UHG Week 4 – Terrain Creation in Unreal Engine

Time for some landscaping

Week 4 is primarily focused on creating a landscape for our player to traverse. To do this, I am using Unreal Engine’s built in landscape tool. This tool creates a rectangular grid of squares that can be manipulated via a sculpting and painting tool. This allows me to change the landscape’s physical geometry and appearance.

Demo of sculpting and painting a brand new landscape

You can sculpt the landscape manually using UE tools or you can import a pre-existing heightmap.

In order to paint on the landscape, I needed to create a special material using a “Layer Blend” node and a “LandscapeCoords” node.

This process is repeated for each desired layer. The node connections going downwards are identical to the setup in the picture. The only difference is the image textures that are used.
This setup lets us blend materials in a pretty convincing manner.

Time to refine the landscape layout

In the week two update, I teased this picture showing my rough concept of the desired landscape:

Using this as a reference, I went back and added some finer detail to both the surrounding landscape and the walkways between locations. I also added some simple texturing to give the appearance of steep cliff sides and rocky terrains.

Ignore the gun model. It is part of the default Unreal Engine first person character.

Next week I will be focusing on major game mechanics. These will mostly consist of interactive elements. The player will be required to interact with these objects to survive.

Thanks for reading!

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *