As a part of our Landscape pipeline, we have been using Landscape Patches with some additional tech to adapt the workflow to the needs of our team. It would be great to get an idea of the direction Landscape Patches are moving in, in order to better plan how they fit into our workflows in the future:
1) Are there plans to make the patches runtime-friendly?
2) Are there plans to support Landscape patches being inside Level Instances rather than in the persistent Level?
3) Are there any strong workflow recommendations that you can offer which are in line with the future developments for Landscape patches?
Hi Amritha,
Thanks for reaching out and showing interest in the LandscapePatch plugin. Regarding your questions :
1) Are there plans to make the patches runtime-friendly?
No, LandscapePatch relies on the edit layers feature which is editor-only and there is no plan at the moment to change this.
2) Are there plans to support Landscape patches being inside Level Instances rather than in the persistent Level?
It’s supported already, but the level instance has to be authored in the context of the landscape it will be used with, so that it has a valid Landscape pointer, as well as a valid Edit Layer value on the landscape patch component. This way, as long as the level instance is used with the same landscape (i.e. the landscape pointer doesn’t change), and as long as the patch edit layer on said landscape is still valid, it works. But it means the level instance won’t work with another landscape.
3) Are there any strong workflow recommendations that you can offer which are in line with the future developments for Landscape patches?
The majority of the planned functionality has been implemented and LandscapePatch has proven stable enough that we have effectively moved it out of “Experimental” in the upcoming UE5.7 release, which will sport various optimizations, UX improvements, BP exposure and proper documentation. In the future, the plan is to optimize it further, in particular when it comes to local edits (as part of a broader landscape edit layers optimization) and polish some of the rougher edges (e.g. landscape/edit layer selection, handling of internal textures and render targets).
Cheers,
Jonathan
Hi Jonathan,
Thank you for your response. It’s exciting to hear about the updates on Landscape Patches.
Is there a page somewhere with more information so that we can keep track of these upcoming improvements?
Hi again,
It’s not online yet but the Unreal documentation for UE5.7 will contain a dedicated section for landscape patches. This and release notes will be the best source of information from now on when it comes to improvements to the plugin.
Cheers,
Jonathan