I’m fully aware i dont know what i’m doing, but i’m just trying to learn the engine for fun, but I’d rather not pour 100 hours into this map and then realize it’s fundamentally flawed (like when i sculpted an entire town out of BSP, lmao)
So yeah, um… thanks! Any tips would be appreciated!
Your map looks interesting, but don’t understand what you’re asking…
Your shadows look wrong though, do you have a working skylight in the level?
Sorry I didn’t clarify what I meant. I once spent about 40 hours making a village, entirely out of BSP objects, before I realized bad of an idea that was! So now that I’ve spent about half of that on this project, I’d like to put any glaring mega huge errors off at the pass that would invalidate this map as a concept because i started it poorly. Currently constructed using the landscape editor, and some polygonal assets as meshes dropped into the world. I have some culling enabled on the foliage currently, but thats it.
Ah ok, what is your goal with this project? So only making a landscape or making a game?
You can do landscapes either in an dedicated external program or with unreal engines build in tools (depends on what look you’re going for, what style of game you’re making, …), basically if you would be serious about this and be going for a photo realistic look you might wanna use an external program cause it then goes much faster creating landscapes, they look more realistic and you get more information you can then utilize in your landscape material, but you can also do landscapes with the sculpt tools only, so that’s fine in your project.
As for really big static meshes like mountains, you shouldn’t use those when you want to walk on them but only for the look/as background view (due to collision, you would need a high precision when you want to walk on them).
And your shadows look wrong, do you have a working skylight in the level?/How is your lightning setup?
[HR][/HR]
You might wanna change your landscape material to automatically blend textures based on slope (so one texture like grass when you have a small slope angle and something like rock/cliffs when you have a big slope angle, cause you can’t do this good by hand).
As for the foliage, I would use procedural foliage spawner for something like trees (you can then also limit the spawning of those to specific layers of your landscape) and the landscape grass node for stuff like grass/flowers.
Basically you should try to do as much automatically/procedurally and do as less by hand as possible, cause if you do it automatically you can easily change and reuse it, if you’re doing it by hand then you can’t and in the end it will consume much more time 
So might wanna look at this: Open World Tools | Unreal Engine Documentation
Procedural Foliage Tool Quick Start | Unreal Engine Documentation
Grass Quick Start | Unreal Engine Documentation
Here I created everything automatic/procedural so didn’t place anything by hand.
So with all the workflows and logic to spawn the things already implemented it takes around 2 hours from starting to create the landscape in an external program till getting this look in unreal engine.
There are no roads, no buildings, … so you would still need to do many things by hand but it saves you lots of time in the long run to establish non destructive workflows/write logic to do as much automatically as possible.
Awesome, thanks for the info, I’ll look into that! Great looking landscape btw!
Definitely set a goal and work toward that. Break down your task list and check off items as you go along.
Ultimately, you’re learning, as you said. The projects you learn on are not the one’s you ship – they will get discarded.
Have fun, learn, and try different techniques. There’s plenty of tutorials online.
Will do! I am currently investigating that shadow issue as well, I have a directional light as my sun, but currently all of my shadows are very very intense, and i actually made a second directional light just so i can see what i’m doing from different camera angles. So I suppose this is a different question, but any pointers or direction on getting the shadows to not be so dark would also be greatly appreciated! Thx!
You would need to add a “Sky Light” to your level.
What a Sky Light does, is it adds a default ambient lightning, so that shadows will not be completely black. You can change the intensity of the sky light in it’s settings (same for the directional light).
And you might wanna take a look at the learning videos from epic games: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/o…arning-courses (seems to me that around half of them is for archvis but you might wanna watch the others I found those I watched very useful)
@chrudimer, Thx so much! That has made it so much easier to work now that I can see! And I will take a look at those learning courses, thanks much!
In the spirit of your original question - I think you are using the right tools, for the right job.
That is - you are using the Landscape tool for building a landscape.
You are using meshes for individual items, placed in specific parts of your map.
As others have mentioned, building landscapes outside of UE4 and then importing them in really opens up the possibilities. I, myself, was very inexperienced with UE4 at the point when I took to World Machine as it just produced results I could never hope to get close to without it. Again, it’s another tool that you have to learn, but the results - for me - were beyond what I thought I would accomplish.
My approach tends to be to learn everything from scratch (of course, with help from tutorials). But I like to build the logic in myself, so I understand it (i.e. no grabbing a ready-made set of Blueprints…make them yourself). For my landscape material, I followed (closely) a very detailed slope- and altitude-based material tutorial (possibly it was two tutorials). Once I understood that, creating different biomes in my single landscape was a doddle. I mention this because you are clearly experimenting with different terrain (grass, arid land, snow).
If you wish, get in touch via PM (or reply) and I’d be happy to share how I learnt. I know the whole system can be daunting and I totally understand the need to validate your method before pouring too much time in. Sometimes, if you go in the wrong direction too long, you can convince yourself it’s no longer the wrong direction.
