Vue Series #1 - Terrains to UE4

Community Community & Industry Discussion
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Howdy folks!

It’s taken me almost a full year to get around to doing this, but better late than never!

I have a fair amount of years experience in e-on software’s Vue, and I thought it was about time I shared some of that knowledge with the community, in a UE4 driven manner.

I’ve written this completely on the wiki, in the hope that other Vuers can both learn, contribute and hopefully improve on what I’ve bashed out this long weekend.

https://d3ar1piqh1oeli.cloudfront.net/f/f8/Vue_Series_of_tutorials_-UE4_Terrains1.png/800px-Vue_Series_of_tutorials-_UE4_Terrains1.png

Vue Series #1 - Terrains to UE4

There are a few little things to note, however.

Exporting and importing terrains as OBJ meshes is a bit of an experimental thing I added to the tutorial.

I don’t have the best computer in the world and it seems cooking maps with these terrains can be troublesome, but never the less, as a proof of concept it works great.

As it currently stands I don’t have any fancy finished maps to show off (the image in this thread is an old v8 render from within Vue), so apologies for that! but I do run my own biz IRL all solo, and getting time away is a blessing and somewhat of a rarity these days!

Decided I would start this first tutorial as the first in a ‘series’ because there is a lot more about Vue <-> UE4 that can be written about and I’ve got quite a few different ideas floating around up in the old noggin. :slight_smile:

A few ideas I had for future tutorials;

  • (Vue generated) Weightmaps to UE4 for terrain texturing.
  • How to create textures from scratch in Vue, best practices, example setups etc.
  • How to create nature meshes in Vue (rocks, waterfalls etc), exporting them with baked shader textures (normals, disp, occ etc)
  • The perfect Skydome and Skybox generation in Vue (I could almost call myself an expert in this!)
  • Rendering in Vue - The options, benefits & drawbacks
  • Using Boolean mesh functions in Vue, and how to export those as meshes for UE4
  • Cross-porting ecosystems from Vue to UE4 - How and why
  • Exporting camera splines (tracks) from Vue to UE4
  • Similar to above, exporting landscape splines/roads to UE4
  • Plus many others I probably haven’t thought of yet!

I would love to hear feedback/suggestions/crits for this first tutorial and the future ones, as I honestly don’t know many other people who are into this kind of stuff, and the ones that are, haven’t heard of or can’t afford a program like Vue.

Thanks again to Epic for their awesome *everything *and thanks to “Thorax” for the idea of getting stuck into this and offering some alternatives to just World Machine (even though that’s a great program too!)

His WM to UE4 tutorial can be found over on the wiki

Cheers and happy Vueing!

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I agree, there aren’t many ‘casual’ users of Vue that would be around here, but as both UE4 and Vue Pioneer are now free, I am hoping to see a rise in Vue-ers around these parts :slight_smile:

The reason I included the sub section of exporting to a mesh was made for people like yourself, regardless of the reasons :slight_smile: I also think you can have a finer degree of control over the surface textures/normals with using a mesh over the integrated UE “Terrain”, but I’ve noticed that is massively affects cooking times.

Have you got any interesting stats to share? I’d love to hear some real world examples of mesh terrain being used opposed to heightfield based ones, as the public information on this regarding UE is rather slim.

As far as the tree texturing is concerned, as you probably know it’s related to the UVs of the mesh itself, are you able to re-edit your faulty exported trees in another CAD program like Max/Maya/ZBrush etc?

I’d be curious to know a workflow to fix the incorrect textures or even better, to prevent it from happening directly within Vue.

Love your mScatter work!

Thanks for the reply :slight_smile: