 Hey there beautiful people, in this tutorial video I'm going to take you through the process of creating a landscape from scratch in Unreal Engine 4 I'll then show you how to create a material which you can use to put on that landscape and blend between different textures So like the one you can see on the screen. We've got grass, rocks and dirt We've also got two types of grass. It's very cool. I should come clean though This is actually a compilation of steps taken from my larger introduction to Unreal Engine 4 tutorial And the reason for that is because this is all the steps that just relate to creating a landscape So if you're looking to learn how to create a landscape in Unreal Engine 4 This is definitely the video for you. If however you want a more full introduction to Unreal Engine 4 as a whole Then the link to the full tutorial is in the description below Additionally, you will need some tutorials to be able to complete this in the same way that I'm doing it You've got two options You can either go out and find your own and bring those in that's absolutely fine or you can use mine And if you want instructions on how to get hold of mine, you can follow the link in the description below for that as well Okay, I think that does it for the introduction. I hope you enjoy the tutorial In this step, we're going to start covering landscapes So first of all, we'll talk a little bit about what landscapes are in Unreal Engine 4 So Unreal Engine can actually support huge open-world environments So I'm showing you on screen now some clips from the open world demo, which is absolutely huge And you should check that out for yourself I'll leave a link in the description so you can go and have a look at how that was made But in order to be able to achieve something like this everything's got to be ridiculously well optimized and that includes the terrain the landscape as well So one way you could create landscape would be to create a static mesh and something like Maya or 3ds Max and Then import that into a Unreal Engine The problem with this would be that you'd have to if you wanted to have it be efficient You'd have to create LODs for it Which means you'd also have to chop it up into lots of little chunks You'd have to have different versions of it that would have scalable polygon counts and that is a bore lake So what we have in Unreal Engine is the landscape tool and it does all that kind of stuff automatically So you just throw in your mountains your hills your valleys etc and When things get further away from the player Unreal Engine the landscaping on real it actually reduces the triangle count to make it less detailed and easier for the GPU to render So that's all very clever and that's why this tool exists So what we'll do now is we'll have a go at creating some landscape and we'll cover what all the different settings are when you first create one Which is what this video is all about. Let's get a terrain made Yeah, so over here. We're going to go to this little mountainous bit here, which is landscape mode You can also as you can see get to that by pressing shift and three So give that a little click There we go And the first thing I'll notice is that you get a big green grid on screen So let's just pull out on that to get an idea of what we're looking at So this right here represents what our landscape will become So it it will look different to this when we click on the create one But at the moment it's showing how many sections it'll be made up of and it's also showing how Complex the landscape will be as a whole and we can change those settings before we do that So what we'll do now is we'll have a look at what each of the settings is what each of the settings are is And then we will actually change a couple of settings and create this landscape by the end of this video So let's have a look at what each thing is right now Okay, so as you can see we're actually on the manage section of the tool and within that There's lots of different bits and bobs that we can change So the first thing you'll see is create new and that is dead straightforward What that will do when you click on that is it will create a new landscape the opposite to that rather than creating a new one within a real engine is you can import from file and That means you can bring in External information that you've created using other applications such as world machine or you could create a height map using photoshop Etc. We will have a look at using the height maps in a couple of steps. So keep watching for that Okay, the next thing you'll see is material and that's where you can assign a material to the landscape So it could be grass or you could choose a more complicated one Which we will cover as well in a few steps time when we get onto materials The next section covers location rotation and scale and here you can just set the overall scale how it's rotated You can also set whether or not it's offset. The moment is central in our world But we could have it be off to the side if we wanted to I actually don't recommend changing anything to do with the Scale unless you're just changing scale on the z axis, which we will have a look at as well But usually it's better to leave those the same to leave those at default Okay The next thing you can see is section size and this is important for determining how UE4 handles Level of detail and culling for your landscape if you choose smaller sections Then that means the engine can be more aggressive with the way it applies LOD Which is basically raising or lowering the complexity of the landscape based on how far that section is away from the player Smaller sections actually have a higher impact on the CPU. So you've got to be careful Largest section sizes are easier on the CPU because you'll need fewer components to create your terrain If you want to create a vast sprawling landscape, then you will need to use a larger section size The next part of this is sections per component and this is also tied to the level of detail system A component is the largest unit of your landscape each component can be made up of multiple sections For example, it could be either one by one, which is one square Which is what is thereby default or it could be two by two sections, which kind of splits that into quarters This means there could be four different levels of detail being handled by the engine at once for each section What you choose here is most likely going to depend on your target platform If you're going for mobile then you're going to keep this as simple as you can The next bit is number of components and this together with a section size determines the overall size of your landscape This can only go as high as 32 by 32 because anything above that can create pretty serious performance issues After that we've got overall resolution and this is the number of vertices that are using your landscape The higher the number the more detailed it will be but the more CPU intensive it will be as well And the final little box here is total components and this basically takes all the settings above into consideration And calculates how many components your landscape is going to be made up of The last two buttons at the bottom are fill world Which means it will just create the largest possible landscape that the engine can handle and Create which basically generates a landscape based on the properties you specify the above which we'll be using in a minute Okay, so we're going to look at setting this up now to be our landscape So I actually want to leave most of these at the default But I don't want to go too big because this is only for kind of practice purposes anyway So I'm going to change the section size down from 63 by 63 down to the next one down, which is 31 by 31 So you'll see what this does is reduces the overall size of the landscape basically So once we're at that stage we've changed everything that I want us to change for now So we can just click on the create button and You'll see that now you've got a landscape The tool set moves over from manage here over to sculpt and you'll see you've got a little paintbrush icon here And that's getting ready to do some sculpting which we'll cover in the next step before I move on to that next step There will just cover a couple more things Two things which you might notice about this newly formed landscape The first one is that you can see there's like a checkerboard pattern. So if we just Move in on this a little bit Too far You can see it's got like a checkerboard pattern applied to it and what that means is that there's no material applied So this is the like default on real engine There's no material sort of thing and it's just there But this is really handy actually on a landscape because it'll let us know if there's any stretching happening when we start sculpting So that's actually okay The other thing you probably notice are these grid lines that are kind of going criss-crossing the landscape and they're not actually there What we're currently seeing is they're sort of like shadows that are being created where each of the components joins so When we build lighting which we'll cover later on in the series What you'll notice that they just disappear So at the moment they're just there because Unreal hasn't yet worked out how to handle the shadowing that is created by joining these together But once you build your lighting that all just disappears. So don't worry about that in the last step Then we created this wonderful landscape that you can see on screen and in this step We're going to look at the different ways we can manipulate this using the sculpting tools So we'll get straight stuck in with that so you can see that because we've now created the landscape We've moved over to the sculpt tool over here and below that you've got lots of different tools here So you can see that you start with here and there's loads listed. So we've got sculpt smooth flatten etc We'll have a look at most of these in turn As well as that you've got different types of brushes you can use now I'm just going to stick to the circle brushes what we're doing here But they are worth experimenting with and you can also change the way that the fallout happens So that's to do with if you look here. Let me just resize this brush if it'll let me So you can see that The way that you've got two circles that make up this brush and the falloff between them changes based on this So we could do a linear falloff And that would to be fair you don't actually see much change here. There you go That's a bit more of a change and and that will change the way that it transitions from kind of The center of the tool to the edge of the tool to keep things looking similar But again, we're just going to stick to smooth for this and I'm just going to bring the size of my tool back now I'm doing that when I change the size of the tool. I'm using the square bracket keys on the keyboard as well Which is a nice little shortcut Okay, so we'll start looking at the sculpt tool So we're already on that and there are a few parameters for this so you can see that you can change the tool strength Now you're probably looking at a default value of 0.3, which I think is a default I always bring that down to zero point one because I would rather build things up So I'd rather than just clicking and dragging once and like hoping that it looks okay I will click and drag over a few times and kind of build things up gradually and I feel that that gives me more control Here's another way of changing your brush size I just put my brush there so you can see it and we can change the brush size using this slider as well and you can also change the falloff and which is How smooth or hard the bushes so if we go for a Falloff of zero that makes it a really harsh brushing I get some really kind of steep slopes of the edge or you could go crazy soft like that and that kind of is all soft But I'm pretty happy with the default value of 0.5 Right, so the sculpt brush is additive and it is subtractive So the additive part of that is if you just click and drag like this So as I keep going You can see that this is raising up and I'm just creating some nice hilly areas Let me just get in a little bit closer so you can see a bit better There we go So as I click and drag I will create little peaks So that's the additive part the subtractive part Is the opposite that so if you want to go down you want to create like maybe a river or a valley or a lake Then you hold shift on your keyboard and do the same thing So I'm holding shift and this is now going to push the terrain down like that So I could create myself a really cool little downy bit. We'll call it a valley So I'm just going for that if I wanted to be quicker with this I absolutely would turn the tool strength up But I really am not a fan of having a higher tool strength because it just you kind of lose control Which I am a bit of a control freak. It's better to be in control, isn't it? Let's let's be honest Right. So there we go. So You can see that using Those there's just this one tool I can do and the peaks over here and the valleys over here So that's kind of what the school sculpt tools all about and we're going to use that in a few steps Time to create some kind of hilly terrain to enclose our level And again, you can lower things and you don't just have to lower things kind of based on it being flat So I could also lower these these mountains that I've created as well Just by holding shift and I could bring up the center of this by Not holding shift. So that's kind of what that tool is all about So the next tool we'll look at is the smooth tool which is just below the sculpt tool in the menu And what this basically does is function is to smooth out what you've done So it kind of Relaxes if you've got something that's too harsh It just relaxes that and makes everything look more subtle So let's just get in on somewhere that's a bit more harsh I like the top of this particular bit here if I just run the smooth tool over that And it'll just chill it out a little bit and make everything blend together. So it's just kind of averaging out all the different Vertices around and just saying yeah, just just match up a little bit more guys. Don't don't be so different And again, I can do that in here. So if I just wanted to relax this bit that I've created here Just use a smooth tool. It'll just chill out. That's nice nice and smooth So that's what that tool is all about and again, we'll be using that later Just to make sure that nothing is too harsh That's its function. That's where it lives for Okay, the next tool we'll look at is kind of cool really useful. Um, so The flatten tool Does exactly that so you can see that we've created kind of quite a random looking area here Um, but maybe I want to put a castle on top of this somewhere. So I'll just bring my brush size down a little bit for this Um, and the way this tool works is it starts from wherever you first click So if I say that I want the height of this castle area Um to be here I just start clicking and what that will do is bring everything up to that exact height wherever I click It will never ever go above that height. So I because I've got it on a lower tool strength It doesn't necessarily do it all straight away But you can see it's just creating a nice kind of flat plateau here Um that I might put my brand new castle on And it blends it in kind of seamlessly with all the stuff around it as well So that's what the flatten tool is all about. It makes stuff flat. It's a very descriptive name for the tool, isn't it? Okay, let's move on Speaking of descriptive names for tools. We now have the ramp tool. So let's check that bad boy out Here it is And believe it or not the clues in the title what this lives for is to create nice little ramps So what you need to do first of all is click somewhere on your landscape So just here and that puts down the first Kind of marker for where your ramp is going to be And then I'll put another one here And that creates a second one and then you can decide how you want your ramp to go So I'm going to raise this side here. You can actually raise both sides. I believe Like that, but I just want um, let's see if I can put that one back down. Maybe not I'll do it by hand. So you can choose two different points And the other thing you can do Is Um, you can set the width of this ramp as well So you can have it be quite wide or quite narrow And you can also change the way that it falls off on the side So it can be very kind of sheer on the edge or it can kind of Go quite near like that. I think that's the technical term Right. So once you're happy with your settings for your ramp, you just click on add And that's it you get yourself a ramp I do believe you can edit it after the fact Yep, so you can just change the points and click on add ramp and it should update So there you go So that's what that tool is all about and that can be really useful The next tools that we'll look at are the erosion tools And we will start with the first one in the list, which is dry erosion or thermal erosion And what this does is it simulates the kind of transfer of dirt and rocks and landscape kind of over time and the shape that that would create So I will try and show you that I'm going to turn the tool strength up a little bit for this Just so that it doesn't take all day Um, and what I'm going to do is just paint over These mountain areas So what they're going to do is just subtly change the shape of this To try and simulate the way that this sort of bit of landscape would have Formed over time and it tends to go a little bit sandy Uh, it gets that kind of look from it using this tool So I'll just go a little bit more. Oh, I think I'm shaking the camera. Sorry guys. I'm getting a bit carried away Uh, we'll go on the ramp as well. We'll get that To erode a little bit and you see it's just kind of making it look Oh, it's having a big effect on this bit here. I like that And it just makes everything look a little bit more natural So that is the function of this tool There you go. I'm actually a big fan of using this. It makes everything look a little bit more natural a little bit more realistic But you can go a step further than that with the next tool, which is hydro erosion And again, I'm going to leave a default setting on this and I'm going to have a slightly stronger tool strength Um, but what this does it simulates erosion again, but based on water traveling Um through the terrain for millennia So we'll have a go at this one. So we'll start over here And you should just see That it makes changes to the train. So you can see it's just creating some little indentations down there At the bottom and generally You'll see water would settle where the um The slope meets the flat so just around these areas here and you can see that that's happening there Uh, but it's a very cool tool. You can see that this area here is quite nice See because these two uh peaks have come together That's where water would have flowed down. So it's kind of picked up on that And again, it's another tool that you don't really want to overdo But it does give quite a nice effect and it adds an extra layer of realism to your landscape So that's that one The next tool that we'll take a look at is the noise tool and don't worry. It's not loud It's like digital noise. It's visual noise So we'll change to that tool And uh, what this one does is basically makes things bumpy. That's kind of what it does So I'll just use this tool over here. I'll get a slightly bigger brush again And it's just going to raise things up and lower them down randomly Which is quite a nice way of adding some, uh, variation to your terrain very quickly like that So you can see it's not just sculpted it all up or all down. It's got a real variation to it Which it's a little bit too harsh. It wouldn't be fun to run around if you're playing the game But I did leave the tool strength turned way up So I would now go over all that with a smooth brush and just get it to chill out a little bit Okay, the second to last tool that we're going to look at is the read to apologize tool And the function of this is to Resample where your vertices are so that you reduce texture stretching So if I can find somewhere that's quite harsh Oh, hello, maybe I need to just turn my camera speed down a little bit for this Um, so it's quite a harsh Area here. I'll just turn this tool size down a little bit Um, and what this will do is it will just move vertices around so that The texture will fit on them a little bit more evenly. So I'm just going to run the brush over this Like that and you don't really see much happening As you're doing it, but it's just making things A little bit more evenly spaced And that's going to make sure that your texture fits on here a lot better Like that and that's all there is to that tool if I press ctrl and z you should see it pop back to what it was originally There you go. So it's just made really subtle changes. So if I just keep stopping between those And it's just meant that there's going to be slightly less texture stretching and that's the entire purpose of that tool And the final tool which I can't actually demonstrate to you is the visibility tool And you can use this to like paint little holes in your terrain To create cave openings and stuff like that but as you can see about the error I've got on screen that red writing I can't use it yet because I haven't created a material for the landscape that's got this landscape visibility mask node attached to it So it's worth playing with that kind of in your own time, but I'm not going to show you that in this video Okay, so that's a quick introduction to all of the different sculpting tools that you've got for your landscape So what we'll do now is we'll actually delete this landscape because all we've done is fath about whether it doesn't actually look good Does it or mine doesn't so I'm going to get rid of it and in doing that I'm also going to teach you how to delete a landscape. So, you know, it serves two functions, right? So What we're going to do to get rid of this landscape then is go back to Place mode, so we're just going to go over here And once we've done that we can now select things within the world outliner So I want to select the landscape and also the landscape gizmo active actor Like that and I just held shift to select two things and I'm just going to press delete on my keyboard And it's gone Which means that we're now ready to move on to The next step In this quick step, we'll take a look at how you can create landscape in Unreal Engine using a height map So we need to move back to the landscape tool. Where's my mouse pointer? There it is over here And by default you'll probably be on create new again Um, but you can move over to import from file So we'll do that and then you'll notice this changes a little bit Your green grid disappears because it's now got nothing to base the grid on and we're going to do that with the height map file But what you need to keep in mind Is that it will only work with height maps in one of two very specific formats, which I have written down over here So you can use either a 16 bit grayscale png file Or a 16 bit grayscale Dot raw file, which needs to be in the little endian byte order. I have no idea what that means But i'm sure it's easy enough to do anyway I've got a 16 bit grayscale png that i'm going to be using and if you have downloaded My project file, which you can get to via patreon Then you will also have access to the same height map if not find your own. It's no biggie so We'll go to import from file and click on the little Button here to go and find the file. So here you go. This is the Folder that I share with my patrons and the height map is in there. So we'll give that a click and click on open It'll take a little minute just to analyze this and create a preview There we go, and I'll just zoom out because this is quite large. Um, you can see I've got my camera on full speed Um, but this is quite a big landscape. So you can see that is just a really basic preview of it What I know because I've already used this landscape is that the height on it is a little bit too harsh So we need to change a setting to get that a little bit more in line And we're going to do that by going into the settings over here. I'm going to change the z scale to about 35 And it won't look like much here, but when we click on create in a minute It's going to look tits. I promise you so All the other settings are fine because it takes all those settings from the height map So we'll leave those at default and click on import This will take a little while longer to create that height map based on the image that we've given it But when it's done, you will see something very cool. So let's have a look at that in a sec Okay, so there we go. I think that took somewhere between one and two minutes for me to complete And that's because the landscape we've created here is vast. So I'll just wait for the auto save Hey, there we go, right So let's zoom into this a little bit and you can see that this landscape has been created in seconds really If we tried to sculpt all this by hand, it would take a long time Um, but you can see there's an awful lot of detail in here. So check that out That's pretty cool. Yeah, so you can look around in all the directions and it looks nice What I also like to do is get a feel for the landscape by having a little run around in it Um, that'll tell you if things look too high not high enough But what it'll also do you see this kind of area here That kind of represents I think one pixel or one group of pixels on the height map And you can see it's just changed from one color to another on the height map So one thing that you'll probably really want to do with any height map That you use is go straight in and use the smooth tool on it So I'm just going to up the strength to 0.4 just to make this happen quite quickly And I'll just up the size of the brush Don't make the brush size too big because otherwise it'll take ages to smooth But what I want to do is just chill areas out a little bit like that And then when I have a look at that again When I'm finished falling from the sky You can see that that now actually looks a lot smoother and pretty nice So if you've got quite a rough height map like the one I've used here, I would recommend smoothing it straight after probably using a softer brush A brush with a lower strength than I've just used But you get quite a nice effect and that is a really cool way of creating vast landscape very quickly Okay, so that pretty much does it for this step So what you need to do is delete this landscape before moving on to the next step because in that step We're actually going to create our proper landscape the one that we'll use for the rest of the exercise So delete this one. We'll make a new one. We'll sculpt it by hand. It'll look proper cool And then that will bring us to the end of the sculpting section. So one more step left Now it's time to create our real landscape the one that we're actually going to use moving forward So we'll get stuck straight in let's have a look. So we're going to move over to The landscape tool once again Okay, so you can see that mine has remembered what I was doing in the previous step It wants me to use the height map which I don't want so I'm going to go to create new And then we get hello wherever I go There we go get up there right, so this is The default size which is far too big. This is not what I want So I'm going to have a section size of 31 by 31 which is there So this is now going to be much more manageable. I like that And the height on the z axis I'm going to put back to 100 because I just like everything to be at their defaults other than what I change So I'm happy with that. I think Although I do want to change the other things that were changed by the height map So my number of components is now no longer set to 8 by 8. So In fact, I'm going to use this little arrow here To set that back to default. That's better Um, and the overall resolution of 249 by 249 is good total components 64. So I will create that Groovy, okay so Let's zoom in on this a little bit Interestingly, it's not giving me the grid lines, which is nice. I guess usually I get those So that's good And the first thing I actually like to do when I create a new landscape is to have a little run around that landscape Just to get a feel for the scale of it so that when I'm sculpting hills and things I've got the right scale in mind when I'm doing that So the first thing I would do or would normally do is click on play But as you should notice That causes us to fall through the floor and we just fall forever And the reason for that Is that the player start? Let me just go back to place mode for a moment. The player start. I'll just press f Is kind of halfway through the floor Which means that the feet aren't climbing with it. So he's going to fall So before you can move it out of the ground what you might need to do is turn your move tool on So you can see mine's on by default and yours probably is too But if it isn't the way that you can turn it on is by clicking on this icon here Or as it tells you there you can press the w key and that will turn it on and then you can move it up. So Move it up out of the floor like that And now when I press play my character will be able to stand on that There we go So this now I just have a little run around just real quick Just to get a feel for How big this is and I can see it is quite big it's big enough for my needs and How long is it going to take me to get to the edge? Quite a while So this tells me What I need to do to create my heels and stuff. So I'm just going to hit escape There we go Zoom out a touch And then we can start sculpting on this Okay, so the first tool I'm going to use on this back over to landscape is a sculpt tool I want a strength of 0.1 Like that and I'm going to have a brush size of 2048 Because I quite like that size for this particular exercise And what I'm going to do is just start by sculpting the edges. I'm just going to bring them up like so And I'm just going to bring it up gradually. So I could again as I've said I could use um A stronger setting on my brush, but I kind of want this Random Building up of what I'm doing. So what I do is I just tend to click and drag quite often And I just allow this to build up Seeing say I'm just building it up Repeating the same thing really, but I'm just trying to get a little bit of variety in what I'm doing by just Being a bit haphazard about things There we go put some detail there might want to just move over there for this like so In fact, it is taking a little bit longer than I thought. So I'm just going to Increase the strength of my brush just to get this done a little bit quicker. I actually still would recommend Using a lower setting, but We're going to be here all day. Aren't we have a faff about with that. So let's just get some nice Healy terrain going around the edge And the reason I'm doing it around the edge is because I don't want the player to be able to see off the edge of the world It's just unnerving if you feel like you can fall off the world So as you can see I'm just going to keep building it up over and over Until I'm happy that I've got something interesting Get something up in the corner there And it doesn't matter too much if I overdo it because I can always come back in with the smooth tool or I can Reduce the height of things later. Let's just bring that bit up as well Um, yeah, I think a little bit more over here like that Right, so I think I'm happy with that But the most important thing is what it looks like to the player So at this stage, I'm going to hit play and just have a little look around Um to see what I think of this And it mostly looks okay. I think this area here. I'm not Incredibly happy about So I'm just going to give that a little bit more love I'm just going to bring something up here. I think And I think just bring my brush size down a little bit Just add a little bit more variety to this area. I don't want it to look too samey Okay, let's have another look around now Yeah, I think that looks pretty cool So that's the first kind of pass. I've done a sculpt around the edge Just so the player can't see that the world is quite finite So that's that what I will also do just briefly You can see I've got my settings turned down when I preview this because my laptop sucks. It sucks so hard Um, so I've got my settings turned down on the engine scalability settings Which if you've got underpowered hardware, you might also need to do But because I've got this turned down to low the resolution scale is at 25 percent Which is why everything looks black. So I'm just going to turn that up and have another look Yeah, that's pretty cool Right, so what we need to do next is add a little bit of erosion to make these peaks we've created look more natural So I like to start with the thermal erosion And I've already been playing with this tool So it's kind of already set up as I want it to be So you should match my settings if you want to get the same results as me or you can experiment with them Which is also cool So you can see my tool strength is going to be 0.1 because again, I don't want to overdo it My threshold I've got set to 128 the surface thickness is set to 512 Which are kind of the max values for both of those I've got iteration set to 28 noise mode is on lower and the noise scale is set to 60 as well So then what I'm going to do Is using this I'm just going to up the size of my brush again So I'm going to do 2048 And I'm just going to paint over Everywhere that I have created peaks on and again I'm just doing this to try and get a more natural look so that it looks like you know Landers been transferred downhill been Attacked by time and stuff So I'm just going to give everything a damn good painting So that it looks super sexy come on painting that bitch up real nice That's nice Okay, we'll get over here Sit and all I'm doing really is I'm just Trying to make these hills not look too fake like they've been created by the sculpt brush And you could go over this for as long as you want um But be careful just not to overdo anything So this area here is going to be kind of nice. I think when I'm done with it Get this area again cool So that looks kind of nice. I think so again The thing that is most important to me is that when I play it things look cool Um and the bit I'm not happy with is this area here. So I'm going to get stuck into this a bit more. I'm going to bring that down a bit I'm going to let this erode down as well Because it just doesn't look right. Yeah come on erode get eroded. Yeah Let's have another look at that Yeah, that's better And what I like if you can see this little kind of indentation here has been created by that erosion That's all the erosion tool So it's adding in extra detail as well Okay, so I'm happy with the thermal erosion what I also want to add an extra level of detail and realism is I'm going to go at it with the Hydro erosion tool as well And again, I've already changed some settings. You can see all of these ones with backwards arrows on them I can undo to put them back to default, but I want them at this thing See tool strength zero point one always recommend that Rain amount two five six, which is the max sediment capacity Which is kind of how much slurry and Well sediment has been carried down by the water as it's run from high ground Um, and I've also changed the scale as well because 12 looked better So I'm just going to repeat the same process You've got to be more careful with this tool where the slope meets the flatter ground because you can overdo it quite easily So I'm just going to start kind of painting down And you can see already this area here. It's having an effect on it's just creating A little area is where water might have rested or might have trickled down between Where different peaks have met? Oh, hello So I'm just going to keep bringing this down I think I just really want to be careful not to overdo this And just keep it looking nice and cool Okay, so this guy up here is quite high up So I'm going to have to make sure it looks like some water's run down from there Okay, I'll keep going like that. Yeah, I'm pretty happy with that Yep, I'm going to bring this in over here as well Okay, so I've kind of been all the way around. I'm pretty happy with that again As always, I'm going to have a little look As I play it make sure nothing looks too odd No, that looks pretty cool. I like that So that's it for erosion The last bit of sculpting I want to do to this terrain is I want to get some noise in there And the noise I'll just put it back into play mode again. It's for this flat area here I'm trying to create an area that looks like it's outside kind of a meadow sort of area And whilst I want it to be mostly flat if it's perfectly flat, it's going to look odd Which I want to avoid So in order to avoid that I'm going to go to my Noise tool And again, you can see that I've had a little mess around with the settings So I've got my tool strength quite low because this is something you don't want to overdo Because if things look too bumpy, it's weird for the player Um, I've got my noise scale set to 64 and my brush size is set to Um, 24 to again And what I'm going to do to avoid overdoing it is I'm just going to click once In most areas of My little plateau area in the center And it doesn't matter if you go over the the kind of hilly area as well Because all you're really doing with noise is adding a bit of kind of random variety to the height So it's not going to hurt anything So I'm just going to let that build up and it's kind of hard to see from up here what effect you've had So I'm going to press play and go in and it's subtle But if you follow the kind of lines on the grid lines that are there You see that now this height has changed a little bit and it's not perfectly flat as you look around Which is the effect I wanted and I could continue to tweak that I could give it a little more in places A little bit less in places, but that actually is pretty nice. I'm quite happy with that So that will do it for noise then and there's one final thing I want to do and what that is is smooth So I'm going to put my smooth tool on and I try to save this until the end and what I'm looking for is anywhere where the Height changes too drastically and looks ugly to look at So maybe some areas like this might have been overdone or I don't I'm not a massive fan of these little creators That get created around the bottom as well So my tool strength is going to stay at 0.1 And I'm going to leave everything else at default and I'm just going to Again, I'm just clicking once here because I don't want to Overdo this and smooth out all the detail that I've spent time putting in This is just to get it under control. It's not to remove it like that so These areas at the bottom particularly I'm not a massive fan of if they're overdone So you can see I'm just smoothing those out a little bit. I'll just give that a few clicks up there as well That looks quite harsh I'm kind of letting the shadows guide me on this if anything looks too shadowy I'm going to try and just smooth it out a little bit And just around the bottom here There we go There's now better than a smooth bottom It's right though in it. Okay, so that's kind of Pretty good now. So I've smoothed things. I've added erosion. I've got some peaks I've tried not to overdo it. This is going to be a kind of hilly terrain Kind of towards rocky hills, but I'm not going for mountains because for the scale I'm working at it would look odd So I'm pretty happy with that for the terrain There is one final step that you could do I actually don't think I need it because I don't think any areas look like they're going to be an issue for me maybe um This area over here could be But that is you could use the retapologize tool Which if you think you've got any Inclines that are particularly harsh you might just want to retapologize those just to reduce texture stretching later But you don't have to do that now if once you've applied your material to the landscape later You see the texture stretching you can always retapologize it then so there's no rush on that Okay, so at this stage I'm now going to save this as another version. So let me just go back to Place mode. I'm going to go file save current as And it's called level underscore chapter two. So this is the end of chapter two that I'm saving So those of you that are working from my files for any reason you can now get access to that one that will pop up Okay, so that wraps up the introduction to the landscape tool So moving forward will be going into materials. So I'll see you in the next step where we'll start looking at materials Okay, so here we go in this step. We're going to set about creating a proper Landscape material for our landscape that we've created So we're going to do everything that's needed in this one step. So we'll jump straight into it so it doesn't take too long Okay, so the first thing we want to do is make sure that you've got All the textures that we're going to be using so you need the dirt texture So dirt d dirt n dirt r then we've got two grasses grass to d grass to n grass to r Grass d grass n grass r and rock terrain d rock terrain n and rock terrain r These are all available through my project So you can get them downloaded or you can go out and find your own versions That's absolutely fine, but you need to have those ready to go and in your textures folder So that's step one and now we're going to go into our materials folder And we're going to create a new material So I'm just going to right click click on material and I'm going to call this M underscore landscape So this is the oh hang on one o day exists. Oh, yeah I've already done this once because I've been writing the thing as well So I'm going to call this landscape new that'll do it Right, so we'll then need to get that opened up. We're going to do some stuff with it I'll close the other one as well. So I've not got too much going on So this is our landscape material So it's got nothing in it just like we did when we started the practice one And now we're going to put some other things in but the magic comes from one particular node that allows us to blend between Different textures and that is called a landscape layer blend node There it is very unassuming very simple looking node, but so powerful And what we need to do we know that we've got four count them one two three four We've got four different types of textures that we're going to use We've got the dirt two different types of grass and we've got the rock as well So we need to create four elements within this layer blend node So in the details panel here it is you can see there are currently zero array elements So we're going to add four by clicking on this plus symbol four times one Two three four Oh, my phone went off Never mind. We'll leave it in. I'm popular enough to get to get messages. Don't you worry about it I am going to put it on silent now There we go. Sorry everyone okay So we've got um these four layers and each one of them needs a layer name So i'm going to call this one dirt Press enter when you've renamed it the next layer is going to be called Grass and i'm going to call one of them grass dry And the next one grass lush So that's a little bit more descriptive. I know what type of grass i'm painting with And the final one is going to be called rock Like that and you can see that those names are reflected within the layer blend node like that So i'll just pop that over there for now What we need to do next is create four texture sample Expressions so that we can get the textures plugged into this layer blend node So the way i'm going to do this is i'm just going to hold t on my keyboard and left click one two three four times okay And then just to kind of line these up a little bit. I like these to go in a line like this so that I can see What i'm doing So i'll get them put like that And then for each one i want to load in the kind of associated texture for it So we're going to do this one first and because it's at the top i'm going to choose the dirt texture So click on it go into your details panel and then where it says non here We're going to search for dirt underscore d d denotes diffuse, which is the same as base color So we'll click on that and that will load in Next one we're going to do dry grass. So We'll have a look in here and I believe that that is grass to In this case so grass to underscore d should be dry grass The next one is just going to be grass underscore d because that's the more lush grass And the final one is going to be rock terrain underscore d Yep, so there are all the diffuse textures and then what we need to do is plug Each one of those oh no each one of those Into the appropriate input on the layer blend Like that And then the final step to do with this is to plug the output of the layer blend Into the input over here base color and that's done. The last thing to do with this is to Select them all we're going to press c to get it in a comment and i'm going to call this base Color There we go and I am using the British spelling of color because that's where i'm from So there okay So that's base color done Now we need to do this two more times, but we need to do this for Normal and we need to do this for roughness. So rather than import all those nodes again We can do that by copying what i've already got and just swapping out the texture. So that's what we'll do So in order to do that, we're going to click and drag To get a marquee selection of all five of those nodes and the comment that surrounds them And then i'm going to hit control and c on my keyboard, which is the universal command for copy Then i'm going to hit control and v as well And now we get a copy of all those nodes that we can place down here, which i'll just zoom in on quickly And these ones are going to be Roughness or rename this to roughness straight away And now i need to swap out all the textures for their roughness counterpart. So the first one is dirt So instead of dirt underscore d it's going to be dirt underscore r The next one instead of grass underscore grass to underscore d or the grass to underscore r And so on so where's grass roughness? and rock terrain roughness Okay, nice and straightforward I'm all about that and then what i'll do just to make my life a bit easier is i'll pull this node Down here so it's closer and then i can plug the output into the roughness input of the main material node And i need to do this one final time For the normal so i can just paste again because i've already got it copied somewhere There we go And this time i'll zoom in and i'll call this normal This is my group of normal textures And then this one is going to be underscore n And they'll all go with the underscore n textures now grass to underscore n grass underscore n and rock underscore n Ta-da Okay, and last step is to get this plugged in to normal Oh, that's looking good. Right now you're gonna have to start zooming out a little bit to kind of keep everything looking Sort of visible so you can see what you want But you can see i've got a base color with four textures that will be blended together Roughness four textures that will blend and known with four textures that will blend There's one more node that we need to add to this before we can call it finished or anything approaching finished at this stage And that's the one that's going to handle the uv coordinates and whether or not we want to change the scaling of this And that is going to be our landscape layer coordinates There it is and this one you need to plug into the uvs Of all the textures that you've included So what I find easiest to do is put it close to The texture samples that I need to Use And that way it just makes it easier to aim around like this So then we'll have it into the roughness ones And then finally it needs to go in normal as well one two three four And then just to try and neat in this one at the end. I'll pull this over here So that I can see how everything's working Okay, so that is the simplest version of this type of material that we can create There we may welcome back into this and make some other tweaks to add things so we can tint the colors a little bit So that we can tweak the roughness values But for now i'm happy enough with this So what we'll do is save it and then in the next step We'll start painting that onto our landscape using the landscape painting tools So let's hit save And once it's saved move over to the next step and we'll start painting Now it's time to start getting this landscape material onto the landscape and start doing cool things with it So if you left off in the same sort of place that I did in the last step You'll still have this material open although it will be saved But now what we want to do is just close it for the time being And move back to our level editor So you'll see if you're in your materials folder that we have our new material And it doesn't look the same as the previous ones Because it doesn't know Which material to show you because it's obviously got four different ones to blend between So you just get this weird kind of cloudy looking thing, but that's fine. We know what it is So what we'll do before we can do anything before we can start painting to it is we need to assign this new material to the landscape So what I'll do is just select my landscape And what I'll do is make sure I've also got my M underscore landscape new materials selected in my materials folder And then if I just click on this little arrow here That will swap them over for me and it should Go completely black when it compiles the shaders it has that's good That's what we wanted to see because at the moment whilst we have assigned this material We haven't told it which textures to use where because we've not done any painting So that's what we'll move on to now So what we need to do first of all is change the tool set over so back into the landscape tools over here Come on, hold your phone real there we go And this time we're going over to paint because that's what we'll be doing And you can see now that we've assigned that material These four different textures are there waiting for us to paint with them But if we were to try doing that now it just wouldn't work because Unreal needs target layers to store this information as we paint and we need to create one for each of those um Textures that we've got in there So doing it's very very easy So for each one of the textures that you want to work with you click on the little plus symbol here And you just click on the weight blended layer and in brackets it says normal That's how I remember it's the one to use because it's the one I would normally use Good good wordplay chain. Okay, so give it a click and it'll ask you what you want to call it And where you want to put it and I'm just going to Go with the default name and the default location You can see I've also got one there for chapter four because I've been working ahead to write this down But at the moment we're going to do it there. So click on okay And we need to do that for each one so Before we can move on we need four of these There we go easy peasy what we need to do now is get a bit of color on there And the way I always approach this is you could just start kind of painting by hand And putting things where you want but I always like to put down like a base coat as if you're painting something else You don't want to see that black color anywhere because that will make your your terrain look rubbish So we're going to put down a base coat of dirt and then paint on top of that to make sure that there's always something there So to do that all we need to do is Right click anywhere on your dirt layer over here And you'll see that one of the options is to fill the layer with with dirt. So if we click on that And wait a second so the shader will need to compile but when it's done you'll get dirt everywhere. So There we go The dirt is there. It was easy. So that is the first step in painting our terrain What we need to do now is start actually using the brushes to add the other stuff. So the grass and the rock Okay, so as with the actual sculpting tools for landscape when you're painting your textures That's also an additive and subtractive workflow. So what I like to do. So we're going to go with grass dry first of all My tool strength is already set roughly where I want it. I'm probably going to go for something like 0.2. I think And my brush size I'm going to start at 1,024 but I may Raise or decrease that depending on currently what I'm doing So I want to set that up first of all I do want a circular brush and I do want a smooth fall off I want it to be nice and smooth so that blends between other textures nicely. I had a hard fall off It would just create really definite edges, which is useful in some situations But it's not what I want here and then what I need to do is Make sure that I can see a good chunk of my terrain like this That'll do it And what I'm going to do is just slowly I might just double the size of my brush. I think for this first step 2048 That's better and I'm just going to start painting in some grass Kind of in this central area We'll call it the plateau And you'll see that it starts to build up slowly because we've got the the brush strength on quite low the tool strength And what we want to do is allow that to build up as we continue to paint it over So I definitely want to get quite a lot of grass in the middle like that And you just got to be a bit patient and allow this to build up. You can have a stronger tool strength if you want um But I'm always wary of overdoing it. So This is why I do it this way And what you will notice as well is from time to time Um, you'll lose some of the grid squares as it recompiles the shaders because there's more information there for it to work with So it does work with it So something like that and then what I'll probably do is just come in a little bit closer And in some areas, I'll just bring the size of my brush down. So I'm using my square brackets for this and I'll just paint up Into certain areas. So the grass is growing up the hills, especially areas that are a little bit flatter So over here. Definitely want some cool grass going on Yeah, here we go Little bit going on up here Or else do I want it? Oh, definitely up here. I think I'll take that all the way up to the top and up here And just anywhere that you think it's going to look pretty natural for the grass to look like that okay, so Let's just zoom out of that a little bit I think that will do it for the first lot of grass So what I want to do now Is sort of in the central areas where there's more light and more water whatever We'll use some of the lush grass. So I'm just going to increase my brush size if it'll let me There we go and just I don't want to overdo this and you'll see the shading needs to compile again because I've made it get a little bit more complicated by adding in A different type of grass and just want to blend in Some of this lush grass in some areas And I might even just bring it in A little bit where we're going up the hill and quite a bit going on in the center Like that So I want to do at this stage just have a little look at how This grass is coming together How does it look within my actual game? Not bad. So I think the sizing is a little bit off, which I will change later But I can see That I've got grass in there and it blends between different ones in different areas So that's good Okay, so now what I need to do is get some rock in there So we'll change to the rock layer get a reasonable sized brush And just some areas that we want to be a bit rockier We're going to start to add that in and again it'll take A bit of shader compiling again to get this to catch up And I don't want to overdo this because I do want this to blend with the dirt a little bit I think that'll give a more interesting looking Material We just want this to look nice and cool So it's going to be quite rocky as it gets hillier Like so So we're not really aiming for this to be perfect It's going to be quite quick. You might spend more time painting your Textures in than I'm going to do just in this video because I don't want it to take forever But we'll try and get a Good amount of this in Okay I'm fairly happy with that But what I want to do now Oh Is just sort out The scaling of the the texture because I'm not happy with the size. I think it's tiling too much So like I did in the the previous material We changed the scale of it to just kind of sort it out So what I'm doing is just running over to somewhere where I can see kind of A few of the different textures over here looks like a good place And and then what I'll do is I'll kind of change the size of it So There's a good one. I think I can see the rock the rock's certainly tiling too much So what I'll do to Sort that out is I'll just go back to my place mode so that my paint tools not in the way and I'm going to open up The materials folder Open the landscape And then I'm going to change the scaling of it using the Landscape coordinates node and I've written down in my notes that I quite like to look of a mapping scale of three So I'm going to type that in press enter Save the material Now the thing about not using parameters and the material instance on this which we really should do but I want to Go a little bit quicker on this is it will have to recompile Which takes us back to the checkerboard while that's happening, but once it comes in it starts to look pretty nice Okay, so one of the problems that we've got is that the rock texture still looks quite tiled Um, and there are tricks that we could do to break that up within the material Or we could blend another rock material in there But by the time we've completed this level you won't really notice it because there'll be trees up there There'll be rocks up there and that'll break it up for us So I won't spend too much time worrying about that but what we will do Is just have a little run around see if we're liking the grass now. Yep, that looks pretty nice Yep, the rock looks okay over there in the background. We've got a nice blending materials going on. I'm pretty happy Okay, so that brings us to the end of the landscape section So we've created a landscape now We've created a sexy material for it and we've painted that around By all means spend some more time being a little bit more kind of creative with this and placing different materials where you want Okay, that does it for the introduction to landscapes on Unreal Engine 4 Section of this tutorial that I've given you. Well done for making it to the end of this If you want to continue learning about Unreal Engine 4 then as I've said the link to the full tutorial is in the description below Okay, I hope I'll see you in future videos. Thanks for watching If you really want to take your learning further than I can cover in this series Then I highly recommend checking out plural site They have loads of really detailed video courses covering game art and game development using Unreal Engine 4 When I learned how to use Unreal a couple of years ago This is where I went and I look in regularly to take a new course and improve my skills I recommend checking out the introduction to Unreal Engine 4 course by Joshua Kinney This is really good and offers a good overview of what you can do in Unreal You can get a free 10 day trial by using my link in the video description And you get full access to all of their courses for that time At the end of your 10 days, you can either subscribe for more or cancel totally up to you It's got to be worth a free trial though, right? I'd like to say a massive thank you to my patrons Your support helps me to keep making videos like this one and I really appreciate each and every one of you It really blows my mind that people will support my channel and my work by pledging their money through patreon So again, thank you all so so much If you aren't already a patron and you'd like to offer your support then please go to patreon.com forward slash shane whitington