I’d like to see a simple Heightmap Terrain Generator with **2D Paint Based Editing **of the heightmap areas in a top/down view, I think this would be pretty simple to add.
You’d start with a black solid colored texture surface in a Terrain Generator window, click a button and a rain drop type approach would randomly spaced paint water based shapes containing varied white colored intensities which represents the height of areas on the texture. Still in a 2D view would clean up some areas manually with paint brush adding or removing areas with black or white paint color.
Optionally, for further visual editing capability, a custom Unreal Engine version where you could manually use color for things such as lakebeds painting them onto the surface, and using alpha transparency to remove portions of a layered image on the top of surface that’s converted back to a blended white or black color representing measured depth. So it doesn’t matter what color you use primarily, in this second option the color intensities would be what’s reflected at the end and converted to a white or black color with that intensity and used to generate the terrain/landscape.
The end result is wired up and **displayed **in **3D **or **rendered **and displayed in viewport side-by-side in **realtime **at sametime.
Usage Example:
I open Unreal Editor
Click **Landscape **icon
Click Create Random Landscape (Brings up a window that is a flat texture surface representing top/down view of the landscape.)
I set the desired size of the landscape, then click an icon that represents portions such as an Eraser, Water, Road Types, Etc…
Could use bezier curves to draw the roads easy.
Then paint the section in, it will paint in a specific color representing what you selected, for instance blue for water.
You adjust brush value to determine the strength and falloff which will determine depth from intensity and smoothness of edges.
Little dark green dots could represent trees.
Another option you could easily import a heightmap in image form as is done here:
And combine landscape portions as is done in the World Browser like here:Unreal Engine 4 World Browser - YouTube
Unreal Engine already has ability to import heightmaps externally and edit landscapes, as well as manually create using the Sculpt Tool, but instead of starting small with flat surface and going big using 3D, how about we start big and go small adding details afterwards using minor editing?
That way when editing the landscape the hard work goes into the details focusing on smaller portions afterwards and not from the beginning and throughout the entire process, resulting in a bit faster workflow inside the Unreal Engine Editor for Landscape Creation.