Hello,
I have recently started creating Landscapes with the Unreal 4 editor and there are several features I would like to request. Though I am new to making landscapes with Unreal, I have been a professional World Builder and Level Designer for over 17 years and have worked with many proprietary world editors and terrain systems for companies such as Blizzard, Red 5 Studios, and Vigil Games. All of my requests are for features/tools I have used in these proprietary editors, so I know these should be doable.
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Additional options for the landscape smooth sculpting brush. Currently, the smoothing brush will only lower verts. And to be honest, it doesn’t seem to smooth terrain very well. While testing it out, I was surprised to find that if I smoothed out a sloped surface, the smooth brush would eventually turn it into a flat surface rather than a smoothed slope. This is currently really more of a slow flatten brush. Please give me the option for an additive smooth which would raise and/or lower terrain verts to create a smooth surface. Think of this as more of a blur that averages out terrain vert height values. If you prefer, it would be fine if the smooth brush is subtractive by default as long as I can make it additive with a hotkey modifier (similar to how many brushes work in Zbrush).
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Allow me to smooth with a hotkey modifier like Zbrush. It is very clunky to have to manually switch brushes. A normal workflow will likely have people switching between sculpt and smooth all the time.
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Do not have all brush types share one common set of settings. Most people will have different preferred settings for various brush types. To have to keep changing the brush settings back and forth seems like an unnecessary waste of time.
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For prop placement, give me a hotkey which will move a selected object to the collidable surface under my pointer. Also give me an easy way to align the prop to the surface normal it is being placed on. For example- spacebar snaps the selected object to the surface under my pointer. Shift+ spacebar also aligns the object to the angle of the surface normal. Rama’s vert snapping plugin seems to have most of this functionality, Epic should add it to the editor by default. It would improve the tool immensely.
If there are reasons why these cannot or will not be implemented, I’d love to know what those reasons are. It might reduce my frustration to know why things are the way they are. At any rate, thanks for taking the time to read my post, and I hope to see these features! Unreal is such a fantastic engine and tool set in so many ways, I really want to fix these few things that are causing me grief :).
Thanks again.