 Hello there everyone. Welcome back to Game Dev Academy. I'm Shane and in today's video I want to show you a plugin that I've recently been introduced to which allows you to create really good, really convincing terrains and landscapes incredibly quickly and completely interactively. It's very very easy and you get really good results and you get those good results quickly. So what I'll do for you today is I'll kind of show you how it works, give you a quick overview and then you can go off and check it out for yourself if you want. I will leave the link to the plugin in the description below so if you like what you see take a look. Okay that's enough waffle for me. Let's take a look at this plugin. Let's take a look at this plugin then. It's called EasyTerrain2 and once you've installed it it comes with its own little shelf. So if we switch to the shelf you can see we've got lots of these cool little settings for it and we'll use some of these to create a terrain today just to show you how easy and powerful this tool is. So we start with clicking over here this just creates like a new plane that you can use to create a terrain on. So we'll give that a click and then it creates that. It's already subdivided a little bit. It's not as far as we might go later but it's enough to get us started and then to do things to it what we need to do is add layers to it and that's what this little icon here does. So if we add a layer that now straight away you can see has added some terrain to it which is lovely and it gives you a handle for each one. So I'm just going to raise that up so that I can kind of keep it separate but if I move it around you can see that the terrain moves with that and then what I want to do first of all is set out like a base ground level and you can do that through these presets here. So this one here is called the mounting range preset which works pretty well for what I want to do here. So if I give that a click you see you've got lots of these different defaults so you should see this change as soon as I select one. So if we go for something fairly rocky this one's pretty good and straight away that changes to give us a bit of a base layer of rockiness which I like. So we'll close that for now but you can see that that's not quite affecting all of it. There's some area here that's not being done and what I like to do for that is to just turn on tiling. If we tile it you'll see that now goes right up to the edge which is pretty nice. You can kind of change how often this repeats by scaling it like that if you want to that is and if your peaks are too high what you can do is just scale it on the height axis as well and just sort of bring those down so they're not too high. So I'm going to go for that one for my first one and we'll just name this handle as base terrain. So I know what I've got going on and then to make this more interesting we'll add another one on top. So we select this again now let's just yeah it's already called terrain. So what we'll do is add another layer you see a new handle is created and I'll move this up above the original so I know which is which and again you can see straight away it's already doing something and these two different layers of terrain are working together which is great. This time what I might want to do is just rotate it a little bit but we'll see what other presets we've got. So this time I'm going to go for something a little bit more mountainy. So we've got these ones here that one looks pretty interesting we'll give that one a go. So I clicked on it and then that's now coming but I now might decide that I want that to be a little bit bigger so let's scale that up a little bit yeah it's pretty nice and we'll just move it kind of off to the side a little bit. So that gets me started. Now my main issue with this at the moment is that it doesn't look great I'm just going to raise the height on this. Let's get a bit more mounting going. So it doesn't look great but that's just because it's not really been subdivided very far so it's hard to show all the detail. This little chappy here actually allows us to subdivide and it keeps it changeable so I can go up to subdivision level three let's say and we'll apply that and now we get a lot more detail coming through. This now looks really nice I think it looks kind of something out of like a sort of fantasy sort of setting which I think is really cool but what I like about this is you can easily just go back down to subdivision level one at any time to make it easier to edit. Now you can go higher with these divisions and that but if I go any higher than three my pc is not up to it and it just hangs but I am looking at upgrading my pc for another day so we can do that so let's now go up to subdivision level three again and we'll think about quickly putting some color on this. So there we go that gets us started. So now to put some color on it let's just press six we shouldn't see anything if we press six there you go I pressed six and there's just no color whatsoever which looks a bit rubbish so we select it we click on this icon here and straight away it adds some color for us and one of the things I quite like about this is it puts these handles out to the side so it's a little bit easier to distinguish them from the the ones that are doing the terrain so I just need to rename this that's going to be mountain and this one is color one nice to stay organized and then with this you can see we've got a bit of a texture on there but it looks a bit stretched and you can just scale this down to tile it a little bit so now I think that looks better we could tile it you know a lot more take it really far down and that'll give us kind of like a base color and in fact that's what I'm going to change that to base color now what we want to do is try and mix some colors together to make this look really cool so I'm going to kind of think of this as being mud I want something to look a bit rockier now so I'll click on this again we will create another color I'm going to scale this down to be about the same and I'll raise it up so that I can differentiate between these two layers and then I'll click over here and what that's going to allow me to do if I go to where am I file six I can mess with the color going to color balance so let's say I want this one to be a little bit grayer I can do that in the color balance so I want to add a gray tint to this and I can also using this color game I can decide how much I want those to mix together so I can just kind of play around with them which I quite like so we'll go for something like that which is completely overwritten my original color so I need to mask it to make this look better and what we do for that is we click on this one here and then I'm going to control click my mountain and base terrain so I'm creating a mask based on those two height maps and then we can go to mask we have to right click to create a new one and for this one I think I'm going to do a flow map so I'll give that a click and then when it kicks in there you go you can see that now kind of mix us together in a fairly mountainous looking way you can see almost looks like water's been moving over time you get a bit of sediment and stuff which is nice so we're going to call this one rocky color and then once you have a mask you can go in so I'm just going to left click on this now and you can mess around with it seeing sort of say how much do I want certain colors to show through so I might just take some of that away and we can also make the strength of that come down a little bit so it's not too harsh so I think that looks pretty good that's not a bad start how about now we add a little bit of green to this sort of around the bottom to simulate grass let's give that a go so we'll click on this we'll add yet another color we'll call this one grassy color lovely we will scale that bad boy down raise it up lovely lovely and we need to make it a bit green don't we grass tends to be green so we'll click over here we'll click over here and let's add an offset to it so we'll go somewhere in the green spectrum let's kind of make this a bit less garish that's not bad and then how much do I want this to mix something like that so that just gives us a nice dark green so this one also needs to be masked but we'll do that in a different way so we'll select the layers that we want to be a part of it so grass color mountain and base terrain and this time I'll right click on mask and let's go for height map so I'll do this one based on the height the higher what we get the less grass we want to see in this case so by default we're not seeing much we've got a little bit of grass showing up at the top here which is the reverse of what I want so now let's mess with this mask so we'll go into here and the first thing I want to if you start playing with these you'll see it'll make a difference but I want to swap the colors over so let's drag the black over to that side and the white over to that side and you can see now we've got grass sort of around the bottom and let's just kind of do something like that how much of this do we want it to hear yeah we'll go for that now let's say for the last one we want a little bit of snow so we're going to kind of repeat the same process and it's going to look real nice so let's click on this bad boy we will have another color let's rename to snowy color oh don't need that capital O there go away capital O let's just get this tiling a bit more move that up above the others we need to add a bit of a coloring to it quite eight um color offset let's just make that pretty white that looks good to me yeah but a little bit too white that was pretty nice okay and this one we're going to do with a directional it might not work very well but I just want to show you that there's another masking method this might look terrible but we'll persevere with it so let's go for snowy color we're going to do mountain and the base terrain or right click and do directional this time and you can see that's done something maybe a little bit overkill we shall see so the way that we adjust this one while we can click on this and go into the mask and get some settings so we can kind of play around with the colors that we get like that what we can also do is change the rotation of this which will impact where it looks like the snow has fallen so something like that looks quite good so now we've kind of got it looks like it snowed fairly recently doesn't it we've got some snow's falling down there we've got bits of grass that looks kind of cool I like that I would say I'm a fan so that took me what um probably five minutes if that and I've only really messed around with some of the features you can see there's a lot more going on here you can create actual geometry like geometry archways um but there's lots of things that you can do with it you can use this here um you can get some real world mountains and there's only Japan at the moment I think the developer of this plugin is going to add more but you've got that in there you've got different mountains you've got rocks you've got um this is experimental it's if you read down down here it says it can break it so I haven't I haven't messed with it but there's lots of different things that you can do and you can create terrain that that is textured really easily and you can export it out as geometry or as maps as well that you can then use in something else so you could take the height map and normal map and color map over to something like a real engine do more cool stuff so I hope this has been useful to you I know one of the things that I always find fairly difficult to do is to create convincing terrain quickly I generally just bring in a height map but this allows me to create it interactively and get exactly what I want which is good so with that I think I'll leave it here I will thank you for watching I will thank my patrons whose name I shall put on shortly because they helped me to keep doing this and that means a hell of a lot and um I'll also recommend I've got a shelf down below where I'm selling t-shirts and stuff no one's bought any apart from me you see I've got one here and I cherish this that's how I know I'm in the game div academy so um yeah take a look you get some socks or a cup I think the next thing I'm going to do is get a mug so that's a good idea anyway I'm gonna go I'll see you later I believe that quality education should be available to everybody and for that reason all of the classes at game dev academy are completely free and we're supported by our very generous school governors over at patreon if you'd like to become a game dev academy governor and support our work as well as helping us to steer the channel in the right direction then use the link in the description to be 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