Hi, i am fairely new to UE5. I have figure something out but i’m still learning so bearover with me and my lack of knowlegde.
I have started a project where i want to create something of the lines of the game “control” in terms of level design. So at this point i am planning some stuff and looking at how to do it. Where i am stuck at the moment is should i use landscape or modeling mode with dynamic mesh cubes? (dynamic mesh cubes just so i don’t fill my content folder up to much)
I welcome anything in terms of knowledge etc.
I plan on making a “building” of some sort, a big one with multiple floors using a ploygon pack i got my hands on with a sale.
Something like God of War wouldn’t be landscapes, everything is like a detailed mesh.
Something like Elden Ring could actually be the same but could also be made with a landscape. Large, open, gently sloping hills and whatnot wouldn’t need a lot of tessellation, so outside landscapes, static-meshes could do just fine. Especially if you then decorate them with detail meshes.
Overall, Landscapes are a system within Unreal that work well for some use-cases, but not necessarily-all. Take a look at your game-type and see how critters are going to run around.
I personally like them as you can do quite a bit within a shader to lay stuff out procedurally, but again, it’s not for all projects.
I will say nanite Landscapes are very promising, as they effectively return tessellation to the work-flow, with things like water, snow, footprints and overall-deformation as a feature. Although with nanite meshes, you could do the same thing as they are well…the same thing
Never played Control but I skipped through a playthru video, looks very Kojima, and looks like you never leave the building(?). Some ‘endless’ rooms with rocks in them, but those could still be meshes, I didn’t see any kind of interaction so assume they are scenery for boss-arenas.
Landscapes are useful for large, outdoors spaces. Sounds like you mostly want to be indoors, in which case you don’t need a landscape.
“dynamic meshes” seems like a bad idea; they are much less optimized than static meshes, and especially than instanced static meshes. “don’t fill my content folder up too much” is a really bad reason to go with a very expensive runtime system.
Most indoor games use a combination of simple, modular assets (walls, doors, floors, ceilings, pillars and trim in certain styles) that are used everywhere, and specific decorative meshes that are used rarely, to break up the monotony.
You can also use the BSP system (“carving”) if you really want to, it’s not too inefficient (better than dynamic meshes, at least,) and very easy to cut rooms and corridors out of a very big cube. It is, however, quite hard to make high-poly content this way; you’ll typically want to build with trim meshes to make it less blocky.
