Environment Creation In Unreal - Importing Terrain/Heightmap

in this video we'll take a look at making a mountain valley Terrain in Gaia as shown here we'll also take a look at how we can export this terrain to Unreal as a hype map we'll start off with a blank Network and we'll be creating the larger shapes or the structures of our Mountain first and to do that I'll start off with a canyon node to create a bit of kind of like a a valley for our Mountain to get added into and right now by default it's pretty steep pretty sharp of a a canyon and we'll adjust this by changing some settings here so instead of Canyon structure I'll go to clops instead of simple I'll go to granular and I'll start playing with the scale maybe something like 65 or maybe a bit smaller 62% and then width will make the the canyon width much larger so maybe something like 75 or 76% and then we can adjust the Slot Valley surrounding and DEP dep and really it's all just about kind of eyeballing uh what works best here so I'll just kind of play around these numbers and find something that works and try to get just some interesting shaping that's not too steep that's not too extreme and then maybe play around with the the seed a bit to see what what we can get and once I have something that I think looks okay like maybe this is all right um what I'll end up doing is start building upon this we can always change this later but we can always add other nodes and start structuring things a little bit more as well so right now this looks pretty good but I want it to be a bit more gradual so what I'm going to do is add a Apex node so I'm going to go in here and look for Apex which I think will be found I could also press Tab and search it but it's here under filters and I'll connect that to our Canyon and I'll press F to preview that or pin that and that kind of creates this very steep uh sharp Valley now and maybe that's a bit too strong so I'll make the steepness maybe 1% and now we get something like this and it seems bit extreme but again we're just building up shapes right now we're not worrying about small details and then once I have something like this I can combine this with maybe our mountain or some other structure so I'm going to go down and find or actually let's see it's up here combine node and I'll combine this with something else that we're going to make uh which will be maybe let's see we want something to create some sort of structure maybe a ridge so this Ridge node gives us some shaping like this which is interesting very uh sharp angular shaping which might give us some nice structures so I'll take this Ridge node and we can start adjusting again scale height definition seed and just finding something that works so I can just kind of Shuffle around here find a value that looks kind of interesting gives us a lot of shape and then just start playing with these other sliders so I want something very steep or fairly steep so maybe I'll increase the height and on top of that change the scale seems like lower scale works better and then definition maybe a laot definition to give us a lot of detail and if it's not giving you the look that you want like what I have here is interesting shaping but it's not really steep or not really that intense I can go in here to my advanced settings and change this and Shuffle it around or I can also go down here to this extra drop down and add like a log or Equalization or something to make it way more Steep and way more intense and if I do that also do drop to floor so it make sure the lowest point matches up with the grid and then I could maybe even use something like this like if we look at this it's all kind of collapsing in but I want a mountain kind of pushing out so maybe this is pretty good shaping but I just have to invert it so I can always go here and add a invert node to our Ridge now it's like mountains pushing up and then I can combine that with what we had before and start getting some interesting uh terrain and based on how we combine that as well you can change it from right now it's a blend where it's like a 5050 mix of each input this first input and this second input but I can also change it to other blend modes as well perhaps like Max and then 100% And then it kind of Blends those those two and maybe I'm not happy with the shaping like it's a bit too chaotic so I'll go back here to uh Canyon and Ridge and play around with the seed or the values a bit more so after making a few more adjustments I ended up with a a shaping like this which I thought was pretty good I have this large kind of mountain here and then this crevice where maybe water could run through it'll become a bit more uh flat at some point and then these other surrounding mountains on the other side so that's kind of what I'm trying to go for is like a bit of a a kind of v-shaped kind of Valley and to get to this point I really just went back to my Canyon node started playing around a bit more with the the seed and some of these settings here so the seed I found pretty good to get this shape was 58032 and then same thing for Ridge just playing around with the the seed and some of these settings here and I kind of found this seed here 38198 that gave me this really large kind of peak here in the center and then when I combine those two uh with the max method I ended up with our our Val like this and it doesn't really matter how you get this shape it's just shaping the large shapes of our terrain we're not worrying about details we're just worrying about the overall shaping of our terrain from here we can start adding more details and making the shapes a little bit more recognizable as terrain but up to this point we're just trying to get the overall shape the overall structure that we want so now that we have this or something similar to this we can start doing some final adjustments uh so right now it is kind of steep and it is kind of crazy so maybe what I'll also end up doing is on the combine node here I'll add a clamp and I'll clamp the maximum uh to a little bit lower just so it's not as steep maybe I'll clamp it to 85% Just to pull it down a bit so it's not as Steep and that should be okay and then from here to turn these details into something that has a bit more structure like a landscape instead of these really rigid details I'm going to use a stratify node so I'm going to go here to erosion drag in a stratify node connect that up press F to preview it and you can see what it does to the terain it makes it a little bit more recognizable as kind of like mountain rock instead of those really rigid shapes and I'll probably do some adjustments here like maybe some more stratification like 50% and then style I guess we're fine with what we have here and then seed we could play around with it but I don't think this will change too much and then I'll click apply changes for it to update and I think this is okay so playing around with the seed a little bit more I found that 9858 gave me a little bit better shaping on this one side so I'm going to go with that I kind of like what I'm getting here it's almost like a water a river or Valley can go through here and then there's like another cut over here as well so I found that that's that's working pretty well now the next thing that we're going to do is start to add uh better details to this and kind of start to break up these shapes a bit more Everything feels a bit wavy and doesn't really look like a proper terrain so we want to give some more rigid Cuts as well because right now everything's just starting to feel a little bit like kind of melted shapes and we're losing a little bit of structure so on top of this stratify I'm going to add Apex node again and connect that preview it it's going to totally break it but I'm going to change this from distance mode to slant mode and that kind of shaves off certain angles of the terrain and then you have a a and b slider here and I'm going to make those both 20% it's a little bit more but it's not going to destroy as much structure and then we have an angle that we could change but leave that zero and I'll turn on mirror edges and what this is doing is if we look at it before and then after is taking some of these edges and just creating these lines or or kind of hard cuts and later on that will kind of translate to some more rigid slopes and maybe we could go a little bit further like we could adjust these numbers a bit more make them a higher or lower percent and kind of see how that shaves it off to be even more rigid like like that or less uh but I think 20% is is enough for now and they'll just give us some nicer cuts on these steeper areas so after doing that we'll start trying to add some more details into this and at the end of adding all these details We'll add a bit bit of erosion to kind of simulate um the erosion of the terrain all the water flowing down it wearing it away but for now I'm really just looking at getting a lot of details a lot of variation so after this Apex node maybe I'll try something like rugged so I'll go in here to look Dev section and take a rugged node connect that up and we'll preview that we don't really see too much change with that so maybe what we'll start to do now is take a look at our rugged node here and what we can adjust so Apex rugged okay it does make a difference and at this point it might be good to go to 1K resolution just so we could see a bit more detail and see a bit more what these nodes are adding and that's that's going to be a little bit better to see so if we have our stratify this is what we had we had that Apex shaves out some of those areas we add our rugged node add some more kind of breakup into everything and and I don't really think I need to adjust too much on that rugged D maybe I'll go down here and say drop to floor so it pushes our terrain uh or Train's lowest value or lowest point and matches it up with the the grid here just so it's not floating and that's not looking too bad so maybe after this think we can break it up a bit more I'm going to use a shatter maybe I'm adding too many nodes here you might not need really all these but I like what that shatter does definitely adds a lot of breakup into that mountain range here I'm looking at this kind of triangular shape as the the face of the mountain when I add that shatter note I really like what it does there it adds kind of a lot of breakage and then you get these areas that feel almost like almost like a rock slide or or structures that have like broken apart and fallen down so I think that's a a successful addition and then we can play around with a bit of its strength maybe I I push that a bit further 150% and collapses half of what it was maybe feature scale half of what it was and apply that and I think that's pretty cool and then seed you can also play around with but I'm not going to worry about it and uh after that we can do our erosion I think we've added enough detail here I see enough structure and shaping and breakup that I don't really see any point of adding more it's just becoming almost like noise so I'm going to add an erosion Noe and connect this up or shatter to our erosion and that will erode everything and create some smoother sloped areas and kind of pull it back a little bit taper it off and for our erosion node we'll probably have to change some of these settings here so rock softness maybe I'll put that 50 % strength let's pull that back down maybe 25% or so and see how that looks apply those changes okay it keeps a little bit more of the structure down cutting I don't want any maybe because if I have that it'll start creating too much of these shapes if you have a lot of down cutting you'll just kind of turn everything into these kind of mountains with flows and I'm not really wanting that style so I'll pull that back and then maybe some random sedimentation some random breakup and rocks and some features in these sloped areas oh add that to maybe 30% 35% see if that does too much let's put it to zero okay adds a little bit we'll do something like that and then seed again you can play around with you know change this and apply maybe it slightly gives you a better better look but otherwise don't think there's really too much else I need to adjust there and if we want to do some final adjustments I can go down here to these extra options maybe I'll do something like a clip and what we'll do maybe let see if we can if you want to clip out the floor or something like if you really want want to go completely flat and have like lakes or something you could do like a minimum clip and kind of cut out some areas for water uh but actually we probably don't need that in this case so maybe I won't use that and maybe instead I'll I'll try this we can add a bit of a a raise and we can look here and see if that helps out any areas so we put that to zero we get all of our kind of flattened out areas disappearing and if we pull it up kind of brings it back maybe I'll set that to like 80% or something and uh see if we add clip again actually let's see if we add a little bit like 10% that flattens it out a bit I'm really looking at getting areas that are are kind of Fairly flat in between these valleys or in between these mountains and I think clip is helping with that just a little bit so I'll clip it with maybe eight or 10% as the minimum 100% as the maximum and then we have the ray here with its influence set to 80% and I think that just pulls it down into a much nicer looking landscape so this next part might be a little bit unnecessary but I'm still going to show it because it might be something useful uh for your own landscap apes and this is where sometimes if I look at terrains I might want to have areas where water would flow that just have a little bit more erosion and in that case what I'll sometimes do is take a flow node so I'll go in here and scroll down and look for flow under data I'll connect this erosion to that flow node and what that's going to do is if I preview it by pressing F it'll show me maybe where water would kind of flow and accumulate and what I'll end up doing is changing the rainfall to 100% and choosing uh primary secondary tertiary quinary the higher it is like quinary you'll get smaller smaller structures and more of them and at this point it becomes everywhere have you primary is very large structures like this so I want to keep it to larger structures we'll do primary and secondary so something like that and I'll use that area as a mask to do a bit more erosion so I'll take another erosion node and I'll erode my original terrain this one here so I'll add erosion on top of that again but I'll use a mask which will be these flow areas here so I'll take this flow node and what I'm going to do with it is I'm going to use it as a mask for this other erosion and then on this erosion note I'll preview that you can see what it's it's doing so if we compare this one we look at these areas now it's eroding out those areas we'll have to change some of the settings duration maybe one rock softness 100 I'm just going to do strength 100 and apply okay so there it goes and we can see before and after it kind of flattens out those areas and pushes them up a little bit but we can adjust it you know if we want to adjust other things as well or if we want us to minus away or something we could invert it but it's just something that can help you take those areas uh where water would flow and adjust the shaping a bit more so we can kind of see those differences and it's something that's that's not really necessary but in some cases it can help you get the shaping that you want and you could use it as a mask but you can also use it for removal so as a mask is just adding that original train with these additional areas that we masked out have more erosion but I can also connect it up to removal and it will remove parts from that area so we go from this to this so kind of softens up those areas a bit more where the water would flow and it might just give us a Terrain with less kind of steep angles and maybe artifacts like if we look at this area here before and after kind of pulls it back down a bit and might just result in an overall better looking terrain and a bit more subtle details so that can be useful you can also use it in this area here but usually I'm either putting it into mask or removal and I found that that sometimes can help just pull back your trains a bit more and make them a bit more usable now at this point we're going to set the resolution to 2K to see how it looks with all its kind of details so I'll let that generate and then we'll take a look at it so here's what it looks like at 2K resolution if we zoom in quite nice details looking pretty good and now at this point we can start doing some quick coloring on it even though we might redo a lot of that once we get this into unreal it's always nice just to visualize what your terrain looks like with some color so you can make any final changes now uh before you get it into unreal and sometimes you have to go go back and forth and and make adjustments but at this point I think it'd be good just to preview this with some coloring or some sort of texture on this terrain as well so after we have this final kind of erosion node here I'll press G uh to pin that as our underlay so G that that'll make it be used for our height and then we're just going to start adding color on top of this so to do that I'm going to go down here to our texture node wherever it is it's going to be under probably data there it is texture connect that to our rosion press F to preview the texture node on top of our height map and that's what it gives us and we can make some adjustments on this texture like right now scale is 15 15% maybe I'll do 3% click apply see what that does and that will change it a little bit not much of a difference so you can make whatever adjustments you want but honestly I don't think it's really going to matter for this it's probably okay so I'm just going to go right away and connect that texture node to a sa map to take that grayscale coloring and bind a color ramp to it so for that sat map I'm going to preview it press F and we'll change this to something that might work good for this maybe these Rocky presets are pretty good and I'll just scroll through here and see what catches my eye and what might look good and maybe this 478 is pretty cool has some green tones in it I don't see much of those right now so maybe I'll reverse this sat map and then clamp it and just clip a section of it just keep clipping it until I get something interesting and maybe it's just the bias here to shift it so really just kind of play around with it see 40% 35% so once we get some kind of detail in here and maybe I'll clip it right there it might have a nice variation and you can just push it a bit further and to do that I'm going to turn on this input Clarity and you can also go down to this postprocessing and the idea here is I'm going to make this our grass so I'm just looking for a green kind of grassy variation over this terrain so if I want to force it to be a green color I can go down here and apply Hue saturation and lumiance and maybe I'll push up the saturation to 2.3 or something change the Hue maybe just nudge it a bit to make it a bit more green and I can also apply brightness and contrast and maybe pull down the brightness a bit pull it down a bit more and then up the contrast a bit you have to be a bit careful with this because you can up with really weird values that kind of show up strange but now I have kind of this grassy and muddy tone which works pretty well so that's going to be our grass and kind of just dirt and then what I'll end up doing is doing more rock as well on top of this so I'll make another network connection here I'm going to use slope this time and connect that to my erosion and mask out a certain slope so this will be our grass this will be our Rock up here for the slope what kind of angle would I want to mask maybe minimum 20° uh maximum 15 I'm doing that backwards so we get kind of an inverted Val value and then I can up the the fall off as well so I'll change the fall off to something like maybe 45 and I'm getting all these steep areas kind of masked out I know the mask is is kind of inverted uh but that's okay you could flop these numbers around but I'm doing this because the next thing I'm going to do is apply a SAT map and I'll connect that sap map to this slope press F to preview it change that satp map to something that would look like rock so again maybe Rocky here and just scroll through here and look for something that's fairly gray fairly [Music] Rocky and let's see I think around 100 we have some of those so these are all maybe it's 172 this one's not bad 177 maybe that's even better okay that's cool so we go with that and we'll clip this so maybe don't need all those value ranges there that's maybe a bit more interesting should I reverse it maybe maybe I prefer those lighter Cliffs there and then we can always play play around their slope a bit more if we want maybe change some of these settings but it's really up to you so I think this is okay okay this is not too bad I can always fine tune this a bit more maybe add a little bit of a a bias and shift it but I think this is okay so now what I'll do is I'll take all this and I'll mix these two together so we have our Rock we have our grass so our grass our Rock maybe we'll add one more thing to blend because we'll need to blend these somehow we have our grass and our Rock but to blend these two I need a mask to blend it so to do that what I'm going to end up doing is adding a couple more nodes I'm going to use another slope node because I think that's going to be useful and I'm also going to add another node called protrusion which will catch some sharp areas that kind of protrude out of the the surface and I'll start off with this Rion node we're going to view it see what it looks like and I'll give that a minute to to generate and with this protrusion note you can see it's capturing these little sharp peaks of these Rock structures where of these valleys and and cliffs and we can change this to have just really more power or less but I think this is okay but I just want to make it like a really strong mask so I'll go down here and what I'll maybe do is turn on log turn on equalize and just make it a really strong mask maybe I'll do a clip as well and also shaper and just see how I can adjust this so if I add more strength on the shaper maybe I'll do drop to floor see if that makes a difference not too much so I think this might be okay it's super strong we only have some areas that are aren't kind of captured these lower areas which might be okay because what I'm going to do is I'm going to use this and I'm going to use it as a mask for the slope so when I look at the slope node now we can define a slope and I'll make the maximum 7% slope maybe fall off 15 something like this so that's all our grassy areas and it gives us some breakup I might not really need this protrusion node like like if we disconnect it but then we lose some details here on the flat areas and having some breakup in there like having some shapes like that will create little rocks and Cliff structures which might look a bit more interesting so often mix notes like this with a mask of another thing like protrusion or something just to get more of those details in there you don't really see it when looking at the protrusion node guess you do a little bit but when you mix it with the slope then you just get a overall more complex mask but again maybe not necessarily needed but now I think we have enough stuff to combine this all so we have our Rock our grass our mask we use a [Music] combine there we go combine those two Sat maps with this slope as our mask and we'll make it blend 100% press F to preview it that's kind of what we have right now it's not bad might need a little bit of adjustment I can see this this rock is going too far so maybe I'll go back here and look at our mask here for slope and maybe adjust it a bit and see what we can do to make that a bit more interesting maybe on the the slope node here what we'll end up doing is add a log and then equalize and preview that I'll make the grass go a bit further up it's maybe a little bit better maybe we make that fall off a bit more 18 so it goes a bit further up the mountain and looking at protrusion down here I think that's all fine I don't really like how these mountains are looking so maybe I'll go back to the Rock rockiness there's our grass that's okay we go back to the Rock maybe what I'll do is adjust this a little bit more clamp it a bit more or play around with the the bias to kind of shift those colors a bit more so it's really just at this point up to playing around with it uh previewing previewing it and seeing what looks good when it's kind of combined like this and then after a little bit of adjustment you'll find something that works quite well so I'll take a look and and see what I can do to adjust those to give a little bit better result but we're keeping this fairly simple for now but it does still have this very kind of contrasty feel and to solve that we could adjust our Z maps on how we're blending things but one thing that might help get a little bit of extra detail in here is to use something to just break up everything overall and soften it up a bit and to do this I like using a rock map so I can go here to our our node Network and after erosion here we're going to add one more node from data I believe Rock map and if we connect that to our rosion it's just going to create these Little Rock structures for the whole Terin if we preview it by pressing f creates a bunch of these little rocky structures and shapes and we'll adjust the coverage a bit maybe 25% coverage density maybe pull that down a bit so we get some nice contrast and the idea is maybe - 20% maybe add log to it to make it a bit stronger in these flat areas but still have it on the mountains and by doing this we can also take take a effects node so I'm going to go here and grab where is it there it is effects under adjustments and we're just going to add some subtle noise and breakup so I'll take my erosion run it through effects if we preview that it gives us pretty much our our height map but I'm going to go in here and equalize it and add also shaper and then connect that to the mask of our Rock map like that if we preview our Rock map now okay makes these areas darker so it's really only on the mountains like this and by doing that I'll probably have to adjust that shaper a little bit not zero maybe -30 I really want to drown out those lower areas maybe 35% that's good so it's just affecting more the the mountain areas and I'll use that rock map now and connect it to a SAT map to give color to it and then we'll add that kind of on top of everything so I'm going to go in here to sat map connect our Rock map up to it preview it maybe go back to Rocky here choose something that's fairly high contrast I think there's some really like something like this is good and maybe I'll have to adjust that a little bit I'm just going to go in here and bring that up to give us some nice grading or coloring and this will kind of soften everything the way that I'm going to add it so let's see if we reverse this what it looks like okay maybe that works a bit better input Clarity why not postprocessing I try on to adjust these two too much but I think in this casee might help making it a bit darker and a bit more desaturated so it's desaturated and then darker how does it look darker okay maybe brighter let's yeah that's that's not bad so I'll try something like that and I'll take this and then combine it so we have our other combine up here which is our current kind of coloring for a landscape and then we'll add another combine and combine what we had before with what we have now this new SAT map and what we'll end up doing is we could use a mask so what I'll end up doing is maybe just previewing this at first I'll press F to view it maybe not blend maybe we'll do something like a screen okay maybe a higher percentage okay that's not bad and then maybe what we'll do is we'll use a rock map since our Rock map has all these lower areas dark it's only going to affect the mountains so I could use that rock rock map as the mask as well for this combine and what this is going to do is leave these lower areas as our kind of grass coloring and then the higher mountains is just going to help soften those details out a bit so this is before and now after and if we look at an area like this before after kind of adds a bit of extra detail pulls away some of that kind of high contrast feel and just adds a little bit more structure and detail to it so it doesn't feel like these areas are just flat color it adds a little bit of breakup into them and I think it helps so even if we look at these areas here before after and maybe we'll go to 4K resolution and really see uh what the effect of that is so maybe what I'll do is view a section like this and see that's that's good and go to 4K and I'll let that just generate so here it is in 4k and if you're wondering how long that actually took you can always go up here to these little three lines and go to statistics and you'll get a window that shows hey total build time took 2 minutes 48 seconds and this is how much uh cach size it's using up and how many nodes you have here erosion look of nodes adjustments how many nodes in total so kind of nice that you're able to see what nodes are taking long uh for if you want to later on kind of go back and maybe REM remove some of these nodes that we don't really need I don't know if all these are necessary for what we're creating here I'm just creating this and going through the thought process that I kind of do when I I make a Terrain so not all this is optimal you could probably cut this down a lot and make it much better uh but adding that rock map on top of the combine you know if we look at the difference even on these other areas this is before and this is after I think it just helps blend things a little bit together and just makes it look overall a little bit better but most of this is probably not needed cuz we're going to be retexturing this thing anyways in unreal uh but I want to make sure that we have something that is presentable and that works in Gaia for if we have to make more terrains or adjustments later we have stuff that has all the detail that we need to extract from so this this is not too bad I could probably call it down here and and Export our height map and and go from there but it still feels a little bit like it's lacking some details so I'm probably going to add a little bit more to this and doing that I'm going to add a bit of kind of like soil flows down the mountains or something so maybe what we'll do is We'll add a soil node so under data soil I going to drag one of those in just connect it up to erosion and then connect that soil node up to a SAT map and for the settings for soil I'll leave it as default just turn on graded um to help it be a little bit more contrasted and then for the the sap map I'm not going to be picky I'm just going to go through here and look at something that kind of kind of looks like kind of sand or or soil or dirt um so just kind of cruising through here maybe Rocky let's see these are all too saturated 300 oh these aren't bad maybe this one and I'll press F to preview that this is now 4K so it's going to take a little while to generate so I'll pause this and then we'll we'll take a look at it once it's generated okay so here it is so not bad maybe I'll I'll play around with the bias a bit and just pull it down to to shift that gradient a little bit to get a bit better looking soil flows and then once I have something like that I'm going to blend it on top of our resulting terrain and the way I'm going to use to blend it is use use velocity from data and that will give me some nice streams or flow looking like details so my preview velocity we can change some of the settings here like duration out need to be 40 maybe 20 rain maybe 50 reach low reach high I could adjust some of these but I'm just going to try that and see what it generates so generating and then we'll take a look maybe we'll have to add more contrast to it or something let's see what it gives us okay so that's some nice breakup maybe we'll do a equalize on that to make it even stronger more noticeable like that and we could adjust this a bit more but I think that'll be okay and uh what we'll end up doing is taking that velocity node and and using it as a mask and blending it with our soil so we'll take another combine here so I'm just going to go up here to combine combine what we had before with this soil with this as a mask combined type maybe blend but very subtle maybe 30% and take a look at what that does so preview that combine as our new map to view on top of everything that's not too bad it adds this kind of soily flow everywhere maybe the grass that I have the SAT map for that I could adjust I'm getting some weird artifacts here so we could do some adjustments of that but this is not too bad now I've made a bit of a a mess of this graph it's probably a bit more than we really need um and we can go back and adjust things and probably make it better uh but I'm going to add one more layer of detail and this is something that sometimes I'll do if I want it to have just a bit more detail add a texture node add a SAT map on top of that and uh not really worry about it too much and I'll connect the texture node to our erosion again maybe I'll place it over here connect our sap map node to our texture node and for the SAT map uh what I'll end up doing is again just choosing something but this time high contrast uh keep it kind of more grayscale because what what I'm going to end up doing is multiplying this on top so it either darken or brighten things so maybe something like this 378 under Rocky if I preview that it's going to be mostly gray values um and I'll probably have to reverse it and maybe shift its bias a bit I'm just going to do that right away because I I probably know that I'll have to do that so I'll reverse it and maybe set the bias to 50% or or something and maybe also improve Clarity so something very high contrast like this that highlights a lot of details and then what I'm going to end up doing is taking that maybe I can even go here and do output clarity as well just to really kind of contrast it and I'll be multiplying that on top of what we had before so again just use a combine and this is excessive this will make things a little bit slow probably better ways of doing this but I'll combine that on top set it to multiply 50% is okay and maybe use our texture as a a mask and preview that by pressing F and that kind of gives us our our end result so what that's kind of doing is before it's like this after just making it a bit darker adding some more crevices Rocky structure pies giving us something that maybe just helps it look a little bit more detailed and highlights some areas so this is kind of what we end up with and again we'll have to do some final adjustments to this uh but it's not too bad and we can change the lighting or see how it looks with different lighting in here uh just to see if that's all reading correctly with different types of lighting you know more Sunset lighting or top down lighting so after doing a final check and making sure everything is how you want it to look like when you export it we can start renaming some of our nodes just to make it a bit more clear if we were to look at this graph add another point in time so maybe my last combine node here I'll rename it as export color and then what I'll also do to export the height map for this terrain the the map that determines what Heights all these different areas are to do that I'm going to use the erosion because that's the last node where we Define the height and we are going to create an output node so I'm going to go on over here to believe it's under output here and just drag a output node and connect my erosion up to that output node and I'll set it to Output as raw 16bit and the R16 option here and I think that option works best for unreal and then what I'll do is I'll mark this for export so I'll take this output node press F3 or you can also rightclick and Mark for export and I'll do the same thing with my final combine here for the color F3 to mark for export and then we'll also create a a node to give us a bunch of masks so what I'm also going to do in addition to marking both those for xport I'll also create a RGB mix here from the color section and this will take three colors red green blue and I'm going to populate those three colors with different masks so we can use that to isolate different areas in unreal and we might have to come back and and Export some other masks as well but maybe we can start off with something so I'll take the red channel of that RGB mix and maybe connect it to my slope here that I have connected to the erosion and then I'm also going to connect the green channel here to maybe our effects note here we used to mask out some more kind of mountainous or higher areas and then I'll use the blue to maybe mask out the velocity and now if I were to press just F to take a look at what this mask is going to produce I'll just zoom out here it gives us a mask of green for mountains red for for kind of all these other areas and in blue for some of these slopes here so it gives us a nice way of masking different features of our terrain and we can use each one of those red green blue channels as masks in unreal to scatter different or to populate different textures like grass rock or sand or something um whatever we're wanting to to kind of use for the terrain coloring and we can export more masks but that's just a example of how you can use these RGB mix nodes to produce a red green and blue mask of your terrains and now I'll mark this for export as well so F3 or again right click and Mark for export and now if I go over here to build I'll sa have my RGB mix I'll save it as a png8 for unreal um export color png8 and then output will output as that R16 a raw 16bit file format resolution for a height map so for unre um it's a little bit different your height map will have to be theal presets here so if I'm going to do a 2K height map it'll be 2017 and that's more of just a Unreal thing so it has a kind of preset section here for unreal so we'll do 2017 we'll leave the range as raw and color spaces srgb um we can adjust these and and get different kind of ways of exporting our height to different softwares but we're not going to worry about it too much I'll maybe talk about that a bit later but for us we're just going to eyeball and make it look as as best as we can and not over complicate things so we'll leave that as raw and then we can click Start build and let this export at uh 2017 resolution now once that's exported one thing you have to be careful of is since we exported this all to 2017 uh resolution that's that's good for unreal for our hype map our output here that's going to be our height map that we're going to load into unreal but for our RGB mix and for our export color that's going to be a little bit problematic because if it's 2017 resolution that's not really divisible or not really a power of two uh which means that if we were to use that resolution for our mask for these different parts of our terrain we're not going to get MIP Maps or lods levels of detail where the the texture resolution could be cut in half or lowered if you're further away from an area so you might actually want to to keep this output. R16 our height map but then delete this RGB mix and this export color and reexport them as 2048x 2048 resolution um it doesn't matter too much like you still use the 2017 resolution one but again you you won't get MIP Maps or levels of detail in unreal um so you probably want to export those out as as 2048 by 2048 or if you want them to be higher quality because maybe you want more details in it something that could also be justifiable as your your height map might be 20 48 resolution but maybe your color map or your map that you're using for masks for your textures here for different features of the train those could be uh 4K or something 496 uh pixels by 4,096 pixels uh so it really depends and you have to remember that when you export your hyp map uh to Unreal higher resolutions will mean a larger landscape you can always scale them back down and unreal and and whatnot but just keep in mind like you might not need uh excessive resolutions you don't need like a 16k land mass um again these height maps are not meant to capture every detail of your terrain they're just the overall height and then you'll be scattering trees plants rocks additional assets on top of this terrain to detail it now we're going to open up onreal and I'm going to create a new project I'm going to make it a game project third person so that we can run around our landscape once we create it so we're going to use this third person template and I'll specify where I want to save this project I'm going to call it landscape here just so we have some sort of project name and then I'll create that now once the project is created we'll see something like this which is the the default kind of third person template uh but what we're going to do is we're going to create a new map so what we're going to do is go up here to file new and we're going to create a new level and we're going to make it the basic uh level just so it has nothing pre-loaded and uh we're just starting from kind of like a a clean scene or an empty scene but we still have like the sky and some basic things in there so we'll click create and now we have have our kind of basic scene and our player start section here and we'll load in our height map so I'm going to go here to selection mode go to landscape we'll load in our landscape so we're going to import our landscape from file we're going to select the height map now so we're going to select that height map that we exported from Gaia that R16 file and once we select that file it'll show us a little preview in here of a landscape if you Zoom really far out you could see our landscape here and we can just go fit to data if you want it to automatically adjust these settings to kind of fit whatever that file is describing but usually it's already doing that anyways and if we look at it I'm just going to look at it from very far away view it looks a little bit flat doesn't look as steep or as kind of high up and and contrasted as it did in Gaia and that's cuz our height is probably being read or imported a bit differently uh based on the size this terrain and there's ways that you can actually calculate this so it appears exactly the same in unreal as it does in Gaia uh but most of the time it's probably more work to do that than just to eyeball it or or guess so what I'm going to do is just manually change this to something that I like and again this is up to you you don't have to do it this way but usually I'm just I find this a little bit easier so maybe I'll set it to 250 or something for the Z scale cuz then I'm starting to see that that mountain there is starting to look kind of how it was in in Gaia fairly steep now one thing you have to be careful too is this terrain now is way below the grid like the 000000 world space so the problem with that is if your characters or something goes below a certain height you'll automatically kill them and and get rid of those objects and you can change of settings over here under World settings this kill Z if anything's below that that kind of location on Z axis um it'll just remove it from the scene but also I don't like having my train like negative 100,000 units below uh the origin I usually like treating zero as like water level um or as the ocean level so this is really far down uh below that so I'm going to have to also offset this so the center of the world is kind of where this is that's kind of at the z0 space and zero space in Z it's not below the the Grid or axis this little kind of block of terrain here block of checkerboard Cube type object so I want to move my terrain up to that point and the best way to do that is probably just change the location Z here so I'm going to set it to maybe something like 50,000 and is that high enough no we're still below it for a lot of our landscape so I'm going to set it to maybe 65,000 and that's above now that's that's okay so I'll leave it like that and I'm I'm just going to go import now it's going to create the landscape properly and there it is you can always change the the scale and positioning of the landscape after if you have to now like you can click here and still have access to the scale and location but it's just easier to do that before it creates it like this and it becomes more heavy so there's our landscape that we had in Gaia but now in unreal and we'll leave landscape mode for now and we're going to take our player start that's where a player will spawn and we'll move that and make sure it's above the terrain and then if we were to click play it'll spawn us as a character and now we can run around our terrain that we exported as a height map from Gaia and have successfully imported it into unreal now it looks pretty good at this point like it's pretty cool we have all these mountains and and all this terrain and it's a pretty large environment but obviously the landscape lacks detail there's no textures on it there's no trees there's no plants there's no rocks there's nothing so that's something that we'll uh eventually be adding and taking a look at but this kind of gives you a good starting point for being able to create some Terrain GA export it as a hyp map and bring it into unreal and start getting it into some sort of form that you can run around with uh with a character on so we've started our our very first kind of steps in creating a little bit of a outdoor environment or terrain in unreal if you've enjoyed this video If you learned something new don't forget to like And subscribe also comment Down Below on what other videos you'd like to see and if you are part of the patreon which you can find a link to down in the description below you'll get access to this PDF that goes over all the steps that we went over in this video in a little bit more detail and you'll also get access to the actual Gaia file that makes up this terrain and also the exported height map files and textures

Channel: renderBucket

Views: 10,902

Keywords: Gaea Tutorials, Terrain Creation, Digital Landscapes, Landscape Sculpting, Heightmaps, Unreal Engine Tips, Gaea Workflow, Unreal Engine Landscapes, 3D Environment Creation, Realistic Terrains, Gaea To Unreal, Heightmap Importing, Terrain Creation In Unreal, Unreal Engine World Building, Procedural Terrain Generation, Game Development Tutorials, Epic Landscapes, Game Design, Unreal Tutorials, Environment Creation, Virtual World Creation, Terrain Sculpting, Game Environments

Id: CtoeG4NxgUE

Length: 59min 17sec (3557 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 31 2023