 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 in something like Maya or 3ds Max and then import that into 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 landscape in Unreal, 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 3. So I'll give that a little click. Ping! 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 will look different to this when we click on the Create button, 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 the 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 Unreal 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, et cetera. 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. At the moment it's 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 that 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. Larger 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 there by 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 the 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 used in your landscape. The higher the number the more detailed it will be the more CPU intensive it will be as well. 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 the landscape based on the properties you specified above which we'll be using in a minute. We're going to look at setting this up now to be our landscape. 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 practice purposes anyway. I'm going to change the section size down from 63 by 63 down to the next one down which is 31 by 31. You'll see what this does is reduces the overall size of the landscape basically. Once we're at that stage we've changed everything that I want us to change for now on the Create button and you'll see that now you've got a landscape. The toolset 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 we'll 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 weee up 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 Unreal Engine, there's no material sort of thing and it's just there but this is really handy actually on the 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'll probably notice are these grid lines that are kind of going crisscrossing 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 the lighting which we'll cover later on in the series 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 the lighting that all just disappears so don't worry about that. Okay that does it for this step then we've got a quick introduction to the image part of the landscape tool and we've had a look at some of the settings and created our first landscape. In the next one we'll do something similar I'll introduce you to all of the different sculpting tools and then we'll have a go with them so join me in the next step for that Thanks for watching! If you want to take your learning further I recommend an introduction to Unreal Engine 4 by Andrew Sanders and Unreal Engine 4 Game Development Essentials by SatishPV Check them out using the links in the video description below Special thanks to my awesome patrons names are displayed on screen for supporting this video If you'd also like to support my channel then go to patreon.com forward slash Shane Whittington