I remember I once saw a tutorial how to deform meshes, to make them look like a surface but I can no longer find it unfortunately.
Hence, I thought to try my luck here.
I’m currently trying to make a tunnel system underneath my landscape. I could just make a landscape underneath it, however I can’t bend it as far as I know it? I can rotate it so it makes walls, floor and ceiling off course, but is there a way that you can make a cylinder shaped landscape? Which you can then deform? I.E. like the river-water that you can then deform (bend) to your liking.
Or is this better done with meshes? And if so how do I do this if I make a hollow square / cylinder or 4 meshes? As if I try to deform a square / cylinder the texture get’s messed up.
Any help, links to tutorials covering this would be very appreciated!
Hey there @Twisted1_666! Non-planar landscapes in unreal are unfortunately not much of a thing. There’s been many who have made it work, but most of them tend to run their own systems, and there’s usually not many resources on it around online. Many games that need to make caves or overhangs etc, cut a hole in the terrain and usually either A use static mesh instanced rocks to surround the hole, B transport the player to another landscape where the cave itself is just a new landscape surrounded by more meshes, or C they go with an deformable system like voxels.
A and B you won’t be able to deform SMs on the fly quickly and easily, you’d be doing it all manually, and like you mentioned textures need to be accounted for as well as modeling them to begin with.
C (voxels) solves much of this and allows for deformation at runtime, but introduces a whole extra layer of complexity and often less terrain fidelity and performance in exchange for full control over a volumetric terrain.
I’ll drop some resources below after this disclaimer, hopefully they can help you feel out which you’d prefer to do.
Disclaimer: All of these links are not affiliated with Epic Games, they are just resources that I think could help you make a decision. Thus all liability is on the end user outside of these forums.
A video to show off how many do caves with the terrain system unmodified.
A video showing off how someone can use VoxelPlugin to get easily deformable terrain:
Voxelplugin itself: https://voxelplugin.com/
Hope this helps!
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Sorry for the late reply, I’ve been a bit busy lately.
But that is awesome! Many thanks for your extended reply!
Unfortunately it is as I feared then, I will have look at all of them and as you say, narrow it down to the least complex one for myself :)!
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