How to Create Paths on a Mountain Top

Development Asset Creation
1

I am at a impasse where I cannot figure out what way would be best to create walking paths on the top of a mountain. I included a image showing the basic idea. The mesh in the image was created with Unreal’s landscape tool and then I painted on top off the image in photoshop. It required a lot of stretching of the mesh to get it to that shape. So much so, that the flatten tool is not really working well anymore. I thought I could use the flatten tool to make the paths, but it gets really weird fast when I try that approach.

I have been looking at World Creator 2 or World Machine and I saw that it has some path functions. That is around $300 though and then I would bake out a height map and bring that in and sculpt a bit manually in Unreal.

My level consists of just the mountain tops peaking above the clouds, so no mesh is required below because certain story reasons do not allow the player to go below. So I just need to focus on the the peak areas. So using the landscape tool in Unreal became useful because LOD’s are already in there and such, but sculpting can become problematic when going for details like paths.

I just need some direction on a way to do this that makes the most sense. Maybe make a bunch of large asset rock formations that can be placed around to artificially flatten areas? Any ideas from people who have some environment experience would be greatly appreciated. I am very new to Unreal, but I have a strong background in 3d modeling and animation.

2

First, save the map as and mess it up as much as you need - if you don’t like it you have a backup that way.

Then,
try using lanscape splines.
they can be applied to the landscape and flatten out areas with whatever settings you set (including a falloff).

it’s a bit painful to layout properly, but it should apply to the landscape and allow you to just push the changes/redo the distance LODs.

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What resolution is your landscape at? Check in Modes > Landscape > Manage and check Section Size, Sections per Component, and Number of Components. Overall Resolution is the total number of polys that the landscape is made of. Possibly try increasing these? If you don’t have a large enough resolution the landscape will seem blocky when sculpted, especially if your making a high peak mountain top…

Also the landscape tool isn’t really designed to sculpt craggy mountain peaks, as you say you will end up getting a lot of stretching in the mesh and textures if you try to push it too far. You will find for cliffs that are steep and jagged and big rock pillars, people will usually use/augment the landscape mesh with separate cliff and rockface meshes.

For the paths maybe try using the ramp tool (along with the increased resolution landscape)…

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Here are the details for the landscape. You might be right on the resolution. Having more polys is what I need to get some paths in there that do not look warped.