Im creating a city with alot of neighborhoods. How should i go about creating driveways, sidewalks with grass, roads etc. Should i just create a landscape in maya and import it to unreal engine or is the landscape in unreal engine better? I have a picture of what im talking about so if there is anyone that can help me out i would appreciate it.
Hi seangunn,
With something like this you could potentially go either way. It really just depends on how you would like to go about it.
When using the Landscape tool in UE4 this has and automatic distance LOD setup to make sure a the higher density mesh is not being used at far distances where it’s not needed, where as a static mesh import from Maya you would have to break your mesh into tiles and setup individual LODs for each one to achieve the same thing. It could be more setup using the one created in Maya, but it ultimately would potentially depend on if you getting the results you would like. With something like a neighborhood where it needs to be planned and organize more so, it may be worthwhile to model out your landscape in your maya and get a basic rough layout with boxes and planes for the roads and houses. Bring that into UE4 as a static mesh and use it as a prototype to get the shape you want for the UE4 Landscape tool by just sculpting over/around it.
I hope this helps get you started. Ultimately, just start getting prototype assets into UE4 as soon as possible and iterate on them until you are happy with the final result.
Tim