Generating Landscape With Heightmaps - #8 Unreal Engine 4 Level Design Tutorial Series

hey guys virtus here and welcome back to my Unreal Engine 4 level design essential series in today's video we are going to be introducing you to height maps inside of Unreal Engine 4 so for those of you that don't know what a height map is already it is essentially a texture which can tell a game engine how to form a landscape inside of that engine so if I take a look at this height map example that I've got here once again this height map example is available to download on my website the link for that is in the description so you guys can follow along with this nice and easy but anyway looking at this height map it is essentially a pre-made landscape and you can see that landscape in the image so you can see I've got some groups here that are already you know extruded a way to give us some rivers we've got some rocks we've got some cliffs and if I import this into Unreal Engine 4 it's going to take all of this detail and the whole shape of this height map and use it to automatically generate a landscape inside of the engine and the reason why you might want to do this is because it's going to save you a whole bunch of time trying to manually sculpt out something like this now the really cool part with Unreal Engine 4 is that once you import a height map like this and generate a landscape with it you can then proceed to further modify this by using the normal sculpting tools which is great but anyway let's get into the fun part and import this into the engine so what we got to do is just make sure we have it open and make sure you have downloaded it from my website if you want to you can even use your own height map it's entirely up to you but what I'm gonna do inside of my engine is quickly go to file new level and just create a default level so we can add a new landscape in here now once again we're needing to go over to the mode panel and go into the landscape mode and then from here with our new landscape instead of going to create new we need to go to import from file instead this is going to allow us to browse to a height map file and use that to Jen our landscape so where it says heightmap file here just press this little box to open it up and then just choose your height map example or which ever height map it is you're trying to use so double click on this and what this is going to do is with the green wire frame that we usually have for a landscape it is going to give you a preview of what's your height map in your landscape is going to look like once it's been generated now as of right now you can see it's way too spiky and it's way too pointy it's just way too tall so this is where we need to adjust the scale now one thing like I said in the previous videos do not change the X or the Z as it can really mess things up the only one you realistically want to change is the Zed so with this set currently it up at 100 maybe changes down to 50 to make it go to half the height personally I still think this is too pointy so I'm gonna change this down to something like 10 and you can see now we've got a more realistic looking landscape and with this I'm gonna leave the rest of the settings as they are as they're going to be automatically taken from the height map file and then just press import give it a couple of seconds to load up and as soon as that is done you can see we have now got a landscape that looks exactly like it does in the image so let me open up this image for example you've got all the rivers here which is quite nice and you can see those have been moved into our landscape and if we get up close and personal you can see we have got lots and lots of detail and if we were to scope this out by ourselves manually it would have taken a whole bunch of time now if you think it's just too tall still with just play around with that said value it's entirely up to you but one thing that I do recommend that you do after importing a height map it's just smooth it because some of these edges are going to look a little bit odd so you can see here some of these edges are just too pointy it just doesn't look right so what I'm gonna do is zoom out real quick and then I'm just going to go to my smooth tour I'm gonna turn down my tool strength nice and low and then just turn the brush size up and just quickly paint over everything on here to just quickly smoothen it out and the reason why I'm using a low tool strength is because I really don't want to take away from the detail of our landscape now when you're doing this you can just quickly brush over the top like I am to save a bit of time but realistically what you should be doing is going in there and just doing the bits that you're a bit too pointy anyway if I quickly press play to jump into my scene here I can run into my landscape and take a look at what it looks like and you can see here it does look quite nice the scale is good however we still need to paint this with the material but you know it's something for another video something that we're gonna be doing later on in the series but anyway guys feel free to look up some other height maps online as you can download some really cool stuff I also have a video on how you can import real-world landscapes into Unreal Engine 4 so for example if you live in England you could bring England into your landscape or part of the States or Canada or wherever you're from anyway that is pretty much everything for this video experiment with height maps thanks for watching stay awesome keep your a ting your boy virtus signing out this video was made possible by my supporters on patreon if you want more videos like this check out my patreon page using the link in the description to stay up to date on new releases make sure you follow us on social media

Channel: DevSquad

Views: 121,816

Keywords: Virtus Education, VirtusEdu, Unreal Engine 4, SDK, Tutorial Series, Level Design UE4, Beginner, Virtus Learning Hub, Epic Games, Level Design, Create a game map, Landscape, Advanced, Level Design Tutorial UE4, Unreal Engine 4 Level Design, Level Design Tutorial Series, Unreal Engine 4 Tutorial Series, Create Video Game Level, Level Editor, Open World Terrain, Landscape Tutorial, Landscape Editor, UE4 Landscape, Terrain Tutorial, UE4, Heightmaps, Generating

Id: E5pHoWfpfYw

Length: 6min 6sec (366 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 03 2017