Honestly, lately I catch myself going straight to the Marketplace just to grab some free landscape material so I can get started.
Not because I want something fancy. Just because I don’t want to rebuild the same basic setup every single time.
That’s the part that feels weird.
Unreal is supposed to be “next generation,” but so many core workflows still feel like you’re expected to assemble them yourself. Landscape painting is the big one for me. Height blending, slope-based materials, a simple auto setup… why isn’t there just a solid default system ready to go?
Sometimes it feels like Photoshop shipping without a layer system and saying, “Don’t worry, you can build one yourself.”
Yes, Unreal is powerful. Yes, you can build anything. But having to engineer your paint system before you can actually paint kills momentum.
When the normal workflow becomes:
Search Marketplace → download free auto landscape → tweak it until it works
that doesn’t feel next-gen. It feels like patching together a starter kit.
Unreal can render insane worlds. Nanite, Lumen, cinematic lighting. But painting terrain still feels like building a material graph first and being creative second.
I don’t think artists should have to build their own layer system before they’re allowed to paint.
