I’ve found creating natural looking terrain with the landscape tools really difficult at any sort of scale. Anyone have any suggestions or tips? I’m on a mac fyi.
I’m also interested in this. It’s one thing to use World Machine but I’d really like to be able to hand sculpt realistic looking terrain too.
think of world machine as a program that would paint a copy of the Mona Lisa, all you have to do is describe it. or you could hand paint it. unless you have years of practice in painting it wont look that great. now imagine painting with a mouse…
unreal’s built in landscape tools are like paint vs Photoshop, they are a subset of tools on a powerful engine yes, but world machine and other programs >Just< do terrain, it’s what they are good at. if you are set on using the UE4 tools you really need a graphics tablet, its like night and day vs using a mouse.
That makes sense. It does feel like I’m a two year old learning how to write on it haha. As a Mac user any program you would recommend to learn? (Reasonably priced)
Really good answer, thanks. Puts it all into perspective. I think it’s an easy mistake for a beginner (such as myself) to overestimate the usefulness of some things. A mechanic is only as good as his tools and the engine is a single part of a huge range of tools required to make a game. I’ll invest more time investigating specialized software that Unreal 4 supports.
Thanks again.
Like the others have already said, worldmachine and other height map gens really are the way to go, however the terrain sculpting tools really aren’t that bad when you get used to them…try experimenting with different alpha brushes and definitely use the erosion tools…I like to use the sculpting tools together with my heightmaps to add some fine detailing or to simply modify my terrain but creating it from scratch isn’t impossible and no where near as difficult as you’d think once you get the hang of the tools…it just takes too long imho 
I found this thread and it was helpful: https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?20217-World-Height-Map!!-For-everyone-who-needed-it