Level Design process, moving from organic to urban areas?

[SevroAuGoblin]

@Mach45

As for the process of designing the landscape, first sketch out the topology of the whole landscape, starting with your main feature areas (such as towns, cities, villages, industrial areas, quarries, lakes, etc) then sketch in the large intermediate areas such as mountains, rivers, roads, transport links, then finally add any smaller features and filler areas such as fields, hills, woods, scrubland etc.

When your happy with the overall layout, block it out in UE4, roughly shape the landscape and put placeholders (basic cubes the same size as your final buildings) where the buildings will be (as it will be a lot quicker to make any changes at this stage than after you’ve started populating the map). When you’re happy with the finished layout of the map then you can start populating it and putting in the finer landscaping details.

This is only the method I use, so would be interested to see how other people approach it…

Thank you very much! That all makes sense and I will definitely try that out. It sounds like this approach is favoured to bigger maps maybe? I’m looking into a side scroller game where urban areas would be broken apart with organic areas. But they would still be smaller (thinner) than your average game I guess… do you think designing these within Maya would be a more efficient solution?