Some Landscape improvements

hello

I’d like to propose a few improvemens to the Landscape toolset

  • First is the painting of layers.
    when you click and hold it doesn’t continue painting until you move the mouse. clicking and holding does keep sculpting (which didn’t happen in UDK btw). it’d just be good to bring over the same functionality from sculpting to the painting of layers

  • For the Layer Info you can import and export it. I’d like it to also allow usage of textures that are already in the content browser. it’s just pointing to an existing texture rather than importing it (and refreshing the painted information)
    if this is added I’d like RenderTargets to be supported for this as well. you know where this is going right? :slight_smile:

  • Support multiple Physical Materials without them being linked to a landscape layer.
    This one is more of a general materials improvement and not exclusive to landscapes. the idea is to be able to use multiple Physical Materials in different areas of the same asset. this was supported (but limited) in UDK via PhysicalMaterial Masks but it seems non-existent in UE4. as a result anyone that wants to use a workflow like the one in the Stylized Showcase is limited to one physical material for the whole landscape. similarly would happen with surfaces made out of meshes that visually have different looks.
    I already made an AnswerHub post that went largely ignored by the devs

  • When sculpting or painting, changing the Brush Size, Brush Falloff and Tool Strength is a time waster. and they are not bindable via the Editor Keybinds.
    I’d suggest using Alt+Mousewheel, Shift+MouseWheel and Ctrl+MouseWheel. maybe Ctrl+Shift+Mousewheel or other similar combinations if more are needed or conflict with existing keybinds. we did this at work on UE3 so I know how much better it is

  • When painting, it would be nice to have extra keybinds to change the target layers quickly.

bonus non-landscape improvement:

  • how about selection boxes in the content browser? you know the typical “click and drag from an empty area”, as it’s easier to select multiple assets

that’s it for now :slight_smile:

+1 for those suggestions :slight_smile:

thread deserves a bump (and read confirmation by a dev :slight_smile: )

Indeed it does!

The Landscape tool feels like it’s from 2007 :frowning: Level Designers want some love too! D:

Other suggestions over here: https://forums.unrealengine/showthread.php?61183-Landscape-Tool-QOL-changes

Hey

After reviewing your forum post, I must say those are awesome requests for changes within the Landscape Tool. I will be reviewing our system, to see if this request is already in. If not, I will go ahead and add the feature request into the system.

If you have any further questions or concerns, please feel free to reply here. As always, we’re available on AnswerHub to answer any questions you may have as well.

Cheers!

Great suggestions! I never understood why there’s no hotkeys, same goes for the foliage mode.

thanks ! glad to know it’s now noted :smiley:

extra improvement ideas:

  • For Layer Painting it’d be nice to have an option to paint by angle (< or > than X degrees), so we can easily paint on slopes or plains. bonus points if we can make it work like “paint only on slopes > X degrees but < Y degrees”
  • For Layer Painting it’d be nice to have an option to paint by height (Min and World Z coord), so we can easily paint only on certain heights of the world

these 2 are already part of the foliage mode, and they were part of UE3’s Terrain system but never made it to the Landscape system

extra inspiration for tools:v=oaAN4zSkY24though I have to say that, excepting this ‘Novel procedural brush types’ (0:40), the UE4 Landscape tools already can do what Scape does
however the part about ‘Creates features perp/along brush stroke’ (1:28 and 1:36), while doable in UE4 via painting with an alpha texture, requires said alpha texture to be made first so it’s not so straightforward

In my blender 2.72 (Not 2.73 :mad: )
Shift + Wacom Middle (Middle mouse button) + Right/left direction = Brush Strengh
Shift + Wacom Middle (Middle mouse button) + Up/Down direction = Brush Size

Shift + Wacom Middle (Middle mouse button) + Right/left direction = Brush Strengh + 1 or 2 etc = Strengh 10 , 20 etc…
Shift + Wacom Middle (Middle mouse button) + Up/Down direction = Brush Size + 1 or 2 etc = Size 10 , 20 etc

It’s very usefull

+1 for this part

Ability to blend material attributes using LB_HeightBlend node would be nice. Right now it only allows to blend textures. Ability to blend whole material attributes would reduce visual clutter a lot.

There is some updates here?

yeah would be nice to hear something about this.
it’s sad to say this but whenever someone from Epic acknowledges a request or bug report it feels like it gets lost in the void. from that point on all we get is some ticket number (worthless to us) or just the promise that it was added as a request into the system. and after that it takes a lot of months (and lots of luck) to maybe ever see the improvement make it into the engine :frowning:

Hi

Your impression is correct, and I understand the frustration. It is true that it is uncommon for a quick turnaround time on requests. After support technicians log a ticket, they are reviewed by producers and development leads. Some requests don’t make it beyond this stage because although they may be a good idea, they may not be in alignment with future plans or intended workflows. If the leads hold onto the request, they will assign it a priority and version of the engine to be included in based on many factors. Most requests are slated for future versions of the engine, which may at times be scheduled many months out.

We are still evaluating having a public instance of our database, which would allow anyone to follow the status of individual tickets. This is not a definite plan yet, but we are considering it.

I don’t currently know the status of the requests logged in this thread. We’ll look into it and let you know.

Cheers

Hey

We appreciate your additional feedback and ideas regarding making the Unreal Engine better! I have submitted a report which requests the features you added in after I had originally posted. If for any reason you need to reference this report in the future, please refer to: UE-14056.

I have looked over our database and the feature request is still waiting to be completed.

Thank you! :slight_smile:

thanks for the follow up

I’m familiar with development processes, agile and planning, and I know feature requests can never have a very high priority.
I think for me the frustrating part is that overall the development of UE4 is very focused on keeping up a train of new features. sure there’s an effort in bugfixing (more notable since 4.7), but other than that it feels like new features are always the top priority, while polishing and improving of existing features always feels pushed to “when there’s time” :frowning:

I’ve a project stopped because there is no way to implement physical materials in procedural materials… it’s really frustrating…

Totally agree with these… especially physical material masking.

+11111

Dude! how is that not a thing? :eek: a click n drag selection box would be great… not just in the content browser but in the level viewport and world outliner as well.

hello

any news on this?

I’m especially worried about this. I want to make procedural materials as well (mostly landscape). even nowadays one can find several procedural landscape materials in the Marketplace but of course they don’t support physical materials

Hello EPIC developers, is it possible or even doable to make easy paint layers generator so just drop images and paint to landscape or static mesh?