Brushify Bootcamp - Landscape sculpting and level design in Unreal Engine

[Music] hey guys Joe Gough here creator of Russia fighter IO welcome to another episode of Russia fide boot camp in this episode I'm going to be talking about landscape sculpting and I'm going to be showing you how to use brush afire alpha brushes to sculpt the Unreal Engine 4 terrain I'll also be showing you some of the Unreal Engine 4 native sculpting tools which will let you create your own levels so let's get started all of these features can be used to sculpt any of the brush afire landscapes that are currently available on the Unreal Engine marketplace so all of the landscapes that you see here can be sculpted and manipulated using these same exact methods so this is the scene that we got - last time we were painting some sort of puddles down and creating some sort of variations in roughness on the terrain and just sort of showing how the texture workflow can could be you know in brush if I swapping out these textures that you get you know any textures that you get with brush if I with these sort of custom Mexicans textures so if you want to see that stuff go to the previous videos from this video I'm just gonna start off by completely flattening this terrain and pretty much starting from scratch I'm gonna go to the paint layer so if I go to modes landscape paint and then I'm just gonna fill the whole thing with grass and then I'm gonna go to the sculpt menu and I'm gonna go down from sculpt tool I'm gonna go to the flatten tool and I'm just gonna flatten everything I'm gonna go through each of these tools later just to explain how all this works there yeah just for now just want to revert this landscape back to its defaults I'm just got a couple of rocks here I'm just gonna click delete and now I have pretty much a completely mannequin as well now I have pretty much just a completely flat grassy plain it see if I get close I've got these grass yeah a little nice grassy sort of clovers and the flowers and stuff that kind of grow automatically and as I move away those all disappear that's something that's completely generated by the grass layer the grass types system so you don't need to worry about that that'll all be handled automatically so I'm just going to save this level as a new version I'm just gonna call this brush if I boot camp maybe version two so that I've got an old the old version available to me as well now she's gonna reset the camera and there we go so yeah this is pretty much just a brush if I terrain sorry yeah just an unreal engine landscape with the brush if I auto material applied to it and yeah you can see that I'm able to move my camera speed down a little bit you can see that I'm able to fill the whole thing with grass so yeah from here you will see that I've got a bit of tiling going on on this terrain and don't miss I don't necessarily want that to be the case now in a couple of ways that we can fix that one way is to simply go to the landscape the painting menu and just like we did before we can paint down a number of different layers so if I take a variation maybe forest I'm just gonna give that a layer info that should usually be some layer infos that are already created so in the materials landscapes layer in photos folder you can choose one of those and just assign that and then from here I can I can sort of go in and start painting a little bit of a variation to the texture and as long as you keep the sort of number variants quite low you can usually do this quite cheaply but yeah so this is just a very simple blend of two layers now you'll notice that there's still some repeat some repetition going on now if I want to get that get rid of that even further I can come into my landscape my landscape entity just click on the landscape entity and then go to the details panel right here and if you go scroll down that until you get to landscape material and just open the landscape material by clicking a little magnifying glass it'll open up in this cot in the content browser from there you can open up the actual material instance now the material instance is a place where we can actually tweak quite a lot of these settings for the textures so I'm just gonna make this a little bit smaller and on the right you can see the landscape and then here on the left we can actually see all of the different parameters for a distance tiling so that's right here should be able to see at the very top it says brush if I landscape auto material we've got a few different categories we've got cover layer distance tiling flow Maps PDF procedural and all of these are just sort of doing different functions they're different functions within this landscape auto material so I'm gonna go and tweak the setting called global tiling and that's really the texture level of detail at a global distance so that what that means is when i zoom in if i zoom in on this terrain you can see that the texture start to shift so at a very very close level you can see like rocks and pebbles and grass on the floor then if I start to zoom out that sort of fades into a slightly different sort of more macro texture and that macro texture is actually a completely different texture and then if i zoom out even further that texture then blends once more into an even more zoomed out version of that macro texture so what we're doing by changing this parameter right here and we just do that now is we're actually changing the amount that that global texture level of detail tiles so this is how much tiling that really has so you know if I make it really really so it doesn't tile at all it's gonna get super super blurry because it's barely tiling but then if I increase that you start to see I get more detail but then of course it's tiling more so really what you've got to do is try and find a balance here for your terrain and the sort of size of your terrain in this setting and try and find a sort of compromise of looks and sort of quality that looks and looks good at all distances and all angles so I think this one works pretty well for my terrain there is still a little bit of tiling maybe we can turn it down a little bit more it really boils down to how much you can kind of get away with you know in in you using as little tiling as possible but still trying to maintain you know a good look so eventually when you turn the timeline too far down it's gonna get blurry yeah so I think this looks a lot better and I'll just revert it back to the default so you can see the difference so that's the default tons of tiling going on there I just have it then we've got a much better result now you might be asking why don't I just make that the default the reason for that is that out of the box when you build Unreal Engine landscapes they're always going to be a different size and a different scale so depending on the scale of the landscape that you've created different tiling settings will look good so the only way that you can really make sure that you have the right tiling setting is to make sure that you eyeball it and make a custom value for the scale of your terrain now when it comes to macro tiling it's a little less necessary to tweak that one I usually find it it works pretty well off the box because a certain distance it's it's kind of relative to ya relative to the player but if you want to tweak that one as well you can you've got macro tiling right here and you can see how that changes based on the value that I input but I'm just gonna leave that on the default 0.04 so yeah and now you can see that I've got a pretty decent sort of blending terrain there aren't too many there are too many very much tile there's not too much timing going on and what I have actually done is I've changed that setting in the default material instance but what you're going to want to do is you want to you're going to want to build your own version of this material instance so I'm gonna go into this brush if I boot camp mat folder and I'm gonna make a material override now the material override I'm gonna throw I'm gonna basically go into the materials landscape folder and take that pen my landscape that's assigned to this I'm just gonna make a copy of that in that material override folder and then this one I'm then gonna sign directly to my landscape so this is now a basically a slightly modified version of a very slightly modified version of that material instance that we can then use to basically store all of our custom settings so I'm just gonna save that right click Save and yeah now we have the global tiling set to 0.06 which is what we want and we've got now this nice little custom material instance in our mat maps folder so now I think we're in a really great position to sort of start sculpting the terrain and I'm gonna show you some of the sort of sculpting tools and yeah we're gonna see how that goes so the first thing we're gonna do just start sculpting this terrain now that we've got no tile laying you know the textures are kind of a few variations painted there we're gonna go to the landscape tool so modes panel landscape tool if you can't find the modes panel just go up to window and go modes to open the modes tab and you know if I just close that window loads you'll see it open right here and usually what I do is put it right here on the right side just so that I get quite a lot of space and then I have a nice big window here and usually just put the details panel a little bit lower right down here because I don't usually need to see that entire details panel I can kind of scroll that up and scroll it down interesting this is quite a nice layout so yeah so this is the landscape tab I'm gonna go to sculpt and we're just gonna go through all of these options sort of explaining what they do so the very first option right the top is sculpt height data and you can see that as I start to sculpt with the height data sculpting brush it's making these sort of big blobs on the terrain and yeah the brush your file to material does a pretty cool job of kind of making my blobs look not too terrible it's got some sort of details going on and if I can actually start running around on this now since this is all real time and you can see it's blended nicely into this sort of cliff wall look but really you know these mountains aren't exactly impressing anyone there's not too much detail there I can run to the top of this one here and look around so yeah big blobs not exactly what we're looking for most of the time it might be the style of your game if that's what you want then you can create big blobs so what if we want to make these blobs smaller well we've got the brush size parameter right here and we can actually turn that down and if you can see the little as you as you usually as you go off to the side here and and leave your brush somewhere you'll be able to see that brush increase and decrease in size so you can see that happening right now and I've I turn this brush size down you're gonna get a smaller brush now you've got smaller blobs and then even smaller than that really small blobs so now you can see I'm sort of painting in you know more detail and well this is maybe not the most impressive sculpting work I've ever done but you can see how you can start to sort of get somewhere on a sort of small low level of detail we're just using this sculpting brushes to sort of manufacture some nice interesting landscape shapes so yeah and now let's go in again and sort of start running around so yeah same thing again but a bit more detail we've got a few more little variants variations going on in our landscape now so that's really the sculpting brush without any you know bells and whistles you've got a couple more parameters here one is the brush fall-off and if you can see that I'm gonna make my brush size a little bigger so you can really see it but if I move that sculpting brush to the side and forth you can see that it's changing this sort of fall-off it's very much like Photoshop it's changing this sort of alpha fall-off of the brush and you can make it really really sharp so if we make it really with a sharp you can see that it's gonna create a stamp like a sort of you know very hard circle let's get a bit of terrain where there's nothing going on and let's kind of scout stamp that and you can see that now it's created this ridiculously hard edge which you know maybe that is something useful I'm gonna show you later how you can create sort of flatten areas so if these sort of floating islands type things are you know what you're interested in creating you can do that and then again size tool can change the size and this is painting now without any without any fall-off so let's go and run around a little bit on there you can really see the the terrain resolution is really starting to show when you use these very very hard edges because there is not enough resolution in the landscape itself to really support that kind of detail but yeah we can sort of run around and jump around on these big canyons we've just created but they don't look especially amazing the other thing you'll notice is that if you do have cliff walls like this that are super super flat there is no try planar mapping on most auto materials and the reason for that is that it's a very expensive feature so if I explain it so in a little bit what triplane are mapping is it would be if you would take this texture and then instead of projecting it from above you would in fact project it from the side now that's something that most games try to avoid because it's adding a lot more shader complexity to to this shader so if we go to our shade over draw view we can see that you know already we have some we're already in the brown sort of area and we don't want to go much further into that we can actually make that a little bit better by tweaking some settings in our material instance or custom material instance for instance we could disable cover another thing we could do is fill entirely with a a single paint layer that would help a lot with the shade of complexity but you know definitely going to be doing another tutorial yeah so if disable cover you can see that I've now got much much more performance here but of course that does come at the sacrifice of not being able to have a a cover layer which would be the snow the snow layer in this scene I don't have any snow so it's not necessary I'll definitely be doing an optimization tutorial in the future where I talk about you know all the various things that you can do you know to disable and so fix some things so what if we will want to get rid of this stretching here well the best possible way that I would say to get rid of and sort of remove these sort of stretch there sort of stretching is that you would create then mesh you'd use meshes to cover up these sort of vertical slopes or you would sort of smooth out the terrain so I'm going to show you the next tool which is the smooth tool and in all of these tools you'll notice there's a parameter called smooth tool tool strength and we can just kind of tweak that tool strength and we've the rest of them on their default settings you ever want to switch to default just use the little reset to default arrow and then if I just slowly sort of move the Bradys down a bit slowly sort of click there you can see that things start to get a little bit better the moment that the terrain isn't quite vertical which looks more impressive I think the other thing that we can do then is of course slot in a few nice little meshes which is the usual way that you would do this take maybe a one of the meshes from the mesh folder so if you go and brush affine meshes cliffs meshes you will find yet some of these sort of general-purpose cliff meshes that you can use so this one's a nice big Ciroc let's see if we can put this one to good use yeah so something like that always make sure you know if you if you want to make some cool variations just rotate things around and make sure things look a bit different you never want anything to look too similar otherwise you will lose that organic feeling and don't forget serve and don't be afraid sort of pile rocks on top of each other and all that kind of stuff small of the assets are the more there you know the the easier they're gonna be for to sort of hold up you'll be able to sort of get closer to them because you have to worry about the textures not holding up at a close distance so you can have a scale things down by all means do that but yeah you can see how you would start to sort of gradually build a little scene here and this is just putting a bit of time in of course there are other ways you can scatter rocks and we'll be addressing that later which is you know stuff like using the procedural spawning tools for things like cliffs which are also very very handy and obviously you don't want to be doing everything by hand because it's a very slow process yeah so just gonna keep putting a few E's in there until we have them in these aren't actually the best asset this isn't actually the best asset I've got for this kind of thing this is actually just a little rock it's not probably meant to be for cliffs but um yeah it's just what I found in my library if you get brush if I you'll you'll get a bunch of these different assets you know different things that you can use and I'm gonna throw a bunch of those in my tutorial folder later so that I've got access to those just using this one for now because I don't actually have all of the different brush fi projects loaded into the bootcamp project file at the moment but yeah so you can sort of see how you would create kind of convincing cliff walls and sort of cover up that vertical stretching on the terrain and yeah that's that's generally how it's done in most games if you if you look at the terrain it's it's usually not using that many sort of fancy shader tricks it's usually a combination of you know nice clean geometry not too much verticality on the actual terrain itself usually the terrain is quite smooth and then and then just cover it up by you know anything that needs to be an overhang that's the great thing about about meshes as well as this can actually be an overhang here you couldn't do that if it was just terrain you know now it looks way more interesting that we can have this sort of looming overhanging cliff you know imagine how crazy that must be if you're a player you're running through and you see this big overhanging scary looming cliff and that only gets better when you have stuff like fog and you know all of the sort of visual effects adding to you know sort of epic scene like this so yeah that's just a very quick demonstration of these sort of yeah if you just decide to paint these kind of crazy islands with no fall-off I'm just gonna delete all of this that I've done now just gonna delete all of these little cliffs that I've made and we'll start from scratch again I think flatten tool I'll go over this one in a second I just want to reset reset go back to the drawing board okay delete this straight rock so where did we get - so we've got through the sculpting tool where we go to the brush effect the brush fall off so yeah brush fall off that's how you get that sort of very hard edge like that but you know that's up to you I think a little bit of an edge is always better and then to use meshes is a good way to kind of cover up the vertical stretching on the terrain that's how I do it and yeah let's see now you've also got this parameter used clay brush now this is a very it's slightly more advanced option I think it's actually affecting the way that the brush additively sculpts the terrain so it's the sort of in Photoshop I think it's more equivalent to sort of additive blend if that makes any sense to you if you come in from so a digital painting background but really you know I can try and describe it and use my words but the best way is just to see what it does and then you will hopefully understand what's what using clay brush does for it to really work and be more sort of obvious we need to actually use an alpha brush to do that we need to go to make sure in the sculpt mode it's got tool and instead of circle I'm gonna choose alpha now a bunch of different options here but alpha I'm gonna go over first something it's the most important and now I've selected alpha you'll see that there's actually a little menu here you got the gun tool strength and all that stuff but right here we've got something called brush settings and in in mine I've already got a texture that's added there and this texture is actually if I hit a little magnifying glass so yeah you can see that I've actually got the brush if i erosion alpha brush texture applied if i hit a little add paper magnifying glass you can see that's because I've got a few sort of installed brush if I pax so if you come to brush if I alpha brushes folder you'll be able to find all of the different alpha brushes for the packs now there's a bit of confusion about this because there is one pack that I sell which does not include an alpha brush so I'm just gonna come over here and make this a bit bigger so this is actual website that we double up if I do i oh you can actually buy the packs through unreal engine marketplace but I like to just put you know nice website here that everyone can kind of understand what the products all about and that's these are few of the scenes from the various packs see I sculpt generate play that's what I'll be showing a bit in this video just how easy it is to you know create little landscapes and then run around on them but yeah if you come down to get brush refine now and hit visit the store and here you can see all of the different brush fight packs that are currently available now if you buy almost any of these packs you're gonna get alpha brushes included the only alpha brush the only packs that do not include alpha brushes are the environment shaders pack which is the cheapest pack so quite a lot of you guys have that it was given away for free and the countryroads pack and the natural roads pack yeah yeah so if you have country roads back natural Road pack or environment shaders back unfortunately those do not come with alpha brushes so if you would like the Alpha brushes be sure to purchase one of the other packs they sort of bio impacts that include them you know so if we come to the Arctic pack this one was actually given away for free this one actually says right here includes four unique Arctic terrain brushes as pictured above and then if you scroll up and you actually go to the screenshots you can see right here these are actually 3d renders of those alpha brushes and the interesting thing is that all of the alpha brushes in brush if I come with both 3d meshes like these whether the sort of distant backgrounds as well as actual alpha brushes for use in the sculpting tools right here so you can actually see this is the one for Arctic this file right here brush if I Arctic a that means alpha and if I drag and drop that over into my texture slot just got to give it a second will usually has to compile some stuff because 8k texture is a very very high resolution and you know quite a lot of people ask me you know why do I charge so much for you know for these brushes and and you know sort of trying to figure out like what makes these sort of packs worth the money and that's really because these brushes they take a lot of time and effort to generate you know they aren't that simple to sort of produce they're definitely not the kind of thing that usually find on the marketplace that sort of ready-made you know they've got an example scene that's already out of the box looking good with all the lighting you get all the shaders you get all the stuff with it in the box it's all set up for you it's re out of the box it's all set up for you and you know the brushes don't just come as meshes they also come as sculpting brushes for the the terrain tool and I'll show you the sort of power of those right now once we've dragged across the brush into the texture slot we've then got a few other options here the first option is texture Channel this is very important because you'll notice that we've only got one file here but like I said before there are actually four brushes to access those four brushes they are actually in the textured channels of that file so you don't just get one brush you're actually getting four brushes in that file and you can switch between red green you can see here the image updating blue and alpha so these different texture channels change the image that is being brushed down basically now the brush size is just the same as the other function so I'm just making this a little bigger so we can really see the brush and the sort of effect that it has and if we start painting straightaway if I set the tool strength quite high like five or something and we click you can see that something is happening it's definitely making an effect but you've got this kind of weird thing where it's sort of cumulatively yeahit's of cumulatively adding it maybe isn't very useful because it's gonna bill it's gonna go like that and just whoa you know it's it's you don't really have much control over unless you really just click once a better mode is to sort of use this clay brush mode and then just click once and then you'll get a much more sort of accurate result so just click I made this tool strength a little higher but now you can see that we're actually getting tons and tons and tons of little details in just one click you know I didn't have to really do anything for it to generate all that detail we can also rotate the brush around using the texture rotation function here it's usually good if we just go over here a little bit we can see that as I rotate that around that big square is moving and then click and there we go so now we can already once we've clicked down like that we can already start to run around on our newly sculpted terrain which i think is really cool because it's a it's a very fast way to generate huge amounts of terrain and landscapes you know without having to do very much work at all obviously there are some issues with this there is still a bit of blockiness going on in the landscape but i'll teach you how to sort of deal with that later but generally it's really cool to have all these extra details like this little I don't know what you'd call it like a little Bluff here you know it can really inspire you with your level design you know to add extra features to your levels that you maybe wouldn't necessarily have thought of you know like imagine if you'd had to go and sort of sculpt every little a little Bluff here and every little Ridge every little you know you would you would take hours and hours and hours and and you maybe wouldn't be able to get such a natural result you know something like this but let's try a different sculpting brush but a switch from red to green I'm just gonna rotate that around a bit and yeah same thing just click see yeah I think that looks pretty cool I'm just gonna try a different area so yeah same thing again you know you can just go around your entire map and you know tweak your tools strength a little bit click oh I didn't really do very much maybe increase it a little bit more click oh wow that looks good and then you know if you if you like the look of something you can keep it if you don't like it control Zed alter the tool strength a bit tweaked a bit the rotation click and you know you can see how you start to gradually get interesting landscapes out of this tool and this is all done without any need to go into a third-party application like world crater now this is a very very very small you know oval credit world machine now that's not to say those those aren't super useful programs I've actually got a video called make a level in one hour that uses world crater and it's using this technique in combination with will crater to build you know a nice big island terrain but you can see how this is really cool because it lets you sort of edit and sculpt in real time and you know kind of get results right then and there that you know on a sort of smaller scale you know so maybe used will creator a world machine to build these sort of large amounts but now you're really thinking about the sort of canyons and and the sort of corridors of the level the you know the places where the player is actually gonna be walking around and you want to really build some detail in so you've got all of these different options you know you can you can create some large you know hills and mountains and things in the game in the engine without having to go back to world crater and completely overhaul and change everything it's where it's much harder to to make these sort of little little changes and then of course you know you can use you know in addition to this then you can go back to the normal sculpting tools and then if you really want to make microscopic changes you've then got the normal sculpting tools that you can now go in there and really modify my school strength is very high might turn off clay brush install strength but yeah just there you can go in and now I've actually got complete control over all the little details all of the aspects of the terrain I can I can model around a bit sculpt around a bit you know and make some some very very detailed areas this comes in handy as well with the flatten tool which is gonna be one of the next things I'm gonna show you but first I'm gonna teach you how to use the smoothing tool because it's next on a list and the reason why I'm gonna teach how to use this moving tool is because this terrain looks really cool and detailed from a distance but when you get very close you start to notice that there are some big sort of problems with the actual geometry it's all a little bit it's all a little bit blocky so what I'm gonna do I'm gonna go to the smooth tool there are a bunch of different options here you've got again tool strength which I'm gonna set really really far down so I don't want to do very much to this and then there's a few options for it's called filter Colonel radius but this I would sort of treat this as you know whether it's a craft or that defines whether or not you want to smooth out bigger details or whether you will sort of smooth out smaller details so in this case we actually don't want to smooth out the big details we want to smooth out smaller details so we've got actually a sort of between one and seven this slider goes between one and seven one being the one that smooths out and with small details seven being the one that screws out the big details so if we moved up to 7 and then sculpt we'll be able to see that it's sort of killing I'm gonna set the size and fall-off back to the default it's gonna start to kill some of the big details whoa I've lost all my sculpting amazing detail there so that's not good control-z but then if I go down to one hey you can see that I'm I've still maintained some of the little you know bluffs and ridges and things like that so maybe I don't necessarily want it to be as smooth as that but so let's just River but yeah you can see that there's definitely a good a good it's a good thing to basically turn that down the other thing you can do is enable detail smooth this is a similar parameter to the filter Colonel radius but even more detail so larger detailed smoothing values remove more details while smaller values preserve more details so if we go we want has to be lower because we want to preserve more details and we're gonna enable detail smooth and then preserve and then we're just going to click and you can see that now it's even more details that are being preserved but the overall terrain is now looking so much more smooth you can really see that in the wireframe and as I've kind of tweaked it which i think is really cool so what I'm gonna do I'm gonna keep the tool strength at one I'm gonna set the brush size though to something ridiculously huge so it covers my entire map and then I'm just gonna click maybe once okay it's a little bit smoother and then again a little bit smoother again and this is affecting the entire map now so I think three times let's have a look around we can inspect areas and just see do we see any of that horrible blockiness anymore okay so now we have a nice sort of smooth terrain we've got you know lots of cool little details going on I've got the sort of grass appearing on the on the paint layer as you know automatically and all of the now all of the others of sharp edges are sort of smoothed out now I'm just kind of putting the camera really close to the ground so I can really look at the sharp edges but they're definitely not as bad as they were before not as noticeable and that looks great so yeah that's the smoothing tool that's how you can use that to you know sort of generate yeah you can use the sculpting tool to generate alpha you know use the alpha brush to sort of generate terrains really fast and then you can use this smoothing tool to make sure that those are sort of ready for the player to run around with you know to run around on you know without them sort of becoming too sort of lumpy and and low res I say that but there's a bit here that's a bit too spiky if you ever get do you know if you ever do get a sort of spiky bit you can just go in and take the brush size down way down and then just click a few times just move it out some bits naturally are a bit spiky and you know worst case scenario if you found like a bit that you really want to keep you can supplement it with geometry so you know if you feel like that bits a bit too spiky and you really want to add a bit more detail there that looks good and not just you know a bit of terrain or something yeah why not go into your content browser and pull out a nice little asset that you can use to kind of supplement that that little piece of terrain you know so this might be the perfect temple but something like that where now we've got something that really adds a little bit of real detail and you know you can go crazy with this like every single part of your level you need to take and find assets and then you know use them to build interesting shapes interesting designs to supplement your mountains and [Music] if we can do that here just gonna rotate this around then yeah and this is all just the case of slotting assets into into the mountains so now you can see that we've got much more realistic looking mouths in there or you know a little Ridge it looks like something that you know it could could be from a game rather than just a blob of terrain and the procedural tools help a lot with this which I'll definitely be going over in a future video but yeah you can see how placing by hand as always do you really want that amazing detail that's the best way to do it just place by hand and had a bit of supplemental detail that way okay so next tool on the agenda we go back to the landscape and we're going to go to the flatten tool so sculpt smooth next one Lattin so flatten tool is essentially a way of flattening your terrain so we've got a few options here at the moment this little thing ticked here called right at the top called flattened targets so I'm gonna disable that and we're going to show you what it does without that we're gonna refer all these to the basic values now if I click whoa its flattened out the terrain where I've clicked and it's the same thing if I click here now it's flattened out there so that's really what this does it sort of flattens out at different height at the height that you click at it makes a little flattened area and of course you can change the brush size as usual and we can build these sort of little platforms that way and you know these could be well you know if you imagine whatever game you're building it could be a platforming game you can just run in here and let's show that so whoo we're jumping down that have build platforms all the way down to the bottom and well if that's the kind of game you making it's a great tool for for that but yeah same thing as before with the stretched terrain used you know use meshes to cover that up or use your smoothing tool to just quickly I've got all of the settings we had before those but yeah use the smoothing tool to you know kind of smooth out a little bit that those super vertical walls if those are an eyesore for you or just cover them up with meshes and so on and so forth and you know if you do really need try planar mapping it is something that is possible in Unreal Engine it's just quite a bit more expensive so bear that in mind brush if I is very flexible you know it's a shader in his but you need he shoot infrastructure of Unreal Engine so if you do want to build your own features in on top of this you definitely can and it's actually quite you know it's set up very logically with material functions for all the different sort of purposes you know there are there's no func trunks and functions where all the layers are sort of blended together there are functions for a tessellation object blending tiling and distance all of that stuff is sort of separated out into very clean logical material functions and and then a sort of main landscape material as well that you know has quite a lot of information in there it's quite a love it is commented as well and I do have you know quite a few videos on here on YouTube sort of explaining some of the various things and that's also the purpose of this brush Rifai bootcamp series is to kind of go over and show you guys you know behind the scenes how you can go in and and make these sort of changes but yeah in this tutorial I just want to focus one percent on landscape sculpting because it's a very big topic and there's a lot to it so yeah so those that's the flatten tool and of course you can take this to the next level we go back to flatten you can take this to the next level instead of basically flattening to the point that you are selecting you can actually pick a custom target so here we're going to use the eyedropper with little dropper right here and we're going to pick a point of the terrain that we want to sculpt to so let's just choose the very highest point here and say we want to make a platformer well let's choose here and then we'll so you want to make a platformer that the player could jump to nope just usually it's better to sort of sculpt fruit from downward because otherwise you you might you might accidentally sort of there's this problem that when you start sculpting it kind of sculpts forward like this and then you end up with something like that that's not really what you want so usually better to subscribe or if you want to really get these kind of nice platforms or what you could do is you could change your tools tank strengths to just be insanely high and then and then you'll get something like that you know yeah so now these are sort of you can see that every single time it's so sculpting and flattening to this exact height which is really useful for creating platforms I mean it's not sure how good-looking these are but you know you can go in and sort of supplement these with geometry and you know Here I am just playing it my character but if I gonna make this jump oh I can well so yeah so automatically oh I'm not gonna make it oh no I didn't make it go carried away there but yeah so it's a great thing that you can just you know preview in real time and just sort of yeah find you know some nice you know some nice ways you know imagine this actually could look much cool or if if you would do something like you know this maybe like where it starts to let's pick and I drop about a third of the way down and make one I like that and then same thing we drop it a little bit further down than that and then like this like this and you see what we're doing now we're just creating some spiral sort of spiraling thing going on now I definitely can't make these jumps but uh oh boy but yeah let's just see how it goes see if we can get all the way to the end oh my god I jumped too far and I didn't I'm okay this is the beauty of level design in real time though is that you can really oh wow I might actually make this look at these skills guys so yeah I'm actually playing this little mini game that I have created now with the just the terrain okay and that's yeah that's the really cool thing about the flatten tool it's it's very useful for that kind of thing and you know you could imagine then you know if this is rapid prototyping you prototype something like that and you're like oh cool but then you could go in later and you could replace this with you know you could really dress these up you can go in and add geometry to the side just like we did earlier we could make these look pretty basically but yeah it's it's a super useful function now let's see sir anything else he is worth going over this there's also this thing slope flatten and this is basically where it will flatten to an angle so we turn off flat target let's find an angle that we want to flatten to so yeah here you can see that this is sort of ramp and you see what it's done it's actually made a flat surface it's making a flat surface on that angle where we first clicked and yeah same thing here see I've clicked on a lesser angle so now it's made a flat angle there but if we go on a really hard angle whoo no it's gonna make that really hard flat angle so it's quite an interesting one if you've already got a pre-existing slope and you want to really flatten it out more can be quite useful but yeah with great power comes great responsibility so if you you know if you don't use that tool correctly you can get some really weird results I don't use it that often that's a bit of an issue one now another way that you can create these sort of ramps and stuff is by actually using the ramp tool so that was the use for slope flatten but instead of flatten tool let's go to the list again and we'll go to the next tool which is the ramp tool so the ramp tool is a really great way that you can sort of add ramps up and down different surfaces so yeah sometimes you'll get this sort of floating geometry if that ever happens to you just save your level and reload or restart the editor and that will sort of recalculate so now you can see it sort of recalculated all of the procedural stuff so just save and reload the level that is something that I get asked all the time it's a super super common issue that sometimes people will have sort of floating foliage in them write me an email so if that is you don't worry you're not alone and I've had many of those emails in the past so yeah back to the ramp tool let's go back to landscape wrap tool and the first thing I'm gonna do is just going to click and you can see it's made a sort of entity now and that's something we can actually drag around with the gizmo and then the next thing I do is click again and that sort of made a second part and what we've got here is a bit of a sort of spline that's forming so the more I click well this one if I click now it will place the second one so yeah click again and you'll have this sort of second [Music] entity here so what happens if I then click add ramp you can see it sort of created this flat area now now the great thing about this tool is it's really something that can be used to create sort of roads and pathways I'm just gonna undo that one so I'm gonna click at the top and I'm gonna click again here but this time going to turn down this ramp width and as you turn the ramp whip you can see that it's sort of changing the you know if you sort of think about this is a road sort of changing the width and the fall-off of this road so click add ramp and then we can start to sort of you know use this you know even further which is that we can click on if you click on one of the entities and then you click around you're able to move that so I'm going to click there then I'm going to click the second entity I'm gonna move it down here and then I'm gonna click Add Ram and now we've got a nice little ramp that we are able to go up and then you have same thing again I'm gonna move that one to there move the second one to here I'm gonna move the first one to here and you can see what I'm doing I'm sort of creating a little road down the mountain all the way to the bottom and we can go and run in and test that now and we're running up our newly created Road same things before if you ever get any floating stuff like that just wrong button just save the level reload level and nine times out of 10 everything all get fixed up but yeah so I can just go in now and and use the ramp that I just created and run around on it now of course I think that's a bit of a bit too narrow but ramp so probably it would have been better to make that a little bit bigger but yeah that that's the essentials of the sort of ramp tool there's not really much to that tool it's really just a case of clicking one area clicking one point and another point setting the ramp with setting the ramp sort of side fall-off and then hitting add ramp and there you'll get a nice nice pretty ramp all the way up and down maybe I can use it to make a way off of here let's see here a little ramp so that I can run up here hey that's cool maybe I can run up there I don't know if I made it I don't if I made it too steep oh no no you can run up that's cool so now we have a way up here and I can now jump oh I'm too far on that one I can now jump up here and then kind of play this failed completely but I did it before you saw me I did it before you know don't judge and yeah so I can now run around like a little kid continually jumping on these like it's some sort of playground yeah so yeah you can really see how you can kind of well you can really see how you can calculate some little gameplay elements and and stuff in addition to a sort of nice pretty terrain these tools are also really really useful for that and yeah so what else is there there's also this erosion tool which is quite an interesting one because this one will actually sort of add some detail to your sort of quite boring terrain so there's no areas of the training that you want to add a little bit more detail to you like this area we've kind of just flattened out these blocks and you know imagine that I actually want to make that look a bit more like you know this sort of nicely eroded area here well there is also the erosion tool so let's change the brush size a little bit and let's see if we can get some interesting erosion going so I'm gonna tweak the settings here you can see it's starting to add a little bit of extra detail so what this does I think is really just like takes takes the information that's already there and kind of enhances it it manipulates it it moves up and down and kind of adds noise to it the less the less you have the noise scale the more sort of bumpy it's gonna be but you don't want to go to too low with that so noise scale is probably one of the main functions here but yeah with this tool I would say yeah really just read the labels play around with the settings it's not an exact science it's not always gonna look good a certain setting you're gonna have to figure out which settings are right for your terrain but yeah it's possible to get some good results with this I think that it's never gonna look quite as realistic as you know something that's come from a digital elevation model image but if a pinch you know if you if you just want to add some detail really quickly the noise tool is fantastic for that and the brush if I Alton material will always you know find a way of kind of making it look okay so yeah now we have a slightly more noisy eroded area that's not just completely flat there so let's do the same thing here can't go too crazy with it but [Music] you just don't want it to smooth out too much that's the problem it can get it can be very tricky to to figure out this one well that's a little bit of a better setting the problem is it does sometimes distort what you already have unless I mean it probably you could find more precise settings but just sort of distort what you already have so bear that in mind and just go very close you know very carefully with it not to kind of ruin your your flat areas or your ramps and any of that stuff but yeah so that's the erosion tool there's also hidrogen very similar sort of tool this will basically yeah add sort of more like I guess rain based erosion so like here if I come down from this it's gonna give you sort of like in sets in the terrain which are really cool so I think on some level it's doing some sort of yeah it's got some sort of erosion algorithm to it but the problem is it's just a bit it's a bit you know tricky to sort of to know what its gonna do until it started so really just got to be like yeah just got to be careful when you paint it down that you don't go with some crazy high settings or something like that and that you you know you're just kind of very carefully sculpted a sometimes really like the shapes that it comes up with like these little canyons and insects I think the the main problem with it is just that it's it can be you know very random so you kind of get what you've given sometimes you'll get areas that are you know kind of giving you really cool detail results and then other times you'll kind of paint in merrier and and you won't really get much you know like if I paint there not much is going on here not much is going on but it's taking but here you know it's taking some sort of overlay or pattern and instead of applying that everywhere so yeah it's definitely an interesting tool and then of course there's a so general generic noise tool you can change the scale missile this will give you some noise I think that's just using some sort of Voronoi noise effect pretty much just like the clouds or whatever in Photoshop but that can be a cool is also a really cool way of adding detail you know if you if you know how to paint noise in the right way the right areas you can get some details but you know I always would say that the better solution is to stick as closely as possible to real digital elevation model data that uses you know there's just something about this mountain here that looks more real because it's got these sort of real erosion lines from nature and that's the real advantage of the alpha sculpting brushes the next tool I like to talk about is the visibility tool this is actually used for caves so it's actually used for sort of making holes in the terrain so let's get a patch of ground here like this one and what you can actually do is you can actually paint a hole directly in the terrain it has to do some stuff with the fader but yeah Wow there we go we have a hole in the Train now of course when people first make a hole in the train just like this the first thing they asked me is hey yo the it's great I've got a hole in my train but why is all of this foliage here and how do I get rid of it so yeah to get rid of the foliage it's actually really simple just go to the paint materials layer and you just go into scroll right down to the bottom there's a paint layer called remove procedural if it doesn't have a paint layer layer info already make a new one and this is very very important do not create a weight blended layer for this material for this paint layer create a non weight blended layer and the reason that is is that we don't want this to effect colors or shading in any way they make a new folder called lair info and that's a little lair info file and that's a no wait blend layer info very very important no wait blend and that means that as I paint down it's actually hooked up to the Shaya so it's actually removing you can see it's removing all of the procedural stuff and leaving this sort of hole and train completely clear so you know if you see all of those flowers that rock and everything I click on that that's gone and if I hold shift so it's it's actually just a paint layer just like any of the others you know if you were painting down forest here or grass here it would be the exact same thing it's just it is doing the same exact thing before removing foliage yeah and it's super important to use the no wait blend now I'm gonna do this by mistake or you know by on purpose I'm gonna do it wrong I'm gonna delete this so just show you the issue that you get when you use a weight blended layer on this layer it's paint layer so if I click and make a new one and I use weight blended layer make a new layer info and save it and now I paint ooh look at this I've managed to create myself a massively black puddle of doom it's uh and that's that's happening because it's that that layer is never supposed to affect the visuals that's what it looks quite quite a cool effect actually it's sort of like a complete perfect mirror and that's actually using of course like the rough is because the roughness is set to 100% I think it's black but you can see the sort of like it's affecting the different color Johnson's black color there and the roughness is completely black and then yeah so it's it's not a good look so yeah if you if you definitely if you want to make sure that you don't have that issue you just want it removing the foliage make sure that you use non weight blended layer and then that will give you yeah I will sort out that issue so now you have a hole in the terrain and of course you know once you've got the hold on the train well the player can fall through it or most of the time what you'll be wanting to do is create some sort of a cave or I'm gonna use my special rock again my lucky this is my lucky Rock for this tutorial because I've used it like 20 times now but yeah let's see what happens if we try and build a cave here hmm I mean the first thing I would do is I'd stop by sort of you know I don't make many caves or I should make more caves in these videos I'll probably do a dedicated cave tutorial at some point or something like that I did do some work back in the day and CryEngine that was trying to emulate this sort of glowworm caves in New Zealand let's see if I can find it it was kind of a cool one this is some of my old work from back in the day with CryEngine and I actually made this into a sort of little music video and stuff with these little light sort of coming down in the cave and then and then the cave actually had this sort of glow worms that you usually get in in these sort of New Zealand cave systems and the way this was made was it was actually just like this exact same which was it using the exact same technique just lots and lots of little in this case they were mega scans rocks but you had lots and lots of little rocks just all peppering the side and then I'd covered that in sort of these nicely glowing yeah these sort of glowing emissive glow worms and they sort of move around a little bit and I think it'd look really cool with the bow Kerr effect and yeah so this was so this is what you can do in real time if you you know just spend a long time placing rocks in the cave so hopefully I'll be able to get around to doing something like that and unreal at one point but yeah this was actually done in CryEngine but you know very similar workflows so yeah let's get back to it so I'm gonna just stop by yeah going around the entrance make a few yeah don't be afraid to don't be afraid to pelea things up that it is all possible as long as you keep the number of objects down or you know within certain limits you can see here actually there's one little slightly interesting issue you can see that it's saying preview shadows preview shadows we want to get rid of that go to show go to visualize and then go to preview shadows indicator and disable that I don't know if can fit in this cave [Music] yeah really that's how you build caves and sort of use the visibility tool we've got all this map to explore so why don't we go crazy let our hair down and find a new area migrate so yeah next step we've got the region tools and there are so three different tools to this the first thing I want to understand is actually the copy and paste tool and you can bring up the copy paste so you can see it brings up a sort of gizmo which you can move around just like any other object in unreal and if we can put this gizmo over the top of a sort of slab of terrain we can even see you know you can see where it clips in with the terrain so you can see what's so getting copied and we're gonna go copy data to gizmo and you can see this you can give it a nice visualization of that data and if we now move that gizmo across now you can see that we've actually sort of transplanted that area of the terrain across and and then it's just a case of basically basically stamping down with the brush you know where we want to copy that data so let's do that now as I kind of click you can see it's wherever I sculpt is taking the data underneath it as [Music] see it see it's an exact copy so it's a really useful for like the big year the tops of mountains or if there's a certain Ridge that you really like so so yeah I really like this Ridge here this little bit of a Ridge there I can copy the data there and then say ever want to bring that Ridge all the way over to the other side of the map and put the same ridge somewhere there that's the exact same bridge and now I paint and there we go now I have that Ridge probably you'd have to do some cleanup around but yeah it's the same exact Ridge and yeah so it's quite a useful tool of course you know it could be that there's a more specific thing for it so for instance over here where we have a sort of little minigame going on maybe this is a minigame that we like over here but we also would like to have that same minigame at a different part of the map and we don't want to have to redo all that work you know we just want to find a way of copying our minigame from one place to another so let's put the little game here change the height there a little bit and then yeah we're just gonna paste in the game all right there we go now we've got that exact same game and I can play it again but on a different part of the map [Music] that's crazy it's difficult I've made it even more difficult because I think it didn't get all of the accuracy so there's one thing you might want to know is that it's not gonna take all of the accuracy of the across in the data so it might be a little bit less accurate I move that back on its try and just like really really really really really really really really make sure it gets all of the strength of that stuff but still I think it won't be a hundred percent accurate to the exact thing we had before so just be warned about that it's just a sort of limitation of that copying the data tool I'm not very good at that but yeah it's a very useful feature so now we've got two little games on our on our map that we didn't have to do twice same exact game two different places see a very useful tool now there's also yeah a bunch of other different settings for this or basically supplemental tools one is the serve region tool this means that you can sort of yeah select a certain area and say like I only want that to get copied or not copied you know whichever you want and yeah so now now if we actually go to the copy and paste tool we're really really really really really really really really really stumped at it you can see that it's only really stamping the let's do it in a new place because it's even more obvious it's only gonna be stamping in to change this so that it's only gonna stamp it here for instance maybe here so we only want that area that's in the sort of brush the mask to get affected so let's do that and if we stamp it as hard as we like hard as we like we go crazy with the stamping but only the area in that mask has been affected by it so it's very useful if you just want you know to only affect within whatever you paint down in that region so you can see there that mask nicely masked out the area that I was stamping in so that could be very useful of course these were sort of very very general purpose tools so I don't know exactly what you're gonna be using them for it's just good to know that that is there in case you need it and then of course the other one is mirroring the entire terrain now this I don't really use very often at all but yeah it basically lets you decide where you're gonna have a sort of center point and then you can apply the complete mirror operation to the entire landscape so I mean I don't know exactly when you'll be using that but it is possible to do that so then we have two or four sets four sets of stone circles on a landscape now which is kind of nifty but yeah that's there if you want you can also change of course all the different symmetry settings x 2y y 2y y plus 2y minus you can rotate [Music] so now it's actually a rotation it's not a mirror but yeah and there's this moving with which I presume is the sort of width that it smooths across the middle but yeah and and of course you can change the point there with X&Y or just X actually yeah you can change the point with this little handle or in the tool itself right there so yeah that's a basic overview of all of the sort of basic Unreal Engine landscape sculpting tools yeah so pretty much the only other thing that I think is really important that you know about is the landmass plug-in so landmass is newly introduced a newly introduced feature in 4.24 which is an experimental set of landscape sculpting tools so I think the first thing that you should probably do is start to get really really comfortable with the tools that are in here first but be aware that there are sort of these newer procedural tools on the horizon that will be able to work with this exact terrain system so if we go up to edit and then plugins and we search for landmass and hit enable it will say plug-in land landmass is a beta version and might be unstable or removed without notice please use with caution are you sure you want to enable the plug-in so now take this warning with great severity because if you do start to use these tools and they at some point in the future become outdated and deprecated and replaced with something else that's built into the engine we don't really know at this stage what epic games are gonna do with this and you know probably they don't know either this is sort of just like very soaked with experimental this is a sort of very experimental new feature that they're adding to the engine which shows a great deal of promise it's really really cool it's a great sort of procedural way of manipulating landscapes and should work great with with things like an auto material so I'm looking forward to it but yeah be very very cautious that if you're going to enable this plug-in that you you know really know that you know it could be that in the future that's not something you'll be able to use well you know that epic will actually build it directly into the engine rather than by using a sort of plug-in but by all means go in there and try out land mass there's a video from epic an hour long sort of overview of land mass where the guys sort of you know explain all of the you know different applications for it and you know how it's going to work with world composition you know in order to create bigger levels and you know to be able to sort of have a sort of more next-generation approach to sculpt in the landscape and this includes things like paintable landscape layers so you know how i'm creating my terrain here and I'm making these sort of changes to the terrain well the big issue with this is that it's actually a destructive workflow so you know if I want to go back to the previous opera you know to to any of my previous operations whether it was wetting down and alpha sculpting brush that I was stamping down or copying this sort of data here you know there's no way that I can actually go back and sort of undo one of those things you know if I go to my I undo history it will you know either be wiped but eventually you know when I say even reload the editor or whatever but there'll be no way that I can kind of go and say like oh remember that point where I I sculpted down this brush here imagine if I could go back now and I could go to that layer and I could just change it a little bit that's the power of of landmass and sort of paint layers so it's gonna be really interesting you know to sort of see what Epic Games can do with that and if they can build that sort of functionality into the engine and make social landscape sculpting a little bit more like layers in Photoshop or something like that and I think that's going to be something that in the future is gonna be a super powerful workflow change so yeah super excited about landmass definitely go and check it out I'll leave a link in description below so you can watch the full landmass overview video and thing that will make a nice sort of addition to this video but yeah the tools that I've gone over in this video are all things that are built into Unreal Engine natively right now you can go and download brusha file you can download unreal you can yeah you can basically start sculpting and using these tools to build games right now so yeah a lot of time I do get people sort of talking to me about the experimental stuff and sort of asking you know when I'm gonna support that or this and you know a lot of the time the answer is I'm very very very careful about the experimental stuff that I support because at the moment I'd rather just stick to supporting what is natively built into Unreal Engine and what people can actually use to build games and that's just to you know to be very very cautious that you know if epic in the future do decide you know they're not going to use a feature or they're going to deprecated something that my entire infrastructure for brush if I you know the auto material all the levels all of the lighting all of the stuff that you get with it is not somehow tied to some experimental feature that could just disappear one version to the next so I just do you know I do try and build everything solidly on the default platform that epic if released so yeah I hope you guys really enjoyed this tutorial where I just went over you know all the different landscaping features obviously to kind of cover these sort of topics in this comprehensive way it takes a little bit of time takes a bit of research and you know I try I try to make these videos as comprehensive as possible so I hope you guys appreciate that and if this video is helpful to you please like the video subscribe to the channel visit WWF I - IO /root camp for more videos like this and yeah I hope you guys have a fantastic day I'm just gonna finish up by trying to jump on these things again and see if I can get all the way down ooh see I should do this kind of stuff more often you know just weird little gameplay oh my god I'm terrible at this that's also a great thing you can test out your levels with you know first person third person driving simulations airplane simulations and so on whoo-hoo I made it and yeah it's really fun just be able to sort of you know alter everything in real time and then and just see the awesome results of your level write that in there so thanks guys it's been great Cheers bye bye

Channel: Joe Garth

Views: 88,813

Keywords: ue4, epic games, ue4 master materials, game development tutorial, texture used in ue4, ue4 shader, ue4 materials, unreal 4 master materials, materials in ue4, 3d game tutorials, game dev, painting tutorial, ue4 prop materials, material, ue4 tutorial series, videogames, photorealism, photoreal, 2019, best, graphics, landscape, automaterial, sculpting, brushify, environment, snow, desert, grass, mountains, tessellation, polygons, detail, terrain, unreal engine level design, landscapes, 3d scans

Id: MYqvBvR5LBQ

Length: 79min 24sec (4764 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 31 2020