Gaea to Unreal Engine Landscape Template

in this video I want to give a brief overview and explanation of my workflow and process creating stylized landscapes in Gaia a procedural landscape generation program and moving them to unreal specifically Unreal Engine 5. this isn't a complete tutorial as today we are not going to get into the landscape material setup in Unreal Engine 5. there's quite a bit to cover there so if you are interested please let me know in the comments instead I will put all of the project files and assets that you see today on gumroad so if you want to pick those up please feel free to click the link in the description let's get started [Music] [Music] thank you foreign we're going to need to do before we begin is download quad spinner Gaia if you haven't already so go to quadspinner.com and click on the free download button we're going to use the free version for our purposes there are some limitations to the free version but for what we're doing those limitations do not matter so simply click the download button and then download setup and install and we're ready to go so when you open up Gaia this is the screen that you're going to see I'm going to hop over to the directory where I have several projects already made and I'm going to open up a Gaia build 3 to show you as an example so once guy is open you'll see here one of the example Landscapes that I've put together uh let's take a look here at the bottom of the screen you'll see that there are four different tabs first one is for landscape shaping and this is where I've set up all the shape nodes for the landscape to create the the basic shape then you have the masking tab which is where we create all the various masks for for example rivers lakes and the snow and vegetation tab is where the masking happens for the various plant life such as grass and trees and foliage and finally the texturing tab which is not necessary for the unreal um but it is nice to have as it gives you a good um basis for how the final unreal map is going to look once it's all textured and all the masks are brought in so I have set up sort of a final texture to get a good feeling for how the landscape is gonna it's gonna be but let's start back at the beginning with the landscape shaping Tab and here you'll see I started with a pretty um wild shape I started with the voronoy plus texture this is because when I'm approaching making a stylized landscape I don't generally like to start with uh the geoprimitives that they give you out of the box they're great very useful when creating realistic landscapes for example if you wanted to have a mountain oh you could easily just drag in a mountain node and boom you have a mountain but for stylized Landscapes I think these come across a little bit too refined and too naturalistic so instead I like to start somewhere out of left field and then work back towards that realism that way you can stop at any point along the way and you have a more stylized and exaggerated landscape so for this particular landscape I started with a vornoy plus texture and then worked in but let's start over from the beginning and I'm going to run through the basic setup that I would use oops didn't mean to delete all that I would use to create a new stylized landscape here in the landscape shaping tab so let's delete this but keeping these last two nodes because these are just two nodes to bring them over into the next tab so keep those um let's start a new landscape I am going to start with a gradient map this time around I think so you can right click and type in gradient or you can come over to your toolbox and find it here as well but since I know the name I'm just going to type it in here's a gradient node and we're going to change it to radial and that will give you something like this very basic Mountain shape I suppose so the gradients stop there I think that's good let's move on I want to give it some steps some natural stepping so let's add a fractal Terrace and fractal terracing has this sort of effect but right now that's a bit too detailed so let's bring down that spacing or bring up the spacing a bit to space those out those those levels bring down the octaves increase the intensity and the shape to really exaggerate those edges and uh why not let's apply some tilt to give it a bit more exaggeration all right now that we have a wedding cake looking shape let's move on it's a bit too big at the moment so I'm going to add a transform node and scale it back a bit let's go something like 80 85 percent Maybe 85 percent that's good okay and uh yeah I think we're good from there okay let's do something interesting this is one of my favorite nodes to use I'm going to use the Whirl node and this adds quite a bit of um stylized movement to your landscape so let's plug that in and you'll see right off the bat uh you get a very exciting shape a very interesting shape um let's let's let's back this off just a little bit instead of 10 whirls let's use five and Maybe reduce the power a bit too that's looking better um when you don't particularly like parts of your shape like this area here comes off a little bit too thin I like to just click the seed node a few times and uh try to find something that I like um when I previously tried this I think I was liking this seed in particular you can follow this too it's the 6506 seed you can use that you can use your own I'm going to try to go with this one because I like how balanced the shape is I think it looks nice so we're gonna we're gonna go from here okay next uh let's see I want to open up some view corridors some some areas in the landscape for paths and rivers so I'm going to add in a cracks node and use that to cut into the landscape but right now that's way too dense that's too many so let's reduce that back a bit uh maybe two octaves and scale it up let's scale it up quite a bit 86 percent sure um depth let's go up to yeah let's make it a bit fatter a bit thicker okay that's a good thickness I think increase the Jitter a bit why not uh let's warp it a bit more yeah something like that so I can see some major shapes opening up in the cracks I know that my landscape will fit well into that but also some nice Pathways as well that are here um so let's do a combined note and let's combine these two together and instead of blend you want to use subtract to cut into the landscape to give you something like this so these Cuts aren't exactly where I think I'd want them I think I wanted to cut through this area here so like before I'm going to use um some seeds and and move it around a bit until I get a cut that I like um alternatively I think you could also use a mask node and actually draw exactly where you wanted your Pathways to be um but I think that can look a little unnatural unless you spend a lot of time with it really drawing things in but if you want absolute control then a mask note is the way to go for me I just put on some music or a video and I click the seed button until I until I get a something that I like it's kind of fun and soothing so I'm gonna I'm gonna do that and before when I was testing this I think I really liked the seed value three five five eight two so I'm just going to type that in and get the get the seed that I liked previously and that's looking pretty good it's opening up some Pathways in the landscape that I want not exactly what I was going for though let me double check yeah let's reduce the warp strength just a little bit this is all just trial and error um plug in a few numbers check see what it looks like oh that looks okay maybe I should change this a bit and uh just play around with it so I'm gonna play with this landscape a bit and um let me come back so I think what we need to do is increase our subtract up to a hundred and there we go now we're cutting in we have some interesting Hills interesting shapes lots of open area but also these very dramatic uh mountains pillars almost in the landscape so let's move on from here I'm going to drag this out get a bit more space from here I think I want to add a bit of detail to the base of the landscape so I'm going to do like I did previously and bring in a voronoi texture um I like born or textures for stylized Landscapes because they have very dramatic edges and interesting intersecting lines so let's use a voronoi right now this is a little bit big so I'm going to reduce the size of the voronoi texture just a bit instead of two iterations let's do four and that cuts it up a little bit more we want noisy edges making them a bit more naturalistic increase the strength a bit oops too much too much there we go and let's increase the density all right so right now this is a bit tall this is going to overpower our landscape so down here at the bottom you have a bunch of modifiers that you can use to really control how much effect these nodes will have so I'm going to use the log node to sort of clamp it clamp the output a bit make it a bit more even and then that's not quite enough so I'm going to add a bit to the clamping by using the clmp clamping here let's bring down the max to about 30 nice whole number all right that's looking pretty good for a base um again you can play around with the seed values and really change up the shape of the landscape I'm going to go with a seed value I found earlier just for the sake of saving time let's go with that one so we're going to need another combined node but this time instead of subtract we are going to use Max so that will add the maximum of both of these together oops don't want it in the masks there we go uh and I think that looks good but let's not lose any of our height let's bring it all up together Max 100 okay that's looking pretty good lots of movement lots of variety in the landscape so let's let's start to bring it back a bit curve those edges and one of my favorite nodes to do that is the thermal thermal erosion node um this is a nice way of getting a bit softer of an edge but not losing your overall shape that you want to keep especially in a stylized landscape you want to have nice strong forms so I often use the thermal and then play around a bit with the settings let's increase the duration a bit and strength is fine I think um let's keep our fine detail and let's add a little bit of debris to the base here and once you're done you need to hit apply changes here because it does take a little bit more computing okay and you can kind of see what this thermal shaper did it added a bit of roundness to these edges and a bit of debris to the base of these shapes which adds a bit more of a natural aesthetic but we're going to go a bit further let's go ahead and bring down these mountains just a little bit I think they're a little bit too tall so let's add a clamp node and this is similar to the clamps that you have at the bottom here but you have a little bit more control I'm sorry not a not a clamp node you want to use a curve node even more control with a curve node it does a similar thing to the clamp but you have more control visually here um with reducing the overall height at certain points so I'm gonna bring the base all the way up keep that height but I want to reduce the topmost height of the mountains down a bit to around yeah that level or so creating these uh sort of Mesa Mesa shapes I think that looks nice all right so our landscape is coming together and at any point if you want to check if you have this file and you want to check what this landscape is going to look like after it's all said and done you can jump over to the texturing node now the texturing tab and let it all compute by the way if you're just doing rough landscape changes I would definitely keep Gaia at the 1K or even smaller the half half case size so Computing isn't a painfully long process and once it's done you can kind of see oh okay yeah this is what it's going to look like I think this is a nice beginning to a stylized landscape but I want to make a few more changes these shapes are still a bit rough especially these sheer faces here I want to add a little bit more detail a bit more definition so let's hop back over to landscape shaping and let's add a Shear node this is a very strong node so you need to use it with caution but it's nice to add a bit of well-defined detail to the edges into the vertical faces as well so instead of 70 let's use 20 percent and 63 and change up the direction let's go about 135 and again the seed has quite a bit of effect on the overall shape of the landscape it's very important I don't like these quite strong of artifacts so I will uh play around with a seed a bit until I get um Some Cuts that that look nice but don't injure the landscape too much and I think the seed that I liked last time was success seven one eight there are definitely methods to this where you have more control less Reliance on random generation that you could do I just enjoy approaching my Landscapes this way especially in the beginning stages because the computer does a lot of the work for you as far as creating interesting shapes and giving you new ideas to work off of so that's how I like to start my landscapes next we're going to add a shatter node and this will help sort of dial back those strong details that we got from the shear node but also keep a bit of the debris and the detail so I'm Gonna Change Up This a bit too let's bring this down oh no keep that at 100 actually you know what I think this is all right I'm gonna I'm gonna stick with this you could reduce the strength if you wanted to keep a bit more of the detail from the shear node I'm going to keep it at 100 I think that looks nice and we can move on from there so another node that I use especially near the end the recurve node is a way to help heal some of the edges that might be a bit too strong especially if you bring it into unreal with a lower resolution landscape sometimes these edges get a bit too Jagged and sharp and they don't look good so you need to to heal those edges before you before you import it into unreal and there's two ways to do that there's the recurve node there's several ways to do it actually but these two ways I'll introduce or the heel node there's also a way to do that uh I've found that heel has a bit more of a gaussian effect it reduces the details a bit too much for my liking so I would use it a little earlier on since we've created more detail in our landscape that we want to maintain I'm going to use the recurve node but we're going to reduce the power a bit so it doesn't take away too much let's bring up the scale a bit and instead of deflating we're going to inflate to help keep a bit more of the thickness yeah I think this is looking pretty good so we have a bit more nice detail in the especially sheer faces of the the mountains here but we've also maintained a lot of the sediment and rounding of edges that we want and it gives you a nice semi-realistic semi-stylized um appearance with especially dramatic shapes and cuts in the landscape so I think I'm going to stop there I'm going to connect this to our drop to the floor node here to bring everything to the base and don't worry too much about this sometimes Gaia struggles with the Computing I'm not sure what happens but it shows you the 2D map instead of the 3D map that's okay if you jump over to the texturing click the last node here again it will rebuild everything and you can see what the final landscape will look like okay so this is what we have and I think that looks quite nice got a nice body of water here a nice sized Lake some Rivers running through the landscape and those are all done over here in the masking node that I set up so it comes from landscape shaping into the masking with large rivers and small rivers snowfall and so on and so forth oh you can see the snow here if you have the file here you can just go say I want more snow you can increase the duration of the snow season say this is a very Arctic region and there's all near constant snow year round reduce the Melt so you get more here as well or say this lake is nice but I would like a bit more um you can increase the participant precipitation excuse me to increase the lake size apply changes things like that so the control is all here you just need to sort of touch around play around with it but let's move on from here and I'll introduce the rest of this file in the next tab you have the vegetation Tab and here is where I set up all sorts of tree masks small trees large trees shrubs any sort of thing that you want to have in unreal you have assets for and you want to place them you can set up the nodes here and they are the placement of them is all decided determined by this dead zone node that was made in the previous tab that defines areas where plants would like to grow and would not like to grow for example in the middle of the lake or on the very steep faces of these mountains not a particularly hospitable place for plants so this mask determines where those plants will be resting but let's move on so once you have a landscape that you're happy with we are ready to export to unreal so to begin our exporting process come over here to the build tab and click on it open it up you will see that there are quite a few exports already set up here they are numbered in such a way that once we get them into unreal they'll be easy to find and easy to place into the file but you can see we have our height map of course and all these other masks here this first part we are going to be using for the landscape material so these are our landscape material masks scroll down a little further you'll see our vegetation masks and we are using these to place assets around the map using grass Maps within unreal and I will show you how we do that in a bit by the way if there is any additional mask that you've created and you want to export that you want to use in Unreal Engine all you need to do is select your node that you want to export and right click here you can see Mark for export you can click that or hit F3 on your keyboard and that will send that node to here you need to set up the file type but other than that that's all you need to do so we have all our masks ready let's export we're going to be using a normal build our resolution is 1009 and that might seem like a strange number at first but if you scroll down to the bottom here you'll see that the unreal native resolutions that unreal likes to use is anywhere between 127 to 8129 1009 is the largest resolution that we can use in the Gaia free version and honestly I think it's fine for for our purposes 1009 is plenty we're going to be using materials and textures to make up any of that lost detail if you really wanted to keep the really fine detail in the strata for The Masks or the height map you could purchase the professional version or a more expensive version of Gaia of course but I think for our purposes 1009 should be fine next we have our color space we're going to be using srgb our range is going to be normalized and most importantly choosing our build destination so this is a new build I'm going to put it in the Gaia build 4 folder for me you can make any folder you want just make sure that you can find it later on when we are going to bring all of your build masks and various textures into unreal so click on whichever folder select folder and start build and let your computer do the rest of the work for you okay once your build is done your finished build should pop up on screen with all the various masks that we've exported and if you've organized them well you'll see them all in nice numbered order that will come in handy in a bit so let's go back to our Gaia unreal stylized folder uh hop down to our unreal scene and open up our unreal project so it may take a while if this is your first time opening up this unreal project to compile shaders but for me it should be pretty fast because it's not the first time I've opened this file and we're in a mountain let's get out of that so when you first open it up you'll see probably a previous setup landscape this will all change pretty quickly and I will show you how so first thing let's bring on a new landscape go over here to the selection mode click on that and let's go into landscape mode to begin so here in landscape mode we are ready to bring in all of those masks that you exported from Gaia so first things first let's bring in our new height map file so click the check mark on the height Mac file and let's open up our file location so here's our height map open that up and let's scroll down to the bottom and hit import all right so our new height map immediately comes in and if it's a bit hard to see right now this is because I do have a post process volume set up so let's actually just turn that off for the time being I did set up in this file quite a few post-process effects for the stylized look but we'll turn that off for a minute and we can turn it back on later so let's go through our landscape again we have our height map file in let's go to our Base Rock file layer so clicking on paint then right click on our base rock layer and hit fill layer and this is going to fill in the entire landscape with our initial base layer uh that lets us build off of one layer and reduces the amount of Errors from overlapping textures okay so now that we have a clean slate we are ready to import the masks that we exported earlier from Gaia and our landscape will quickly come together so let's go ahead and do that hop back over to manage and import and I am going to check all of these and activate all of our material layers here and let's go one by one this is why I numbered them earlier in our Gaia file because this will make this part of the process much much easier to bring them all in one by one all right now that we have them all in we are ready to import I'm going to go one by one here just in case to be safe so starting with O2 ground a I'm going to go down to the bottom and select import and that will bring in our dirt layer looking good so I'm going to uncheck that move down to ground B and import all of the textures or most of the textures are in place but you'll notice some issues uh first of all our assets are still strangely placed on the map showing up in the lake and in places where they shouldn't be that's because we haven't yet imported our Vector masks okay so what we need to do is import our foliage masks and to do that if you go down to the content browser once again click on our Gaia build folder you'll notice that we have all of our masks imported here as well if we go to our landscape Master instance once again double click on that you'll see all of our materials here but if you scroll down past all of those we have our foliage masks here and these are the foliage masks from the previous build we need to replace these with the ones we just exported so let's do that now so we're just going to import again into a separate folder completely and replace all of our foliage Maps from this folder instead so let's go back into our landscape Master instance and once again they're all numbered so this shouldn't take too long just drag them into place okay once those are all in place hit save and just like that it looks like all of our assets have been placed properly in the scene no more underwater trees everything seems to be in order it's that easy there are a couple more things that I want to bring in first of which is our landscape normal so jumping back over to our landscape instance let's go down to our landscape normal map it's just a bit further down underneath the Global adjustments tab we want to replace that with our new one and that handles a bit of the fine detail in the distance you'll notice a bit more detail on the cliff edges here especially so I add that in just for a bit more detail other than that one more thing that I always make sure to check especially after replacing all the materials is that our rvt color and our rvt height are reading properly from our landscape so I just go to each of them and I will click set balance once again and if you have this box properly around your landscape you should be good to go and it should show up here with all the proper colors I think we're good there one more thing we do have a vector mask that we haven't imported yet that handles our coloration this should be coloring our grass layer but right now it's coloring our base rock layer and that's because we have not properly imported it so let's head back over to our landscape layer to our manage once again and import and scroll all the way back down to the bottom to our GM masks grass masks and these last two are important I set up a grass a color and a grass B color with these red and yellow colors that you can see so let's import those 19 and 20. and these are a bit lighter weight so you can go ahead and import them both oh we need to bring back in our height map file sometimes unreal forgets that you had a height map file just bring it back in so it automatically recognizes the import resolution again and uncheck it go all the way back down and let's import them okay and just like that you can see that the coloration in the grass is fixed let's hop back into selection mode to get a better View so I have it set up in such a way that uh it's a distance blend the assets will come in at a certain distance but if you zoom out further um those just turn into simple colors on the landscape similar to what we had set up in Gaia so uh we have everything in and it's looking pretty good um if there are some parts of the height map that you think are maybe a little bit too strong and could be adjusted that is of course no problem you can always hop into your sculpt layer and smooth out some parts that you think are a little bit too much um do some adjustments add some extra erosion or whatever you feel is appropriate and and say for example you made quite a few changes and you don't want to lose them in the future if you are going back and forth um from Gaia to Unreal to make these adjustments to where your assets are or where your textures are but you made all these changes and re-importing the height map file will completely reset all of the sculpting that you did don't worry there is a way that you can quickly save your progress I go to the export option here I click on height map so name it whatever you need um for example height map edit one that should be fine and hit save make sure height map file is checked and Export single file is checked as well if you don't check single file it will export several files based on the landscape coordinates so that can be a bit messy make sure you have this checked and scroll down to the bottom and click export and it should very quickly export a second height map file that includes all of the various changes that you made into the sculpt so you don't lose any progress important thing to keep in mind quick note before we wrap up the video here um this workflow from Gaia to Unreal uses grass maps to place our foliage very quickly and easily the problem there is that the assets that are placed using grass Maps do not have any Collision so if you need Collision for your project I recommend using Unreal engines procedural foliage tools they're fairly easy to understand but do require some more setup so keep that in mind on the topic of assets if you want to switch out any of these assets for one of your own simply go to landscape landscape materials grass maps and here you'll see all of our landscape grass types if you double click on them you can change out the static mesh here changing the landscape materials is also very easy click on the landscape go down to our Master instance again and all of our landscape materials here are divided by number so if you wanted to change any of these or if you had a different mask that you wanted to bring in and set up from Gaia you can change them here I do have it set up in a way that we are using the Unreal Engine ORD system this is similar to the mega scans texture system and ORD simply stands for ambient occlusion roughness and displacement and these are simply a composite using the RGB channels of the texture to individually represent ambient occlusion roughness and displacement so it's a way to reduce the number of textures and keep your game running a bit more smoothly but simply switch out any of the textures here and the changes will be reflected in the landscape and that just about wraps up the video I know there's quite a few things I did not touch on today especially regarding the landscape material and how things are set up to make it as simple as possible to transfer between Gaia and unreal to be honest there is quite a bit to cover regarding that topic so if you are interested please let me know in the comments I can make a tutorial video on that soon other than that there's a little bit of a bonus in the file if you do end up picking it up on gumroad I left in all of the post process effects that I was playing around with to get the stylized look including the guahara filter here the distance Blended outlines and various other effects like chromatic aberration and cell shading thank you for watching and let me know if you have any questions in the comments

Channel: NateDotFbx

Views: 29,409

Keywords:

Id: hxp5ig2HYzw

Length: 45min 57sec (2757 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 10 2023