
Does it need to be that bad? No.
But you cant fix it when using landscapes… so… switching to properly made meshes, or making a mesh of the mountain thats meant to be seen from afar would solve that issue…

[tancen]

Thanks, I consulted with a teacher a few days ago, and I also referred to some games released on the market (such as THRONE AND LIBERTY, The Elden Ring, etc.), and they all told me not to do it like this, the mountains should be steeper (for example, you can make it like a staircase or a cliff), or make it a gentle slope, and never like the picture above, unless you just want to use it as a distant view. So far, I have never seen a game with mountains (that players can walk on) like the one in the picture above.
So, if I insist on keeping the mountains in my game like World Creator, then your method is absolutely correct. But I think I should give up this idea.