Brushify - Build a level in 1 hour with World Creator

hey guys Joe goth here creator of Russia fight Ohio I wanted to change up the format a little bit this time to kind of show you guys a little bit more of my workflow and make sure that you guys can kind of follow it step by step so that you can see my clicking you know exactly what I'm what buttons I'm clicking exactly what I'm doing all the way through this sort of hour-long video and yeah I really want to show the process of bringing a height map from well creator into Unreal Engine and sort of using the brush apply tools to help with that process so like the auto material and you know some of the assets that modular assets that I sell with the brush type acts so if you like this kind of content don't forget to subscribe hit the subscribe button below and check out brush if I on the Unreal Engine marketplace and yeah enjoy the video Cheers hey guys so I'm Joe goth and in this tutorial I just want to cover the basics of getting a height map from world creator into Unreal Engine 4 so the very first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to start off in Unreal Engine 4 with one of my example scenes and this is this is the multi biome landscape scene and it comes with the brush if I environment shaders pack this is the pack that this one comes with I think you can get this one is about 10 euros so if you don't have this already this is basically a pack that comes with a landscape auto material and a few additional assets and stuff to kind of help you get set up with landscapes in Unreal Engine 4 so it comes with a pretty sophisticated shader that will so you help sort of help you get started with landscapes in unreal and it will help you with the automatic texturing of terrain and stuff like that so that's something I definitely recommend something similar to that if you're going to be following this tutorial of course you can use other landscape auto materials as well that's just the one that I've created and the one that I recommend so so very first things first is we're just going to start by taking this scene and I'm just gonna save a copy of it so I'm just going to go to file save current as I made a folder here willed creator example I'm just gonna name this will create a example and this will just save the new version of the map which will be one that we can now work in so yeah so now I have this new version first thing we'll do is I'm just going to delete this background set of mountains because we don't need those let's just strip this down to the basics so we've just got a sky dome a few different controls for the lighting and atmosphere I've got some camera actors here I'm just going to little heat because we don't need those and what else oh and the landscape there is a couple of procedural foliage volumes but we might need to use those later those use force of generating rock so I'll go over that in a bit and yeah and then you've got the main landscape so really not very much in the level here and you can see that this is all just a very kind of basic starting point okay so the next step is going to be bringing a height map in and getting it onto this landscape entity that we have here and unreal so yeah the program I'm going to be using in this tutorial is going to be world creator so will creator is yeah basically a program that lets you generate height Maps very very rapidly in real time on the GPU which is amazing because it means you don't have to do any sort of baking processors that you know take a long time I'm gonna make a very very basic example the first thing I usually like to do and we'll create start off is just adjust the noise height range so if you go to the top here and you go to this first it kind of works in a very kind of ABC kind of way similar to unreal where the first thing you work is the surface then you texture it then you add objects and you know there are some and post effects and you know it's basically a very kind of one two three four kind of cycle so the very very base of it is the surface based parameters and this is what we're seeing right here if we can kind of kind of change those you can see that we're adjusting the kind of noise on the overall terrain so this noise hype range is basically the amount of kind of general repeating noise pattern that you get on the terrain so I'm gonna reduce that down so it's there a little bit but it's almost almost zero you can adjust the strength of that too and of course you can go too far with it but you know just a little bit of it can give some nice random detail and then the next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to the custom base shape and edit the shape here we want to make something that's sort of like an island or something that's a sort of yeah something that sort of an island you might notice here that there aren't enough of these to really make interesting shapes you know you can only just do like that kind of thing or like that and that you know it's not gonna be really interesting so to fix that what we're gonna do is I'm going to change the terrain width and length to 4096 and then hit edit shape again and now you can see there are more of these of course you can go even higher you could change the the setting to a 192 and then you'll get a massive massive Turing here so this will give you way more options these are almost like pixels you know that you can kind of lift up and yeah this is really it can give you some cool control because you can kind of go in and lift up parts of this and then you can actually decide to you know add a bit of noise to the selection or you can of course take the make a kind of soft selection so instead of sings using a single you can kind of make like a circle and and then you could have a kind of radius so here you can see you see if got a radius around the cursor now and as I move that up it's it's selecting weight way more and of course I can type in a value here it's a little bit higher one thousand five hundred and now I've got a quite big radius and you can adjust the fall-off of that radius to so you can see here that the edges you know the middle ones are getting a bit more the middle ones are getting a lot more a lot of power and then the outside ones are kind of reduced if they don't have they're not quite as much and yeah and so I'm just gonna start like be trader if you know start building some little island shapes and these are really like the overall environment you know this is the overall bigger picture landscape we're looking at right now so we're we're sculpting whole islands we don't want to go absolutely nuts with you know with the mountains or creating very you you know we don't want to create really really detailed shapes at this point we want to create sort of unique overall shapes I think this noise is working quite well for that I'm gonna make the radius in my brush a little bit smaller and then makes some kind of edges to the mountains usually there's a kind of shape to an island that we can kind of try to get some you know try and get some interesting shapes that not too blocky and all kind of yeah realistic or useful and you know we're gonna pass this through some filters later that are going to make it even more realistic so we don't have to really care too much just about the general shapes I'm trying to make those look kind of interesting and and of course you can you can use the double bass and D keys to kind of zoom around and just like you would in the first-person shooter in Muse and just like an unreal use the right mouse button to look around with the camera and there was keys to to move around and I think that is the best way to control 3d viewport to be honest I think it's gonna take is taking some people in the industry a long a long time to get that into their their heads but you know it's it is becoming an industry standard at this point and I think that it's only a matter of time before even 3d modeling packages sort of shift to this this way of working because it is really really nice even when you're modeling so yeah so the next so the next step would be to once you have something like this overall shape I'm just gonna make a few little off yeah okay just going to think about this how I'm gonna I'm gonna structure this island and how I'm going to make this because I think it's gonna be pretty cool if I do stuff correctly so I do want to have one part of the island that has something like a sort of bit of a volcanic section so I think I'm gonna really boost the height of one part of the island with the height just to make sure that it's not too steep you know just there there's got to be a kind of yeah okay so that's overall elevation and the next step like I said you kind of go in order and we'll finish it in and we'll create a so like I said you kind of go in order and we'll create it so the next step is the filters so this is basically a part where we can add filters to this height map so I'm gonna click Add layer as a Echo surface filters and then add layer and we're just gonna call this one mountains very basic hit add and here you can see you've got a bunch of different options for filters so here's all the stuff you know difficult for annoy pattern smoothing noise you know that's all this sort of like generic ones I'd say and there is some there are some more advanced ones for such designs and roads in rivers that kind of stuff it's a cool effects but what I'm gonna go for is think I'm gonna go for ridged I'm gonna go with small sharp and bridges and see how that looks so okay so you can see immediately it's taken that sort of basic height map that I had and it's already you can see the difference it's already started to give me some cool kind of mountain peak shapes which are just looking amazing already you know that that's already already great and very natural-looking already looks like almost like real mountains so so that's a really good base to work from and you know once you once you have something like this you can of course run some more filters over the top of it and to play around there are some interesting ones like this ones like rocky plateau so it's more if you just want to have like a little less of a defined little less of a sort of defined Ridge but you just want to have some sort of it's almost like chalk it's really it's really fine as much soft like stone erosion but yeah you can always play around with it and see which one's look more natural so I think a bit of that's gonna be interesting and yeah so now I've got I think pretty convincing kind of shapes for my my islands here and I've kind of designed this in a way that down here will be the the ocean so I'll just I'll just kind of bring the water level up and you know these sort of parts will become islands in Unreal Engine so we're gonna see how that looks and of course you can always go back to World Creator adjust some things bring back into unreal and kind of go back and forth and so on so there's no you know it's very creative it's very sort of like there's no it's not a one-way street it's all you know it's always a two-way street it's always a way that you can you can manipulate back and forth and just import export and you know make sure that you can do that until you get it right pretty much so yeah I hope my pier looks just about ready to export the only thing I'm gonna do before I do that is I'm gonna reduce the resolution from 8k to 2k and the reason for that is I don't think that we really need 8k resolution in order to to have our sort of base kind of glow full height map because those kind of extra details are going to be added in by unreal anyway and we actually don't want to have an 8k landscape in unreal because all of our texture all of our textures and automated materials on top of the terrain they're going to give a lot more necessary detail and if we if we have too many too much bumps and the playable terrain it's going to cause problems for players it's gonna slow down the level so if you really want a playable level try and stick to a sort of slightly lower landscape overall landscape resolution based on the amount of the landscape that you have so I have a very small map in this case so it's not really necessary so yeah get your you can dial down your resolution where necessary so I'm gonna export this to game map and to do that I'm going to get hit export and the top right here and terrain height map make sure it's PNG 16 and best fit and then choose unreal and hit export that's one I made earlier so just I'm gonna call it WC height map okay so now that's exported I'm gonna go to Unreal Engine and yeah here's just where we left the other scene before it's completely flattened out terrain and yeah just click on your well let's start from scratch and just I'll show you the process of building a new landscape because that's really important I think just typed landscape up in the modes panel drag and drop landscape in and first thing I'd usually do is just zero out the landscape on all of the location parameters and then you can see this one set to 8k but what I II wanna do is set it to 2 K so that's 2 kilometres across sorry that's two to two by two two thousand meters by 2,000 meters if as long as I set the sections per component to one and yeah you can you can just adjust that section size here you you know you can make that 255 and then it will go up to 2k here and you keep an eye on the total components more components you have the more performance intensive the terrain is going to be so keep that as low as possible try not to use that many that higher resolution the lower the resolution is the more playable your terrain is gonna be and the objective here is to try and get the detail through texture work rather than through just pure you know pure resolution so the last thing to do is make sure your materials set to you or to material so mine is set to the brush if i am i under scan landscape auto material ok create and it took a long two to load up so as long as you have like 2k it's it's usually pretty fast 8k will take a lot longer and usually you can slow down your PC so just a warning the higher you go the more you're gonna end up slowing your PC down I find a lot of people struggle simply because they're taking the wrong approach of just throwing more resolution at landscapes and you know and that's not always necessary for their games even these sort of big open world games I don't think a lot of the time it's really necessary to have such massive landscape resolutions especially when you see what I'll be doing with this next so yeah so once you have that you'll notice it's completely black that's totally fine go to the paint's panel the paint panel and go to grass and we're just gonna make a weight blended layer and I made a layer infos folder there I'm just gonna call it grass layer info and hit OK and now you can see it's filled up with grass you can see there's tiling there but we'll fix that in a second so to import the height map just go to the sculpt panel so to import the heightmap just go to the e Scott panel and right down the bottom you'll see you it says target layers height map just right click and go import from file and I'm gonna choose my will create a height map if it gives you some error messages about color PNG just hit OK and about the resolution disparity just hit OK if your height map comes in with really really steep walls like this it's actually really really easy thing to fix just go to your height map and open up in Photoshop and then just go to adjustments and then levels and usually I just eyeball it but to bring it down to somewhere like there you know where it's a little bit more gray it's not filling the whole range and that's just gonna squish the height map into something a little bit a little bit less of a range and then hit save it's just a PNG file because you can also use like or any other paint software to do that so and then yeah right click go rien port same error messages and then okay so now the height map is the correct or similar to a more correct or more realistic hi I'm just gonna lower the fog a little bit here so we can see what's going on it's kind of got this dramatic fall effect going on from the previous map so yeah overall pretty good the there's a little bit tiling going on so to fix that I'm gonna just show you how to make your own changes to the mi landscape material to change them the tile exciting because you can see there's a lot of tiling going on there this kind of all depends on on where your player is gonna be is your player going to be running around in the level in which case you don't have to be as drastic with the tiling because it won't be noticeable if there's a lot of you know running around on top of mountains looking all the way down then yeah you will see it if you are doing a flight simulator well then you're going to really want to you know change the settings drastically and you know focus less on tiling it more you know so the player so it looks good down here and and your toilet much less so it looks good up here so all depends on the kind of game that you're making what you're really trying to produce so first things first I'm gonna go to the mi landscape material and I'm gonna open that up and in here you can see that there are settings for right here distance tiling and these are several settings that control the various levels of detail so there are three different levels of detail one is this kind of global level of detail which you can see here and as I control that just adjust global tiling you can see that there's that's the global tiling changing right now so we can kind of adjust you know if it's a flight simulator of course you want it to look good from here then way where less is more but you know if we want it to look good for I'm just about like the top of the mountain for instance so we want that bit to look good so we can tell it a little bit more and get away with it I think so yes something something like yeah something like that it's probably probably good enough to get away with and and then the extra the next level of detail is as you can see I'm getting closer to this cliff wall it's it's got another level of detail that's kind of fading in and just a little bit more and then you can see that there's this next level you can adjust the distance at which that level fades in by changing this global distance value so if I make it twice as much you can then see that now that extra level of details fading in much of earlier and you can start to see it more and more and more on the cliffs of course the side effect of that is you're gonna start see the tiling more so I said it back to the default you see you don't see the tiling there but if I upgrade that value you start see the tiling and that's because basically the three levels of detail global macro and detail are blending into each other so the top one right here is the global and then if I move in further you start to see the macro and then if I go even further you'll then get the detail and this is where you actually see the actual grass and you know a little Rizal rocks and things that is the most of close detail texture so yeah detail macro global and by sort of adjusting these parameters you can usually get really good results it's just a matter of you know tweaking it for your own game and so now I've got these settings changed I'm just gonna show you I'm gonna go to the landscape material I'm gonna save a version of this custom material into one I made earlier I'm just gonna save a version of this into my world code example this is the map were working on I'm gonna save that to a folder called material overrides I usually make this little material overrides folder because you know I want to store material instances in there that I've altered from my default ones and I don't want to kind of you know affect the global the global material instances so just copy and paste that folder and then once I've got that in there I can I can select my landscape and make sure I apply that one to the landscape instead of the main one so yeah now I've got my landscape from will creator and well you can see those are distance on the shadows that's kind of interesting but you can of course extend that if you want yeah in general I can now start to run around the map if you go to world settings and I've got the third person game mode activated here so I can just jump into the game gives it a second to give it a second two shits update the shaders but yeah now I'm running around on this will create a map a map that I just imported and it's looking pretty cool so this is of course like the basis of you know the level that you would want to import of course from here you can you know start to do things like tweak the lighting and the atmosphere and you know get really try and get somewhere with let's see if I can move that around get some really nice effects within this view up here I've got some rocks floating in the air from my previous level I'm just gonna delete those should have cleaned that up earlier and yeah you can start to you know start to experiment with different lighting and different sky domes and and in different ways to make this look good you can see the cloud shadows affecting everything there as well so yeah so the next step that I'm gonna quickly try to perform is I'm going to show you guys have bit how you can sculpt a bit onto this landscape because now you've got this kind of general island you know this might be the island that we won but of course we want to add something cool like we want to add some of the water we want to make sure that we can actually level design on this thing now so this is actually in a position where we can start to build a real environment that the play is going to be around rather than it just being a height map so I think that's something that a lot of a lot of Lowell designers and artists don't really kind of go from this point where it's a height map to being an actual level that people can run around and you know we've already got to that point a bit because we're kind of running around it here with the player but it's still just a height map which is it's fairly boring so it's going out some of the extra bits of spice that brush if I allows you to do really quickly so yeah if you go up to content and I'm just gonna go to brush if I materials water and the ocean folder you'll find essence called water so just drag and drop that in and make sure the little wok is ticked and move the scale up to 10,000 okay great so the accuracy of this is going to depend on how big the scale is I think 5,000 actually enough for me so yeah if we go down onto the players level let's see if we can see any issues here of course is something else where we can change the tiling and fix any issues in the material itself so you know if you go into the ocean material you can of course create again you know go into your map create a copy and the material overrides folder copy here and then you go a little material override drag and drop that onto the onto the water plane instead and save it and then you've got something you can now can now change the material parameters here for the water right here in this in this panel in this material panel without altering the global settings so you know if you if you think that there's too much tiling you can tweak the tiling settings here for the water as well so a normal tiling that's the kind of bumps that are going on on the surface of the water you can see if we make it really really big it's gonna look ridiculous and I kill the scale but yeah let's make it a lot smaller and the other thing you can do is which I noticed makes this a lot more realistic is if you tweak the you tweak you tweak a certain bump settings so only a little bit of normal bump is required if you go to much more the tiling becomes really really obvious and and you don't really want that you know just tiling it a lot and then also reducing the bump also helps so much so yeah it you know it can be really calm water and then and then you don't have to worry so much about like if it's tiling a lot like a link of course I'm sure sure there are more advanced water shaders friend real engines it's just a very simple one I used to kind of block out environments and stuff I'm sure if I'd make a real you know full game in Unreal Engine I'd probably look into a much more involved water shader with you know maybe some waves maybe some like more advanced stuff going on but I think this one is is quite good just for you know I think the art pieces and for showcases if you want a simple water shader I think it's it's good enough it's at least good enough for my purposes and and yeah so now I have something like a water you might notice it's super super transparent that's because I was doing a tropical map before and the settings were for that but so I'm just gonna gonna try and increase the fog density a little bit here you can do that by tweaking the fade distance I'll make it a bit of us yeah like that I just mean it's gonna be a bit foggier okay you can also get this foam on the edges here which is quite nice don't quite as much as that yeah that's good and yeah it's Eve so yeah that's my water now oh so that's one more thing I don't have to worry about quite as much is I've got water so yeah so let's see the whole map now has its Duns a little more like an island so what else does an island have beaches so I'm gonna quickly go around my island now adding beaches and to do that I'm gonna go to the modes panel and I'm gonna go on to landscape and I'm gonna go to paint and then right here the on the list you've got all kinds of paint layers for grass more dry grass desert forest dry forest snow beach dunes mud so you can use those in a lot of different inventive ways you know there's different kind of colors and different styles of texture and you could of course replace each of those materials with your own textures as well so you know if you go into the materials folder in landscape materials you'll see here there are a bunch of material functions and you know inside of each of those functions you've got all of the textures being defined there so if we go into the grass function that's the one we were you know we're using on the terrain right now you can see inside of there it's there are three different textures assigned for grass and those are hooked up to global macro in detail so you can change the global texture right there you can change the macro texture and the detail texture of every single brush if I paint layer there's even an example with the mud layer for tessellation and roughness so that's that's new in revision 2 which I just launched last month and yeah it means you can you can of course add those kind of more advanced properties to paint layers if they're necessary just gives you the option so yeah I'm gonna start painting Beach down and let's see how that goes so yeah first things first I'm going to start by creating a waitlet blended wait blended layer and then I'm gonna choose the layer infos hey okay and I'm gonna make sure I disable these layer and focus want to make sure they're useful and yeah brush size just I guess just change it for the default we kiss maybe a little bit higher it's a quite big features but I don't want to take a long time doing all these beaches to be honest you know this is just something I'm just demonstrating so yeah you can set the tool strength to be pretty high and it when you first start sculpting it doesn't eat it does need to do a bit of shade of compiling but you know eventually it's you know it will stop so you don't want the whole of edges to be beaches so you just want like what is it like just a kind of some parts to be beaches I guess there's a kind of pattern to it which is that like areas that get kind of areas they're going inward kind of inverted they usually tend to be more Beach like and then the areas that are kind of see them kind of leaving gaps on the sides that's just an artistic thing though I mean it's just to kind of copy the nature if you look at some reference you'll you'll see that some mostly beaches kind of follows of pattern of like only on the interior bits could be wrong about that there's all kinds of variation in nature but I usually find this just good so that definitely looks like a that looks like a really nice beach that so let's just make that around me like that's where I would go you know I'd drive from that side of the island all the way to this side of the island with one just to go on holiday there okay and then a couple more little beaches here maybe this is a little beach there nice beach and then yeah and so I'm you can see what I'm doing it's not much to it to be honest it's really easy and yeah if we get distracted but if we go really close to this beach stuff you can see it's actually got a nice detail each texture going on there as well of course you know when you when you have a bit more time if you are really focusing on one of these areas you'd go in and you kind of flatten out these beaches to make them look more like real beaches because right now you see it's just so sloped it's nice that we've got a rock texture here as well that's also part of the auto material so it's already already giving it some texture but it's not really a beach like shape so you know okay just really quickly to do that I would just go with the I guess the smooth tool at first and I'll just go in and smooth out that whole beach area and maybe I would maybe I take also the flatten tool and choose like there and I would I would take the tool strength way way way down with a fine till one I'll just click like that you know just to get a little bit more flatness going around the edge of the beach but without you know ruining the kind of fall off into beach you know it still needs to look like a long beach so yeah now now I have a more beach like appearance to this this Coast wide here and yeah so yeah that's how I do beaches and yeah and that's just you know it's just the case of being a bit like now the reason I I mean the reason I have these tools and the reason I've developed these tools is because I am very lazy and I don't want to spend long a long time doing everything completely custom from scratch you know I've I've built these tools you know so that I don't have to do a lot of work when I work on these kind of quick Unreal Engine projects and you know so I can focus on the stuff that is really important like you know developing the assets and stuff I don't want to be spending all day painting stuff and unreal and I'm still you know doing a bit of manual work like this is a bit of manual work in unreal I just realized I got my brush size way way down that's what's taking me someone to paint but yeah and but yeah these automated tools they help so much and and audio materials are just fantastic for artists so yeah and of course you know it's the amount of time that you want to spend on on something like this it really comes down to like what is your game is your game something that requires every single nook and cranny of an island to be you know perfectly yeah perfectly artistically photorealistic or you know are you just trying to get somewhere that's you know a playable game that within a few weeks because that's something that's possible - I think a lot of people don't realize you can build a whole game in just a few weeks using these kind of tools okay so yeah I'm gonna save this now and yeah still recording okay so yeah so now I've got the beaches pillar placed I think that's that's really nice what I might do is just add a few more sort of biomes and sort of variations of biomes to the paint work so that will help also further break up the tiling so if I go on forest I'm gonna add a weight blended layer and again laya layer info it save and now I've got a forest layer so if I paint this down sometimes it takes me time to show you compile but you can see this is actually a different texture to the grass texture so what's great about this is I can kind of blend this in with a slightly more green forest so it goes from beach to grass to the forest and now I can start to kind of blend in my my forest and this is just another way to break up lines so you saw how before there is you know let's see if there's a really good example okay so you can see some repetition going on in the in the materials here so that's on the global layer so I can break up that repetition really easy just by you know paint paint a little bit here that man paint a bit here that one you know let it flow with nature but also use it to cover up anything that shows that it's you know using some sort of you know computer-generated tiling texture so you've got because you've got these different levels of of detail and you know they've got kind of manual sculpting you've got this kind of automated process that already gave you this really nice kind of like overall effect but now you can go in and you know make it even you know just cover up your tracks a little bit with the manual sculpting tools which is really great so yeah here we go getting this and of course you know this is also an auto material so if you if you paint it onto slopes you're still gonna get nice weight you know slip variations going on that and I think this is a really nice green saturated green for forests that you know helps to bring out a bit more this kind of lush green vibe I'm not gonna paint too much in the shadows because it's that's a boring area anyway so yeah and now I've got a little bit of texture variation there one of the big advantages of auto material is you can use the brush if ice sculpting brushes you know so if I want to for instance make sort of a really cool eroded Ridge here right I can go to sculpt and instead of circle I choose alpha and I've got a few different because I've got all the brush fi packs on on my PC I've got all of the different brush afire sculpting brushes to choose from I'll choose the one that comes with the grass lens pack which I think yeah so far you could you could do everything I've done here with just the grass lens pack you wouldn't need anything else yeah so the grassland pack comes with the erosion brush and if you just drag and drop that texture it's quite big it's avoid if it's an 80 K alpha brush so it's got a lot of detail in there just in case you know someone is working in a K and they really do need like a lot of detail I've got that built in so yeah you can switch between the various texture channels to choose between so the different brushes and the green channel is quite a nice I think a really nice erosion brush on there and you can see as I push that around on the terrain you can see it's actually it shows up there can make it bigger again same trick just and then I just just adjust the first number a bit and then I can also rotate around you can see it rotating there I'm just gonna rotate it so it's right there and you know this is gonna give me something that's hopefully a really cool I just control and control and undo and then click and then controlling and do and just kind of keep doing that until I get interesting results see what I could try and do is actually make the top of the mountain a volcano let's see so I choose the alpha brush though these are cool because they actually have craters kind of thing you know like or not creative but like natural volcano a volcano top you know I think that blue one is the best one or sorry the Alpha one yeah so if you go to a place where it's like the middle of nowhere in the map and then we do the brush you can see there's actually a proper volcano shape that forms with this brush but what I'll do I think is put it on the top hahaha yeah just like that and how how Highland has a volcano that's the beauty of alpha brushes it lets you just you know sculpt like that the other brush I think that's also really really useful is the one that comes with the canyons pack which is great for these sort of ridges and canyon walls is this all the time it's just so good for these kind of bridges especially sort of on the lead up to them to a beach it totally makes sense to have some Ridge line like that it really feels cool and you have these kind of lines forming like that and you know let's put a couple of those down I think this one also forms that become natural ridge line see I usually just match up the rotation a bit yeah something like that that's cool it's always just a bit of back on fulfilling control one that's cool yeah so so once you once you start you know getting into it it's it's a bit of trial and error but it's like it's just really good for level design and then of course you know you can use these alpha brushes to stamp out some really cool erosion shapes or or give a kind of general idea like if you want to build like a corridor you can still go in and and use the you know the traditional sculpting tools if here I wanted to for instance make and I like a let's see like a house on the side of the mountain here just for instance like I wanted to make a building here on the side of the mountain I can go in there and I can just quickly create that kind of shape here you know that's someone's secret lair where they have you know that stuff and of course I can use the ramp tool just make a little ramp there the width I can alter as well you can just change this and once you have something like that you you've got like a general shape and then just smooth it all out you know to your heart's desire and now I can run around and just run up that thing in the game so I mean obviously you can do this very very quick stuff for level design the initial global shape of the island you know we generated that and we'll create a but now we can go in and we can start you know fixing you know and building it into something that's a playable level and that's just a matter of time okay so in this next part I'm gonna be adding foliage to the island this is gonna help a lot because it's gonna sort of boost the the realism and it's gonna mean that as we get closer you know to certain areas there's going to be something to look at other than just sort of like grass if you look closely that we do actually have some you know grass spawning around and some flowers but those are just sort of like they're on the grass type system so it's sort of like a procedural grass layer and it just kind of covers everything but yeah what we're going to want to try and do is is place some more so distinctive meshes so like trees some rocks that kind of stuff so in order to do that we're going to need to enable the procedural foliage system and that involves going up to edit editor preferences and then type foliage and make sure that you enable procedural foliage you just have to take this little box and then you might need to restart but once that's once that's done you're able to access the procedure of foliage entity which is a really useful volume if you just type procedural into the modes panel you could drag and drop the procedural foliage volume and this is really just a box so you can see there it's just this little box that spawns and here you've got control if you go to the details panel you've got control over the shape so I'm going to change the x and y values to about let's see let's try 10,000 at first and you can see I've now got a slightly bigger box so if we want to cover quite a large area say that I want a big I guess tropical rainforest to spawn around here I'm just going to cover this area in in this big big volume that's Travie b3 across to zero and it's a box shape so all the volume in there will spawn in a box rate but we can clean that up later so for this example I think I'm going to use some assets from the brush of a tropical pack so you have to access those assets we're just going to go to the brush if I folder and then measures and foliage trees palms and then you'll see that in this folder we've got all of the various measures that are used for palm trees so here I've got a few different variations you know you can you know have different types of them there's also these kind of leaves for the ground which are also really useful but I don't want to have to place all these manually so I'm gonna use this procedural folio spawner and to do that just hit click on the foliage spawner and if you see inside a brush afire there is this folder if you could brush if I you can go procedural and in the procedure follow fall folder is foliage and then tropical and here you can see I've got two options or block bushes and trees and so here is his trees tropical so just drag-and-drop the trees tropical procedural follow spawner onto the foliage spawner these are just folders that contain lists of meshes and they're basically instructions for what measures doing it that the leader of all foliage spawner is going to spawn and you know they have all kinds of rules in there about you know the density and that kind of stuff but all of those already come setup with Russia Phi so all you really need to do if you if you've just got brush afire and you want to just start populating your it's just drag-and-drop that trees tropical procedural foliage spawner onto onto this and then hit this button re-simulate okay so you can see it's already populated with at the island with a few different spots where there are some palm trees I think that looks pretty cool how we've already got some you might want to go in there and tidy up some bits you know maybe alter the direction of some of the the palm trees on the edges because you know some sometimes you'll want this effect where they're all sort of leaning towards the ocean so sometimes you'll get the odd one that's not really leading the right way and then just go in there and fix it this doesn't usually take that long and it depends on the game area the size of the game area that you've got but I usually find that it can be done pretty quickly yeah this one actually came out pretty well I'll just rotate this one but yeah just I usually just go eyeball and eyeball and just fix any ones that I think look a bit weird or look like they're facing the wrong directions and yeah so now we have a few few tropical ones just gonna keep going around placing these volumes in different directions and then hit Reece emulator and yeah this is how you can just rapidly start to create large sections of island with tropical palm trees pretty simulate and you know if there is ever anything odd or anything like that you can always just go into the foliage panel here and use the selection like here I've got some some that have spawned outside of there so I've got a couple of options for that like one I can go into the paint section and I could just select all of these activate all of them so that they're being painted and that that's just like the paint mode and I can just delete them then or I can select individual ones using the Select panel and and then of course you know move those around of course that can take a bit longer so usually I just you know I can either just scatter them or delete them in the foliage panel when it comes to scattering this is the alternative method that you can use instead of procedural stuff instead of using the procedural fall foliage spawner is you can just change the yeah you can just basically paint down assets so right now I'm painting those down and you can see they're actually quite thick so if I change the density to a little bit lower and then maybe even change the brush size a little bit lower to and you can see that I've you know I could start to get some cool slightly you know quite realistic quite realistic patterns going on there so you can also tweak the size so that stops doing just errors just like change the size and I think I have the sizing the procedural spawner a little bit higher than the size on the paint one so yeah that's that's cool I'm just getting just letting the random algorithm generate some cool shapes is always cool just dotting trees around in places and yeah so let's go running around here then now we have some palm trees [Music] yeah we also have a procedural foliage supporter for the banana plants which are also vital sort of component of this ecosystem so if I just copy and paste that basically what I'm doing there is you're able to just if you hold down alt and then you drag you can make copies of these bonus it's really really useful to do that and that works with every entity and unreal that actually just hold down alt and then and then drag and you'll get you'll get a new copy okay so I'm gonna put the bushes banana plant onto there and yeah now I'm gonna start placing down these banana plants let's see how good the spawner is okay cool so now it's yeah it's basically placing a few of these banana plants around the jungle if you were painting both at the same time that actually works really well because then you'll get like everything being painted at once if you did it in two separate layers like I did then you have a bit more control and within which you can no just decide where you need these parts to be remember that painting foliage it's gonna get expensive so you don't want to maybe you know if there's a certain area of your level that you're really concentrated on you maybe want to place your plants there but you know if this if there's just like you know some random areas that just aren't that important maybe don't go crazy with the foliage and and you know put it everywhere so I do I do stress you know don't place so many foliage entities that it walks down the whole game for instance is the player really gonna go up here and does that really matter if they on the pier if it doesn't you know if do they need to be all these banana plants here because that's not really that performance you know that's not really that great performance if you place a whole bunch of them there if you never see it if you can never really get up there as the player or if the players never supposed to even go up there you know it's not really necessary whereas like these parts down here where you know all the players are going to be you know by all means go crazy and just kind of cover those with with some nice-looking vegetation and helps to kind of like cover up the seams of you know especially especially trying to place them around the basis of the trees to make it feel a bit more grown in that's really useful it'll make it look a lot more realistic okay so let's walk around a bit on a new island so the island is actually really massive it's gonna take me a while to walk all the way across so I'm just gonna zoom a little bit and walk again there's a whole bay here zoom a bit let's go to the other side of here yeah so it's not bad for an hour or so as work so now I'm going to concentrate on just like one area that I think looks cool and and try and yeah try and kind of increase the quality of it let's see what's a nice looking area I think this area here is it's really cool see I'm gonna work a bit more on this area and just kind of make something that's more like a picturesque landscape out of it I've got a nice camera angle here that I'm gonna save a bookmark of so I'm just gonna set bookmark one and then now when I hit one it goes to that bookmark and yeah so what I really like is this kind of tree he is sloping downward I'm gonna bend it down we can add a few more of these tropical plants they're really thicken up a forest there and yeah now I'm gonna just adjust some of the lighting a bit the sunset is nice but it's a bit it's kind of missing a strong Paradise style light that I don't know they like it I want I want to make it feel like this you know it's a more more like a proper paradise so maybe more of a midday style lighting is better and let's see if I can turn off the cloud shadows for a bit just to see how how we can make this look so it's really just a case of playing with it I think I need to fill in a bit more in the background there and the the light source I think it because of his sunsets a bit orange so I'm just gonna reset it to only a tad orange and then so my sky dome is still a sunset sky dome I think I'm gonna just drag one from so I have the tropical map here so I'm just gonna drag one sky dome material instance from the tropical map and put that on there so yeah this is more of a daytime somewhat daytime lighting which I think looks a little bit nicer yeah another thing I'm going to do is get rid of some of the exponential height fog that's in the air because I think it's a bit much and then let's see if we can recreate the recapture the SkyDome okay cool yeah sky dome is super important so if you can get that right and get the balance of that in this and light source right it's really good and then and now we have something a little bit more realistic I think just keep tweaking it another thing will be really good is to sort of scatter a few more bushes and dead leaves down on the ground because you know those are gonna help a lot so I'm just gonna put a few more bushes around and then let's do a dead leaves layer we can find that right here so if we go into meshes foliage ground sorry trees palms and then its leaves ground and inside the foliage you've got two options you've got leaves ground one and two there's two variations then you can just drag and drop those into the foliage painter and then just paint those like any other like any other foliage so let's just start scattering a few of these dead leaves around especially underneath the trees so that looks really you know there's a bit more like you know some trees have lost some palm trees over you know some palm trees have lost that leaves over time and that's making them a little bit more lived in you know that helps them to live in the world a little bit better and don't need to go too crazy you know you don't want to put ones randomly the middle of each that doesn't make sense you know but just scattering a few of them around and seeing how you know seeing if you can make it look a bit more like this there's been some you know tropical storms and stuff that's up below and those blows away blown those around or that they've just simply died you know so yeah now I have those on the floor it really helped a bit to make the world feel a bit more lived-in so what else can we add so rocks we don't really have any nice looking rocks right now so one of the big components we can we can add as you know some bigger cliffs and rocks brush if I comes with quite a few of those so if you want to add those you can next thing is getting some I guess big cliffs mountains so I've got a few different cliff options I've got these kind of things that come with pretty much all of the brush if I pax it's a very generic cliff I've got these huge huge cliffs these big modular cliffs that come with the brush if I cliffs back so really realistic looking rocks and I've got these kind of sharp looking mountaintop cliffs it's good for a couple things one is the edge of the sea where you can kind of blend these into the terrain and it makes it look a bit like these kind of coastal rocks which is really nice smaller yeah these are used all the time as like little coastal rocks because they kind of stick out like coastal rocks like that the other thing they can be used for is from mountaintops so you can scale them way way up and use them in the distance for for the sort of tops of mountains so wherever you see that there's a sort of like you know this is built into the terrain here this kind of peak here but what we can do is we can take that and we can make a better textured higher resolution sort of background distance mesh version by just sticking this mesh directly into the Train and the thing with brush your fires I've made all the textures kind of you know they fit together quite nicely so you don't need to really worry too much about you know whether or not they fit so yeah just just tweak that a little bit let's just put that around and of course you can spin these around and change the directions of them change the shape to them you can even go up and down with the scale tool to give some more variation that way and you know just generally these can be really useful so this is how you get more shape variations and more details into your landscapes as you kind of supplement them with a few different meshes on top and this is all just a matter of time you know so you've got more time you can spend more time tweaking and fiddling and you know this is how these huge game will to build their just assemblies of lots of little assets all thrown into the same world and just usually repeated because it's cheaper to repeat the assets than it is to you know use unique assets for every single situation you know so here you can see that the texture from the terrain there isn't looking that good but now I can just kind of replace that bit with you know a big cliff piece and then you know maybe if there's if the players gonna get closer to that I would then you know use an even better cliff mesh underneath like this you know there's then I'm gonna slot in and make that area map now way better and you know you see this ugly bit here this bit with this you know some disgusting you know stretch texture first things first you can go in and you can obviously go in and smooth that out and that's looking a lot better already there the second thing you can do is you can take that mountain piece rotate it around a bit and just slot another one maybe a smaller one right into there and you know just kind of cover it up a little bit and now you've got two sort of layers of mountains you didn't you know they didn't have before same goes pretty much everywhere you know you don't have to use the big pieces you can use also these little small pieces so for little outcrops like this one you can see that you know the terrain is kind of it's created these nice shapes but they don't necessarily look that good so just kind of hide them with real geometry and then smooth out the smooth out the terrain underneath so basically the terrain is basically acting as your inspiration as to where the geometry should be placed because the terrain has already generated these kind of nice grooves and erosions on a general sense it knows where the rocks should be placed it knows where the sort of lines of the natural formations should be but it's up to you the artist to you know kind of take the height map and interpret that into a game level and that's really what you're doing it's your your job is to kind of take the height map and get creatively inspired by the height map you know creatively to buy it enough to build you know convincing in level geometry so yeah and just and usually just by reusing assets a lot of reusing assets because that way you'll save on performance and you know once you do have those kind of situations you can just go in and you know smooth out any errors that you see so the terrain itself should be rather smooth you don't want it to be really blocky because then you know people can't walk over it in the game people can't drive vehicles over it in the game you know there are all kinds of you know all kinds of reasons why you don't want to have you know terrain that looks like let me find an example like yeah you don't want to have terrain that looks like this where there's just like you can see it you know there's just random triangles sticking out everywhere it doesn't look that good you know if I if I'd go in and walk over that if I go in and walk over that you can see it my players going up and down up and down up and down and that will confound a stop and then up and down up and down it doesn't actually work for game play so for game play would be better if this Devil whole area was a little bit smoother like this you know and then and then I've got a few places where I can add some you know big rocks and stuff so I'll grab one of these rocks slop that rock in there to see if I can maybe I'll just put a couple hidden away in the forest and yeah you know and then and then I've got something that's like a smooth path that look how the smooth the player is going now doesn't have any problems if that's a car that's a buggy if it's a quad bike whatever it's not gonna have any issue he's not gonna have any issues basically and yeah that's really good the other thing you can do of course if you don't want to place every little rock manually so these big cliff measures you should place manually because you know that they're just so massive that you have to do that you know they're just going to be such a massive part of the gameplay that you just need to make sure that you place those properly however for small boulders and stuff yeah I mean because these also you're gonna be you know you're going to be running around on top of these actually so you need to make make sure that you understand where they're going to be placed and what they're gonna be used for and how how people can get a platform around on them but yeah for the small rocks and boulders we don't need to do that at all again we can use the procedural foliage spawner so this one right here I'm just going to grab another one duplicate it using alt same way I did before and let's go to the procedural folder again and instead of tropical I'm gonna go in procedural I'm gonna go to grasslands and then cliffs and I'm gonna use the cliffs grassland spawner and this is basically just spawning lots and lots of little rocks and stuff so let's put that yes but that right there maybe a little bit less here so let's just go to that area that we were just working on okay so now this is place over that whole area and we're just gonna hit spawn let's see what it does see yeah and then just hit simulate and now it's added some really cool sort of supplemental rocks kind of around yeah just and these are you know cause block the player as well so they can't run through those and yeah that's it's really nice because it's just extra you know extra stuff that you just don't have to place now it's kind of added a little bit more detail so yeah and now it looks like we spent a lot longer on this that we really have because there's all of this detail place down and but it just it still feels structured because of these larger cliffs that we hand placed and you know we can a hand placed a few of the you know the trees and things like that these look ugly up here these cliffs so probably just which is probably you know come up with some interesting shapes and designs so yeah here I was just trying to dress up the side of this mountain a little bit more just by using the distant cliff meshes is I'm gonna just turn up the slope tiling a little bit here because I think this looks a bit low res so I think we can we can definitely improve the slope tiling just a tad I think it is actually in the global tiling because now we've got you know such a ground you know now we've got all of this stuff covering up the terrain you don't notice the tiling on the terrain as much you know as when you're you know completely like if I look from here as well where's the tiling it's gone now because we've got rid of it with paint layers and by putting foliage on top I'm gonna tweak the lighting one last time and yeah let's see how that looks the other thing that I noticed is the beach so the beach is a bit too sandy and you can fix that by going into the mi landscape and there's actually a parameter its biome specific parameter called beach brightness and you can change that so it's a little bit brighter and that could help you get like whiter beaches so you know if your beach is looking really dull like this go in there and increase the brightness a little bit and then you've gonna you're gonna have a like a more white sandy beach that's a you know a bit more similar to you know some sort of tropical beach so that's a nice little dip that's in the landscape material so that looks like a super-bright Beach now whereas before it was a bit sort of lacking I'm gonna put up to ten and then I'm gonna turn down the beach brightness a little bit there we go I think the skylight was actually good at where it was all just a matter of tweaking okay and now I'm gonna give it a bit more of a Sun Direction the kiss let's see if we can get something cool a bit of atmospheric fog marvelous yeah looks better with less I think it's always a problem you know people try to people try to go crazy with fog and it it just doesn't really look like a real life in that case you know I prefer very very very thin line of it okay cool of course you'd want something the distance like some other islands or something like that that would help to kind of merge the two together or the fog like this and then I think I can actually just push the start distance out a little bit so the start distance of the fog is way way out and then and then you can use that to kind of blur out the line there yeah that's better that is better so before and after like it just helps to merge it all I think the main thing looks weird with this see is the the grass so I'm just gonna paint out the grass of the frontier completely that's better that's much better I'm gonna grab a palm and I'm gonna make that one been bent palm that I'm gonna put in the foreground like this because I always love that shape of how the palms look always love it and the ocean I'm gonna tweak the colors a little bit because I think that watercolor could definitely be a little more realistic so I'm just going to tweak the ocean and that's really just a case of like tweaking the watercolor so it's a little bit more of a turquoise and you know tweaking a few things like this specular like the fade distance and stuff so yeah now it looks a bit more like a tropical scene now I've got this little tropical island here that was made very very rapidly in Unreal Engine I hope you guys found this tutorial useful and I hope it's going to inspire you to build your own Unreal Engine 4 levels using brush if I and world creator brush fi packs are available on the Unreal Engine marketplace with brush if I you'll be able to use the landscape auto material and all of the modular assets that you've seen in this video to supplement will create a height maps in Unreal Engine 4 if you enjoyed this content and want to see more of it subscribe to this channel and check out brush if I on the Unreal Engine marketplace this is Joe goth signing off Cheers [Music]

Channel: Joe Garth

Views: 403,696

Rating: 4.9366217 out of 5

Keywords: world, creator, ue4, unreal, engine, brushify, level, design, terrain, heightmap, generation, export, environment, sculpting, brushes, automaterial, landscape, landscaping, archvis, archviz, 3d design, concept art, concepting, assets, 3d, tropical, grassland, palm, tree, procedural, bushes, cliffs, photogrammetry, sky, beauty

Id: vkOt1zSc1rE

Length: 76min 42sec (4602 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 19 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/havoksage]

Hey guys!

In this tutorial I use World Creator and Brushify to generate an Unreal Engine 4 environment in 1 hour. I show the entire process happening in real-time from start to finish with very few cuts, so you can see exactly what i'm doing.

More information at https://www.brushify.io
Get brushify here: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/profile/JoeGarth
Get World creator here: https://www.world-creator.com/

[u/Wolfies_Games]

Ye, nice, really loved the beach view!

I actually like creating maps and it usually takes me like all day and at the end I'm really tired ;D... but I still kinda enjoy it , but sometimes I just want it to end faster so I can see my work!

Sincerely, Wolfies Games

[u/9faggerz]

This is why I love game environment art and want to become a game environment artist