So I want to create steep coastal cliffs like this with a landscape, but when I use megascans and landscape to achiev that steepness it doesn’t look right. Is there a proper way to do this?
A black to white height map can’t really handle steep inclines like cliff-faces. You will always get ugly stretching as the mesh attempts to interpolate from low to high in a small space. You can hide this stretching by placing rocky static meshes actors and blend them into the Landscape with RVT.
As a Houdini user, I found this useful. I think the concepts could be transferred to any DCC tho.
Yes!
The caveats are:
- a truly-vertical face, will always have 1 triangle up/down no matter the height difference between high and low. the engine just-doesn’t tessellate that surface.
- you cannot have concavity, eg: you cannot have the landscape wrap around like an S-curve and have it hang over itself. Anything that stick-out from the wall can be displacement (that does small-scale concavity) or a mesh. the landscape-itself cannot wrap this way (until Epic implements their new landscape solution).
- You aren’t really-supposed to do it this way, but it functionally-works.
You could likely do this with voxels.
As to the landscape consider:
The column on the left is when holding down the sculpt tool with 0 falloff and just letting it sit for several seconds. The one in the middle is the same but the strength was very very low.. and the one on the right is the same as the first, but with a SLIGHT amount of erosion applied, and I mean .05 strength and a single, tiny tap of the mouse button to apply.
The first illustrates the problem with the single triangle per-face, you can see them just stretch and shoot up off the screen. The second is the same but since it’s stubby, you can clearly see how the walls are shaping up.
The 3rd shows you CAN get almost-vertical faces and meaningful-enough tessellation to make texturing workable:
So, yeah, you can do this with a landscape, but you will still likely want for mesh-scattering to make it all more interesting. Since it’s technically not-vertical, you will get some hit responses from using traces, like PCG and the like so grass is applicable as well (it works for me).
Otherwise, things like the Cliffs of Dover are doable-enough to a degree.