I created my first hole in my terrain, a brushify landscape. First problem… I still had rocks spawning over the invisible section. So, I changed the material to desert which has no foliage spawners. Next I’m fiddling quite a lot trying to get the entrance of my bunker door aligned with the terrain. After too much work I now have a square 'ish hole with a bunker door. With snippets of sand dune around it.
So, looks like I have to recreate the base material, but on without foliage, or, find another way to prevent stones spawning there like an exclusion zone. Or, cluster rocks around the entrance to hide the sand texture
Is there any advice you can give that might be a better approach than what I’m already doing? This feels like a homer simpson spice rack.
Ue4 landscape is the Homer Simpsons spice rack solution.
You can build on it, but you have to be aware thats the base you start from.
You can try to make the hole not a square with the retopologize tool.
Make the hole much larger than you think.
Export the landscape to a mesh.
Load the mesh in a DCC.
Create the entrance that merges with the terrain however you like.
You can either keep the coordinates in place to where the terrain loaded the hole or move the final result to 0,0,0 the difference is you have to move the object in engine or just drop it into the level.
You can achieve OK looking things in spite of the spice rack you start with.
But to guarantee characters / things not getting stuck or procedural items not spawning you really need a much larger hole than what you think - which means a mesh has to take over of some portion of the landscape.
There is a ‘remove procedural’ material in the Brushify default material stack. Just paint that on the area you want the procedural foliage removed from.
This is a fairly ingenious technique. I initially didn’t grasp the scale of the ‘export landscape to a mesh’ goal, but after some time I realized that you were intending on extracting a localized mash of just the area, merging it with geometry I was going to insert and the putting that back and probably nudging it forwards\up just a touch to prevent zfighting, when jiggle the sides of the landscape so the edges of the mesh are buried.
Cool idea! I was resigned to just making a ‘big mesh entrance’. I referred back to what funcom did in Conan exiles and that seems to be their go to approach.
Side topic, once you do a bit of work in UE4 playing a commercial game made with the same engine adds a new layer of enjoyment… you run along… for me, on a PVP server and oblivious to other player dangers… just stop and look at how they inserted cliffs n to the terrain structure give a little smile when the accidentally left jaggies on a ridge top. I’m sure I’m not the first to forget to play, or the jump up off the couch, logoff intent to jump on the the dev PC to try out something I saw
