How To Make A Massive Open World Map In Unreal Engine 4

hello guys smart Polly here welcome back to another tutorial today I will show you guys how to create a massive open world map in Unreal Engine 4 we will use world machine to create an export a tiled landscape we will then import all of the maps we made into our neural Engine 4 and finally use world composition tool to create a massive open world map before we get started 80% of you guys I'll watch my videos aren't subscribed so make sure you hit that sub button hit that Bell icon as well because you do not want to miss some of the new videos I'm working on so for this video what you want to make sure you have is world machine professional version if you don't have the professional version don't worry you can just follow along I will provide the project files for the map however I do suggest watching how to create the landscape and world machine just for future reference go ahead and open up world machine really there are two types of massive open world maps that we can make a large island or continent that has an ocean or we can just make a normal landscape that without an ocean those are basically the two types of open world maps that we can make before you started let's talk about size real quick so Unreal Engine can support pretty large Maps as well to put it in perspective I've worked with maps I have over 700 landscapes or levels basically for signal player there is a is a limit on how large your map can be in a Malaysian and for multi player there really isn't a limit either but it's just a bit glitchy on religion has what's called world origin rebasing which I will talk about more in depth later but this is what basically allows open world landscapes to be possible within the engine now I will show you how to make it massive open world map in world machine we'll start by creating a mask for our landscape with the advanced pro one selected go ahead and go to your layout view and then you're gonna see here attach new layout as mask input okay and then what you want to do is click invert values and then you're gonna see everything is a sort of brown color so now we have to draw our so for good reference you can use Google Images here for fantasy map and there are some good ideas for general shapes on what sort of continent you should draw I basically use this fantasy map right here and I'm going to draw this continent right here we'll start by clicking on the polygon right here and then we can start making this shape by just matching up the squares here to these squares you so when you're done use right-click to create the landscape and then you can double click on this and you can here see some of the properties here we can adjust the height the fall-off all that stuff so one thing you can use is use break up this will help make it look jagged and now the size or landscape is 8 kilometers by 8 kilometers this little box but to make it larger than that we want to make it the entire size of this landscape it's about 7 by 7 and so we can go ahead 7 times 8 which is 56 kilometres by 56 and then for our resolution here you want to choose any one of these resolutions here I'm going to use 1009 by one thousand nine the of course you're gonna do a higher detail one but it's going to take longer to bake and export for example I've done you know 700 tiles that has the export at 4,000 33 by 4033 and it took over three days to export ok so just click OK and then you can see the box right here we can either move this up here or we can go into overview you click this little box to move our box down whichever works right now our landscape is about 56 kilometres by 56 kilometers so it's a seven by seven tiled landscape which really isn't that big of course you can always scale this up and make it way larger than this you can make it you know 10 by 10 20 by 20 30 by 30 to do that you would go into the project settings here and then go to tile build options and then tiles per side and want to change that to our 7 by 7 so we made sure that ours is 56 divisible by 8 which is 7x7 Todd landscape high-resolution we're also gonna have to change this custom and I want to do here 1009 so before we export this we just need to do a few more things let's see what it looks like you just click our height output here and click build click OK I and that's already looking pretty good well we want to add a coastal erosion here that way we can get some nice beaches and we also want to click the guide level to show our water and maybe we'll have to adjust our water as well so let's go ahead and add some beaches so go back to our device view go to natural coast erosion you and then I could go 3d view click on a coaster ocean set water level to guide we have a few options here we can choose our beach size okay go ahead and build it and see what we have alright so I just played around with the settings a little bit I adjusted my height to 1116 meters and then I also adjusted the height here and then I also mess with the erosion to get this little terrain of course if you don't have world machine you know was download this link will be in the description below before we export this weekend a couple maps for our texture duplicate the height output and then when you need a selector select a slope and we also want alright so when you need is a select height node right here and then copy paste the height output hook those up actually my back to the coastal erosion and we need one more than the height output needs to be PNG set that to our desktop make a new folder called open world map and name this and okay okay and then for this one set this one to dark grass make sure that's PNG okay for this one I wanted to set it to the same folder name this light grass PNG and then the last one we wanted to set this to our export folder and then name this to rock and make sure it's PNG click OK alright so for our sand height make sure something like this okay for our dark grass you want to drag the wetness map height field from the quick texture into the mask input and then we're gonna drag these things up just like that all right something like that okay click okay and then for our light grass you want to adjust slope something like that okay rock want to adjust this right here to the very peaks of the mountains well rock or light grass our dark grass and then our sand and then for our height output got to adjust this to raw 16 set that to our output folder and we can name this to our open world and then all of these are set we can go ahead and make sure that our child build options or seven by seven one thousand and nine by one thousand and nine let's go ahead and save this just in case and then we can go ahead and hit this tiled build right here okay following outputs are enabled so we got all these outputs like yes and it's going to take it a little bit depending on your landscape size alright once it's finished you'll see build completed successfully so we click OK I want to see here a bunch of maps you can delete all these bitmaps we don't need any of these so you can either make a brand new project or you can import it into the project that you have what I would recommend is you import it to a community ocean project a free infinite ocean plugin I've made a video about it previously we just go ahead and clone and download it for whatever version you want change the version right here you can always use the free water planes here it on the marketplace you go to free Epic Games content and use their water shaders alright so if you're following along with the ocean project go first when you first opened it up it's gonna take you to an island map that'll look something like this the colors might not look the same because I have you know a different sky and a different color for my ocean all I want to go ahead and do let's go ahead and select this delete that save that okay go over to your content browser under your maps you're not gonna have all these maps here but basically what you want to do is duplicate your island map the one that you have open the default map um that way if you know if you mess up your map you always have a backup head and make a new folder you can name it whatever open world map tutorial move that new map right into there okay so once that's in there we can go ahead and open that up so before we do anything here what we want to do is actually go ahead and make ourselves a new landscape material so we go to right-click material and then we'll just name this four layer and landscape mat and what we want to do is right click add landscape or blend and then we want four layers okay so we just hit that little plus button four times go ahead and add that to the base color these are all down arrows to expand each one want this to be wrong and then change that to alpha blend next one will be flight grass that will be a weight blend a next one will be the dark grass again weight blend and the last one will be sand which will be a weight blend okay we can duplicate this again drag that into our normal add some constants here go ahead and duplicate those roughness 2.3 what we need here to continue our sub textures if guys don't have any textures you know is download the ones in the project files that I will provide which are basically just the starter content rock sand texture is provided with the ocean project but I'll also leave it in the project files that you can download go ahead and drag these right in get these sandy and then the sand dunes normal right here go ahead and drag that right there of course you can always use any other textures for example the brushfire I owe has a really nice grass texture which is the one I used in the thumbnail let's add some more room here okay so we got a rock texture and that grass texture so let's hook up our rock took our grass then our rock and then our grass so far grass texture here we want to add and then drag us often at a vector a parameter so allow us to change the tent of our grass for a darker grass all we need now is a landscape layer coordinates this will allow us to control the tiling put that into rock and then the rock normal right here copy paste that one for the grass right there and then for the normal right there and one more for the sand right here for the sand right there okay so very basic material I say for our rock we can change that to about 100 for our grass we change that to 300 for our sand we can change that to you 200 ok so save that before we import you want to go to world settings and go right here to enable world composition and you always want to make sure that your level is in a separate folder it just save current alright now what we can do is go ahead and go to our window levels window and then right under here you click right here and pour tiled landscape okay so we'll get this little window open right here you want to select Titan app tiles go to our desktop go to open little Dan happen and then what you want to do is select all of these files right here all of our tiles not the PNG files click open right and you can see the material right here we want to select our for a layer landscape mat the one that we just made here we see our rock like grass star grass and so I'm going to have to select the weight map tiles so for Rock click that go back to our desktop and then this is for the rock so search rock okay ctrl-a open those 49k fit like grass right there go back to the folder and search up light grass kate control a open for a dark grass like wait map files grass control a click open and then force in let's go back to the full name search ups and control a open that make sure that's all 49 because remember our landscape is a seven by seven tiled so we're gonna mess with the see usually around 70 that way it's not too steep okay you can always play with this and Riaan port it again again see what settings are best for you then we're gonna hit the import alright and depending on your landscape sighs you know if you have a twenty by twenty or ten by ten sixteen by sixteen it's gonna take a while to import all right so now we can see there's a bunch of levels here so we can go ahead and click right here actually summons world composition this little button and then when you see here usually it'll open up another window like this where you see all of your levels right here and you can see as you select that all the levels will select here so just go ahead and drag select them all and click load I guess doc this in the bottom same with that one right there okay so we can fly around our level here and when we see our little guy in the bottom left update okay so let's go ahead and check out our landscape alright so as we can see we need to do a lot of work on the texture okay all right so we're back I just had to figure out a few things a few things that were wrong with the landscape that had black spots basically in the world machine when you're exporting you want all of your layers to be covering entirety of the landscape that way there's no information that's entirely black that way when you import it to unreal each part of the landscape want at least have some sort of paint to it so that it won't be black see the landscape doesn't look too great because of some of the textures obviously this green color texture I couldn't really work with it too much here's my material how did a few vectors here to try and get the color to different tint again doesn't look the very best as you can see the detail right here looks pretty nice but again these are a lot of work but yeah so basically when you import your landscape into your map what you want to do is grab the ocean the swim volume and then any of the boats that you want and basically what you want to do is position it drag it up and down you can hold down the shift button to go with it and then position it so that it's lined up with the coast line here and then of course you can also scale up this skybox here if it's too small and then in our world composition tab here what you want to do is drag your landscape and center it right here you can Center your landscape right there well you can also do is you can take your swim volume and resize that to the size of the map that way your players can swim if you're going to have a massive landscape larger than this yellow box what you want to do is you want to do a few things you want to enable world origin rebasing right here world origin rebasing basically that will shift the world origin according to your player so if your player is way on the edge of the map it'll shift the origin to that player and this will solve a lot of the physics-based issues with having a massive open world map okay so that's mainly for single player for multi player to enable world origin shifting you need to go to your project settings and then you want to search world origin rebasing here under Network double check just want to check that and then save your project okay so that will allow when you are running a dedicated server when one player runs pass the world border the origin will shift for them on multi player and then another thing is there is a kill Z or a kill zone basically when the player goes pass a certain point they will die we want to disable that so can I think you can just delete this right here Killzone damage type and ways if your pond does you know if you're just traveling around your massive landscape you know you're sailing your boat around in the distance and you just randomly die then you know you need to do something about your kill zone okay so you can see all the levels it was loading four levels at a time if you want it to a render larger than that distance then four tiles distance you want to basically change the streaming size so I had a nuclear right here my lair you want to change the streaming distance here play around with it I'm going to do two hundred thousand crate and then select that sign it layer my layer okay so that will get rid of that categorize and put it on my layer and then when you hit play you can see it's gonna load a lot more so this is really helpful if you say you're adding more tiled landscapes here like a mountain another island here I like a volcano here and you want them all to load in from a far distance that's where you'd add more layers with larger streaming distance that way the player can see it from far well anyways that's gonna be it for this tutorial I know this isn't the best looking landscape but of course you can always switch out the materials here like I said I reckon always recommend the brushfire I owe material and a better Rock material than the ones here anyways guys I hope you guys enjoy the video if you guys have any questions about this make sure you leave it in the comments down below and yeah that'll be it for this video make sure you guys like the video if you liked it and I'll see you guys in the next one

Channel: Smart Poly

Views: 193,244

Keywords:

Id: HQUC0Gejmo4

Length: 24min 2sec (1442 seconds)

Published: Tue May 19 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/DOHayes]

Great tutorial, looks fairly clean for the effort!

[u/abiscuitabaskets]

Looks great, been hoping for something like this. Do you have a link for project files? I haven’t watched it yet

[u/Mordynak]

No shade intended. But in the thumbnail you say 100x100km. In the video, the landscape you create is 56x56km. And you only set it to generate 7x7 tiles at 1009.

Then when you import the landscape, you left the x and Y scale at 100. So the landscape you ended up with was just a touch over 7x7km.

The default world bounds in Unreal is 20km. So a 7x7km map is nowhere close to requiring origin rebasing.