Introduction to Landscapes - #6 Unreal Engine 4 Level Design Tutorial Series

hey there guys virtus here and welcome to my video where we are going to be showing you and introducing you to landscapes inside of Unreal Engine 4 now Unreal Engine 4 is capable of making really beautiful landscapes and that's everything ranging from small details landscapes to vast open-world landscapes as well and when you set up a landscape it's really important to set it up in the right way with optimization in mind now if you take a look at the clips running in the background it's gonna show you just what Unreal Engine 4 is capable of and while this is running I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about the two ways that you can make a landscape and then we're gonna move on to Unreal Engine 4 and getting started with that so the first one is by creating a landscape inside of a 3d modeling package like Maya however if you wants to do that if you have a larger landscape you'd have to break it down into loads of sections manually and then make the low polygon versions of each one of those terrains manually and it just takes a whole bunch of time now with Unreal Engine false landscape editor what this allows us to do is to essentially just go ahead and start sculpting scup you know start painting and literally after that the engine is going to do the rest for you and that's part of the reason why I like Unreal Engine 4 so much so having said that we're gonna get you started in Unreal Engine 4 creating your first terrain or rather looking at the settings to create your first terrain as they are really important anyway without further ado let's dive into the engine so to start off with landscape you need to go and go over to the landscape mode and you can do this by clicking the little landscape icon at the top in the modes panel and you can also access this by holding down shift and free at the same time anyway so once you're in here by default it's gonna take you into the management panel this is going to allow you to manage your terrain or create a new one now we haven't got a terrain in our scene at the moment so it's gonna automatically take us to new landscape and then from here we can define a bunch of settings for this landscape which are going to define essentially how it's set up how it should be optimized and how the engine should build it now if you take a look in our viewport if you just zoom out a little bit you can see a little green grid and this is representing what your terrain is going to look like when you go and grate this now don't worry if it's too big or too small right now this is something that we're going to be changing using all of these settings and we're not actually going to be creating the terrain in this episode more so we are going to be focusing on understanding what all of these settings do so that when you do set up your terrain that it's set up in the most efficient and optimized way possible because a massive misconception when it comes to making terrains is people just make it as big as they can and then once they start putting foliage and other stuff on there it just takes up too much processing power and you just cannot use the level so having said that let's go through some of these settings so starting up from the very top we have got our management mode our sculpting mode in our painting mode now these are pretty straightforward so management is just editing and defining the settings for your landscape sculpt and paint are currently grayed out and the reason why is because we haven't actually got a Terranea until we hit create sculpting will allow you to sculpt and shape your terrain and painting is going to allow you to paint different materials and textures onto your terrain to put down things like grass rocks and that kind of stuff but anyway moving on the next thing is we've got two options we've got great new which is gonna create you a flat terrain based on the settings that we put down here or we've also got import from file and this is going to allow us to use a height which is pretty much just a texture which is going to predetermine the height of your terrain now I already have a couple of videos on this such as importing real world locations grabbing the height map and bring it into Unreal Engine 4 the link for that is in the description I definitely advise you go and check that out but anyway I'm not gonna worry about height maps just now that would be a whole nother video of its own so moving on down from there you've got your material your material is going to contain a bunch of different textures which you're going to be painting on to your landscape so this material will contain the texture for rock sand mud and whatever else you want to put on there and then your painting mode is just going to change through the different textures in your material and just paint it on wherever you want it you know where if you want it to go into so that's pretty straightforward we're not going to put a material in there just yet as we haven't really looked at materials just yet but we can add that in later on and it is something that we're going to be touching up on briefly as part of this series so the next thing is our location rotation and scale these are pretty straightforward location is just your location and the level and as I use the transformation tools to move this side to side up and down and stuff you can see it's being reflected here now generally I try not to change these I try to leave these on 0 0 and 0 so our landscape is in the center of the level the rotation generally you won't want to rotate that but most importantly do not change the scale as it can really hurt the quality of your as it can really hurt the quality of your landscape or it can also just make it you know there's lots of things that can even hurt the quality or it can hurt the performance just leave it where it is and then instead just use the sections the components and the resolution to control the quality instead now moving on having said that the section the components the number of components and the resolu is where it's sort of where it gets a little bit more complicated so just bear with me a moment and we're trying to explain it as slowly as I can so first things first the one you've got here is your section size now a section is pretty much one of these big little squares here and you can see they've got little mini squares inside of that now if I change this down to something like 7 by 7 and if i zoom in here you can see each one of these sections has now got 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 and we have small sections now one thing I do want to mention with this is if you have smaller sections it's gonna allow the engine to have more control with the LEDs and this is essentially going to be raising or lowering the complexity of that section now if you want a large world I would instead use larger sections as it's gonna be less of a hit on the performance that way if you have a small world using smaller sections like 7 by 7 is not going to be a problem but if you reduce this you're gonna have a little bit more detail which is quite nice now for the purpose of this video I'm just going to put it to something which is relatively average which is 63 by 63 now moving on we have got sections per component and this is also quality related so a component is basically a section or one or a section but a part a larger part of your landscape and this larger part can have either one section which is one of these big squares or it can have two by two so if I show you a component now you can see you've got these big lines here and then you've got the four sections in between it now generally for mobile and smaller world's and something you want to be simple I would just use one by one but if you want to have a bit more detail and you might want to work with four by four it's entirely up to you personally I just keep it simple one by one and that is it so moving on the next one is your number of components this is relatively straightforward this is pretty much just defining the size of your landscape so right now 8 by 8 goes up to here if I set this to 12 by 12 you can see it gets bigger 15 by 15 it's getting bigger and so on and so forth and this isn't changing the size of the sections just the number of these components rather and that's how you change the scale and like I said earlier try not to touch the scale settings over here as it can hurt the performance or the quality of your terrain and then lastly below that is your overall resolution now your overall resolution is essentially just the quality of your landscape and when I say quality I mean by the vertices now if you have more of these it's going to be a higher hit on the performance if you have lower less of them it's gonna be a little bit better for your computer so if you have a large open world what I would say is don't have your resolution too high I usually like to leave it on the default settings and that's all good for me but it is one thing you might want to play around with when creating larger landscapes anyway moving on from this it's now time to create that landscape and doing it is really simple from here you've got two buttons you've got great and you've got fill world fill world is going to pretty much fill your entire level using these settings apart from that the number of components and stuff and then create is going to create it using these exact settings so if we press create give it a couple of seconds to import this landscape the little green grid is going to disappear and then it's going to unlock the sculpt and the paint management sections and from there we'll also have a big grey checkerboarded landscape now you can see this is just loaded in and it's taking me straight to the scoping mode sculpting mode and this is our landscape and if I wanted to could then start painting on my mountains and stuff but that is for another video now this checkerboarding effect is just the default material inside of Unreal Engine 4 because we haven't applied like a rock a grass a mud or anything like that and also these lines these sort of grid to the growing of it and nothing to worry about IVA once we build our lighting that will go away but for now this is what the base or the foundation for your landscape should start to look like anyway guys I'm gonna end off the video here if you're more interested in going on to building your landscape a little bit more make sure you do head off to the next video but anyway once again thanks for watching stay awesome keep creating 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: 299,302

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, Project Setup, Epic Games Launcher, Level Editor, Open World Terrain, Landscape Tutorial, Landscape Editor, UE4 Landscape, Terrain Tutorial

Id: OWOlYoI-3tY

Length: 11min 59sec (719 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 01 2017