How to Make Mountains in Unreal Engine 5

yo what's happening guys uh today I wanted to go over my process for making mountains and other Landscapes and environments in Unreal Engine 5. we'll start with the Landscaping brushes to model any terrain you can think of and then after that probably the most important step is going to be painting and blending any combination of textures you want on to your landscape so the first step in this process in any process like it for me I jump right into pure ref and using Pinterest and Google I'll compose a board of reference images that I can refer to throughout the project I always make sure that these images are enough to get me inspired and excited about starting the project next we want to launch Unreal Engine 5 in my case but this will work with pretty much any version of Unreal Engine to my knowledge blank game template assign a location and create the project once we're inside the engine as usual I like to do some housekeeping before I really get rolling inside the content browser you can right click within the content folder and create two new folders one I'll call levels and the other alcohol materials and I colored these blue you can color them whatever color you like after that we'll create a blank Bank level and load that up we'll go to window environment mixer and add each one of these items to create some basic lighting then I like to go to edit project settings and disable auto exposure finally edit plugins and attempt to enable a few plugins on every project that's render movie queue water and water extras and the landmass plugin I enable all those at the beginning so I only have to restart once then after we restart the engine like it prompts us to do in the bottom right we can get started okay go from selection mode to landscape mode to begin the process of sculpting your environment on the left hand side of the screen a window should appear with the settings for the landscape we're about to spawn in I typically will change the resolution to a thousand by a thousand but I'm not a hundred percent certain on the function of any of these options really and I'd encourage you to experiment but once you're done tweaking just hit create now that we have our canvas in the world we can begin sculpting the particular process I use is actually relatively specific and doesn't really change regardless of what I'm trying to achieve first I start with the standard sculpting brush and by pressing the left Mouse button down we could begin to add some clay most all of the brushes I use I keep the settings at 1.0 for fall off and about 0.3 for strength but definitely experiment for different looks my goal with the sculpting brush is to Simply get a form that is in the ballpark of How High the peak of the structure will be I then change to the flat brush and by clicking on the highest point we can then drag and spread out our clay until it is even flat and has the overall Mass we're looking for basically in this instance I felt like making a volcanic type Mountain thingy so I hovered the mouse over what I intended to be the center of the peak switch to the Eraser brush and just clicked one time to form the mouth from this point ninety percent of the work is going to be done with the erosion brush with the erosion brush selected we can begin to mold the clay and start shaping the look we're going for don't hesitate to experiment with the other brushes like the smooth brush to smooth portions out for some variation but for the most part I find the erosion brush to do most of the heavy lifting and ultimately provides a very realistic look once I'm finishing up sculpting the main structure I'll typically take the noise brush and add some Randomness as grooves and Hills to avoid having a perfectly flat floor on the rest of the landscape once I have a look I'm starting to like I can then exit landscape mode and enter back into selection mode and of course you can return to landscape mode and make further edits at any time now for the landscape material I'll create a new material within our material folder that we set up at the start of the video I'll just call it m underscore landscape and open it up once inside the material editor I can right click and search for a landscape layer blend node and then hit enter with that node selected I can navigate over to the details panel on the left hand side and start adding to the array that is going to contain text strings that will represent my different textures I'll press the plus button three times and name them Rock lava rock and ground rock I then need four copies of the layer blend node one for each of the texture samples and two for the stack textures and at this point there are many different places to get quality textures online I mean there's textures.com polygon I think but quixel Bridge is a no-brainer now once I have the textures on quicksil bridge I can drag in the diffuse normal and the Stacked texture that are provided by qixel for each material and I can drag them in the material editor with the stack textures their data is typically split by channel for instance with these quixel Bridge Stacks the red Channel goes into the ambient occlusion and the green goes into the roughness I know that's a little confusing but just stay with me from this point it's simply a matter of connecting all three diffuse textures of our three materials into the first layer blend and then connecting that output to base color all three normal maps from our three different materials into the second layer blend then connecting the output to the normal map all three stack textures the red channel into the third layer blend connecting the output to ambient occlusion and the blue channel into the last layer blend node with the output going into roughness voila now we have three different textures fully set up that we can blend between with a brush the only thing we're missing is a means to adjust the tiling of these textures as needed sometimes they'll come in too big or too small we really need to efficient way to change these this is going to come in the form of right clicking and searching for texture coordinates and press enter make four copies of the texture coordinate node and each text recording node will connect to all three texture samples that make up one of our materials with any texture node selected in the details panel we can bring the tiling to 0.1.01 or really any other number out there and it will change how the textures are tiled on our landscape and with that we are completely set up here we go top left and I'll go from selection mode to landscape mode and the third tab is where we'll paint in our materials now this is where the textures are supposed to appear but you'll see there's nothing here that's because there's a strange bug with Unreal Engine 5 that makes it so the materials don't show up until we reload the level so we can just control shift s to save all on the project and that should do the trick once they've appeared there's this little plus sign next to each one that if we click we can create the assets the paintbrushes need and save them and we should be good to go now it's simply grabbing a paintbrush experimenting with different brush settings and making something cool you can blend all three materials seamlessly and and just go crazy with it you can simply click on the different textures to select which ones you wish to paint with I hope this helped guys talk to you all next time foreign [Music] thank you

Channel: Creativekit

Views: 12,092

Keywords: unreal engine, unreal engine 5 tutorial, unreal engine 5 beginner tutorial, unreal engine tutorial, environment tutorial, unreal engine 5 environment tutorial for beginners - creating an island

Id: hwV3v8NZ2Hs

Length: 6min 32sec (392 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 07 2023