Create Landscapes in Unreal Engine 5 | Beginner Tutorial

hey what's up creators today we're going to be showing you how you can sculpt landscapes inside of unreal engine 5. we're going to be showing you how you can import your own custom height map into the engine with a pre-generated landscape whether that be from real world geometry or something that you've made in external programs like world machine if you are completely new to landscapes this is the video for you with that being said let's go ahead and jump in and get started [Music] so starting off we're gonna introduce you to the landscape mode inside of unreal engine we can access this by going to the top left hand corner and then pressing the select mode and choosing landscape we can also press shift 2 to activate this inside of here this is going to allow us to create a new landscape and define all the properties such as the material the resolution the size and more what we're going to be doing is we're going to be creating a brand new landscape from scratch if you're not in it already go ahead and press the create new tab here we will be showing you how you can create a landscape using a custom height map later on in this video we can use the section size to change the size of our landscape we can also change a few of the other properties over here such as filling it to fit the entire world for now though we're just going to go ahead and press create on this and we're going to give this a couple of seconds and this is going to create a completely flat landscape that we can work with once this is loaded up we're going to be able to see all of the different tools that we have available to us don't worry we're going to go through these and we're going to be getting started creating our own landscapes in no time let's hop back in so first things first we're going to be navigating the viewport just like we did before when it comes to landscapes one thing to note is you might want to set your camera speed to a slightly higher value up in the top right hand corner here i like working with speed around 5 and 6 when it comes to going and working with landscapes now let's go ahead and start sculpting to do this inside of our sculpting mode we can see we've got our tools the first one is sculpt really straight forwards what i can do with this is with my brush i can run over and i can hold down left click this is going to raise the terrain and we can do this to create things like mountains so i can just keep going on and i can just keep sculpting those i can also use shift and left click to start indenting into the landscape to make things like rivers now that's really straightforward we can use this to build the foundation of our landscapes we can also adjust our brush size on the left hand side here to control the size of our brush and this is going to allow you to get lots of detail we can also adjust the brush fall off to increase or decrease the smoothness of that brush so if i make this brush nice and big you can see we've got two lines if we decrease that fall off you can see the brush is going to get very very smooth with this brush fall off if i decrease it it's going to be a very harsh brush you can see there's no smoothing on that whereas if i increase this all the way up to one it's going to be a very very smooth brush we've also got our tool strength to control just how strong of an effect this tool is going to have we've also got a whole variety of different brush types that we can go into if that's something that you're interested in if it is just let us know in the comments down below that's the skunk tool what i want you to do is just play around with that get comfortable make some mountains make some rivers and have some fun what we're gonna do now is we're going to hop over to some of the other tools including the smooth tool using the smooth tool could not be easier we just simply click it and then with this we can find an area we want to smooth run over this and press our left click this is going to smooth our landscape for us really straightforward we've also got the flatten tool this is going to do exactly what it says on the tin if i choose an area and then hold down left click from that point it is going to flatten our terrain to that point the next tool we're going to cover is our ramp tool with this we can choose two points and then press add ramp on this to build a ramp between those two points we can also adjust things like our ramp width and our ramp fall off to change how that ramp is going to look and just like any landscape or most objects in unreal engine they're going to have collision and if i was to go over to my ramp by pressing play i can actually run up that ramp and i can use that to traverse my level which is absolutely fantastic so you can see my character here perfectly running up this landscape the last few tools that i want to introduce you to is the erosion tool and the hydro erosion tool this is just going to be simulating erosion from soil and erosion from rainfall we can try this by simply clicking on it and then using left click to simulate that erosion and you can see we get a really nice effect there similar to what you would see in an actual mountain where you've got soil going down it you've also got your hydro erosion tool which is going to simulate erosion caused by water and the difference between this and the soil based one is the erosion effect you get from this is going to be a lot smoother as you can see there it looks just like water did this you can of course adjust all of the different settings for these erosion tools to get the look that you want that's it for a quick introduction to the landscape tools inside of unreal engine 5. what i'd like us to do now is i'd like to show you how you can import a custom height map into unreal engine 5. again doing this really straightforward let's go ahead and create a new level and we'll do this so to create that new level we're just going to go up to file new level and we are going to be using this basic template again if you want to you can save your work from there in this new level i'm just going to delete the floor and then i'm going to hop back into my landscape mode in the top left hand corner now what i can do from here instead of creating a flat landscape i can import from file and most importantly what i can do with this is we can choose a height map file for me i've got a height map that i've included with this video you can download that in the links down below i choose my height map by simply selecting it and then pressing open then what we're going to see is we can see our landscape is slightly curved here in the preview if you can't see that don't worry totally okay if you have a high height map you're definitely going to be able to see it here but if i go ahead and press import on this now it's going to generate our landscape and we're going to see all of the detail that comes with it so now this is loaded i can slightly see i've got my landscape down at the bottom there if i go and fly towards this you can see i've now got my landscape with all of the detail that it should have that comes from that height map and with this height map landscape what i can do is i can actually take this and i can start adding additional sculpts or additional information onto this using the sculpting tools that we just used so let's say i want to get a little bit more erosion onto the side of this mountain i can take that brush fall off i can adjust it same goes for the size and with that i can then start simulating that extra erosion and i can start forming this myself that is simply put how you can take a height map and bring it into unreal engine you already know how to use the sculpting tools take that height map play around with it and have some fun what we're going to do for good measure is to show you how you can quickly apply a material to our landscape and then get rid of some of this fog because well there's a lot so let's go and do that we're gonna come out of our landscape mode again by going to the top left hand corner and going to our select mode this is our default editing mode then what i'm going to do under my landscape material i'm simply going to set this to something like grass really straightforward we're not going to be showing you how you can have different layers right now but what i did want to do is just show you how we can get a simple material on there and now when i press play on this and i start running around at the very least i've got some grass we can also choose things like rock and apply this to our landscape by simply just searching for that rock material giving it a couple of seconds to update and now you can see we've got our rock on here now let's go ahead and get rid of some of this fog because there's a lot so i'm going to take the exponential height fog in my world outliner in the top right hand corner and then i'm just going to turn that fog density down until we get to a level that is comfortable for me so that's it really straightforward let's hop in and see what we've got so we can see here we've got our landscape we can run around on it and it's got lots of detail what we're also going to be doing is adding an additional video to show you how you can paint this setting up different layers for things like rock mud grass and more if you're interested in that again be sure to let us know in the comments down below that's it for this video i hope you have enjoyed it by now like i said you're going to have that landscape and you're going to have lots of detail i'm really interested in seeing what you are able to create using your own sculpts or using those height maps that i showed you be sure to go ahead and share those in our discord server and get some feedback or just to share it with me also if you'd like to support more high quality training just like this be sure to check out our patreon page and unlock exclusive perks such as live mentoring early access to our videos and easy to use game templates like our fps or rpg game full of code as always stay awesome keep creating fertis signing out [Music]

Channel: Virtus Learning Hub

Views: 124,851

Keywords: unreal engine, unreal engine 5, unreal engine 5 landscapes tutorial, virtus creative hub, unreal engine tutorial, unreal engine 5 tutorial, ue5 tutorial, unreal engine 5 tutorial for beginners, unreal engine 5 tutorial beginner, ue5, ue5 landscapes, unreal engine landscapes, ue5 landscapes tutorial, sculpting landscape, landscapes, sculpting landscape in unreal engine 5, landscape tutorial unreal engine 5, unreal engine 5 beginner tutorial, unreal engine 5 landscapes for beginner

Id: JSjtHU6xuDE

Length: 10min 45sec (645 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 23 2022