UCreate - Create a Tropical Island Level in Unreal Engine 5 with Gaea (Full Tutorial)

[Music] [Music] hi everyone my name is m snut and I am the founder of V create today I'm going to be showing you how you can use our newest asset pack for the Unreal Engine to create your own environment I'm going to walk you through the process of creating a height map for the landscape in Gaia and later on I'm going to show you how to quickly generate a procedural jungle Forest as well as share some tips along the way um today tutorial has a bit more lengthy format because I will walk you through the process step by step without any shortcuts so you shouldn't feel disoriented at any point so I invite you to just sit back and enjoy let's get started all right so the first step in creating your own tropical island would be to generate a height map you can of course also scalp your own terrain inside unreal but this is the way we are going to approach this today I'll show you how to do it in Gua but of course you can use other software you can buy a height map on the marketplace but GA is in my opinion a really cool um intuitive and quite easy way and fast way for creating a nice Terrain so I'm going to walk you through the setup I already created for um this island it's the same island as the one you can find in the example level of the pack so I'm not going to explain so much I don't want this to be a Gaia specific tutorial but I'm just going to share with you my own workflow and hopefully this will give you enough confidence to create your own terrain and also if you are wondering if I can download this Gia file yes you can just go Um into the description of this video and I will includ it over there all right so Gia has a note base workflow as you can see and you can access all the notes on the panel on the left and if you hover onto any one of them you'll see a little popup with the short description what the note is basically doing and we have um few categories like Primitives and Geo primi which are generating a base shapes and then basically all of the rest of the settings are a way of manipulating those shapes that's a very simplistic summary of how it all works so anyway let's take a look at the setup so first I started with the simple Mountain Noe and you can access the nodes by hitting Tab and in the search bar you can type M or whatever so to not Bor you so much let's create something slightly different based on the current setup so each note has a property window on the right so we can change the scale Edge height um type of the mountain but let's stick with the seat and just change the seat to something different let's see maybe I want something something soft as the base maybe this will work and then um as the second layer which will add some complexity I use this drift noise and uh I believe those are just the default settings that comes with this note but you can of course change it and then I plug it into the thermal shaper which has this kind of a melting property so if we see the comparison it will make the shape a little bit more soft maybe more natural so then if we use the combine node which is really handy tool we'll see we have a mountain and our additional noise and with the blending method or combined method I use embedded with high ratio and the next step step would be to probably erod it so that the terrain will look more natural so I used uh this wizard erosion but you can also type just you can type erosion and you can use this node which is a little bit more complex and gives you more control but for the just the generic soft erosion I use this one and again I guess I didn't change the the settings so that's that and another note is called rugged which adds even more complexity and I guess ruggedness and the really interesting thing here is the thermal erosion which will nicely flatten the terrain and gives us only the part which is more steep which is perfect for creating a island and this is already looking pretty good but let's take it even further and uh next step is combining of those two layers in a way that leaves the terrain flat only on the edges and to achieve that I use the mask if you open up the properties of the Mask you can click on the edit mask and just paint the mask however you like so over here you'll paint the edges of the island and then plug it into the combined node as a mask and the settings for the combined note is the blend method which is the default one with the 100% ratio all right the next node is the transform node which will let us um move our landscape on the X and Y AIS as well as allow us to rotate it and a very useful thing here is the scale which will help us to shrink down slightly the size of the island so that uh we have more space around it and it's useful in this case because we want to have some additional volume around the island for our seabat but we have this really ugly um kind of a border thing going on so in order to mitigate that we have our zero borders node which will um apply kind of a vignette effect around the island and will help with softening this ugly Edge and as well as um giving the landscape this more gradual softening gradient I guess as the landscape is getting eaten by the sea but this is of course optional you don't have to use it but uh anyway next step would be to create those Cliffs around the island which I think it's really cool and it looks really nice so that's the well not the end result but one step ahead towards our goal so um as you can see I combined the previous note with the FX Noe which will Elevate the whole landscape so if we choose clamp setting and then raise it you'll see the whole landscape is getting lift so let's stick with 5% later on we might want to adjust those settings and the great thing about this whole node workflow is that we can adjust all of those settings non-destructively so we can go back and forth like working in kind of a substance designer style so it's very handy so coming back over here we are combining those two landscape levels with the mask which is comprised of the height information so over here we are masking a particular height level so we will have to adjust it slightly so that we can Encompass this Edge more precisely so let's see maybe move it SL slightly up but not too much um 1% and 2% range is not precise enough so let's type let's try. five let's try with one that's too much 7 well maybe it's going to be enough so we have additional mask that is pluged into the height and with this mask we can control where exactly we don't want the landscape to be raised so to better visualize the thing let's go back to the combine and if we pin it that means that this node will always be um the result of this node will always be displayed and now if we edit our mask by going to the edit mask watch closely what will happen if I paint this mask let's go back so we can control where exactly we don't want to see those Cliffs so that's a little back and forth process cuz we are not drawing over here but on the 2D view so let's see um maybe soften those areas those sticky ones a bit and right now we can also decide where we want to maybe have a little beach or a bigger Beach well actually we can separate those areas so maybe we can have a one big island and the other smaller one why not so let's say we'll have little Bay over here or maybe not maybe over here okay maybe lower this one and at this point we can save it either the original file or as a separate one so that's a saving by increments I use this one okay let's move on because uh we can also as I said we can always come back to those settings and tweak them later down the line when we see the big picture so right now let's just more or less create an approximation of what we are looking for so the next we have a blur note which we cannot view because we have this one being pinned so let's unpin it and let's take a look um the blur note which doesn't work quite all right because I believe we need to adjust the mask for the blur so the wide area represents where the effect of the blur will take place and this mask is driven by the height information so let's maybe first pin our blur note and let's go back to the height and just play with those settings and see what we can find out and again we'll have to play with those small decimal numbers so let's try first5 too much [Music] 2.1 this one maybe we'll have to go over 1% which might be too extreme but uh if we go back to the transform node and maybe increase the scale let's say by 20% well now our mask is being screwed a little bit it but maybe it's not that bad actually let's leave it for now maybe position it little bit [Music] better now a second island synced in but maybe one would be enough okay let's see let's let's move on to the another part which is optional I have combined um our base landscape with the mountain actually two mountains this is another one over here so again an optional step but I think we can add at least one more mountain to create some more interest so this is quite an easy setup as you can see it's just the mountain Noe with transform so that's the original one then I shrink it down and position it and use AO level to increase its height so let's pin this node so that we can see what we are doing and let's transform this little mountain and as you can see we can create very easily additional small island as well if you wanted to but maybe let's just move it back to our Mainland maybe slightly bigger here and of course you can also mess up with those Mountain settings so could be less bulky um you can change the edge so the mountain will be more soft on the edges I guess change the scale of the I guess noise that generates the mountain shape so you have different results this one is not looking so convincing to me let's play with the shape let's stick with this one for now and again we'll first unpin it then move on to the next note and let's transform a mountain looks kind of funny for some reason to me maybe a little bit bigger I don't know guys I'm not quite convinced but I don't want to fix it on being you know too perfect about it cuz later on as you will see very soon the whole thing will start to take shape and way so if we erode it again with the wizard I'll first go back and unpin it with the wizard erosion as I said the whole thing is starting to make more sense and the things will start make even more sense when we plug in the C node which will create those Beach line and you know ocean erosion all around our Island so we can play with the level this is quite interesting but you have to be careful not to you know um find the balance between how the cliffs are looking of course if you if you want to have a cliff but today we are going for this Cliffy terrain so the next settings is short size which will create bigger or smaller well sure maybe this is fine sure height this is the I guess amount of aggressiveness of the ocean erosion maybe this is all right variation will not do that much it will preserve more you know those underlying details of the previous notes well actually we can maybe shrink them down so as you can see the C note handled really well those little imperfection if we go back you'll see you know the Shor line in some areas like over here for example or over here is not looking so natural but again if we apply the erosion and then another basically erosion but of the different type now it all starts to make sense and I think is looking quite interesting okay so we are almost done actually our hide map is I guess ready for export the only thing that we have to do is to generate the Splat Maps which are basically you can think of them as a mask that tells the engine where to apply a particular layer so one layer would be for the jungle [Music] to our tutorial folder and you know maybe before we export it let's handle those Splat maps and Export all the files you know simultaneously so the setup is super easy I just use the height data node which for the jungle layer is set to um the height which would ENC Compass you know the area we where the jungle could occur and Mak sense so that's slightly above the cliffs and then I use it as a mask for the slope information so the slope information is based on our terrain and we are masking the height so that the slope is taken into consideration only this area Mark with white so for the slope I use 25° with small Fallout and for the junk puddles I use the same setup with the only difference is that over here I'm using just 5° cuz you know puddle will not occur on the more steeper areas and and you can you know argue that 5° might be too much but you know we don't have to be 100% realistic and what matters is the final look so that's it um let's mark both for export let's go back to the build so I already name it jungle Splat and jungle puddles and that's it let's click on start build and give guy a few moments all right coming back to Unreal we almost ready to erect our Island but before we create a new level first we have to make sure that we have a two plugins enabled one is the water plugin which will create a nice ocean for us and the second one is called impostor Baker which enables the billboard Foliage for the trees which will save quite a lot of performance for us so after we enable those plugins we have to restart the engine so I already have a pack imported into my new project so if we take a look at the main folder we see we have a example level for the islands and I could just create a completely new level and start from scratch but instead I'd like to duplicate it and use all of the pre-existing lighting setup so that we save some time and we don't have to deal with that so let's call it Island tutorial and let's take a look all right so this is the exact copy of the example level and first thing that we will tackle here is the ocean right now um the water is just the plane with the Ocean material which could work quite all right but in my opinion the ocean that comes from the water plug-in looks more interesting so let's first select the water plane and either delete it or hide it I'm going to delete it and uh I leave this little notification that says turn visibility on so this is exactly what we're going to do so type visibility and tick visible and give it few seconds to compile all right that's better let's delete first the second island or keep it if you like but I'm going to delete it all together and I believe the foliage is still there no all right that's fine but anyway let's delete a Fage volume for this smaller Island and as well as those F cards all right cool and now we are ready to apply our newly created height map so let's go to the landscape mode and import a new file hide map so let's locate it so so I have my Gaia folder in my documents and I save it here so what we are looking for is our height map so let's try it let's import it all right so this is our Island and as you can see we have this funny glitch with the Fage so we'll have to recompile the foliage spawner and spawn all of the foliage again but let's actually first select the Fage and hide it for now and the first thing we going to do is go back to our landscape mode and then go to the paint Tab and let's reset all of the layers and this is true only if you are following my steps which are you know duplicating the pre-existing map if you created your landscape from the scratch then you don't need to do that instead what you'll have to do is go to the material O3 which is the landscape Auto material and fill your landscape so I'm going to get rid of all of those layers which were applied for the previous one so clear it okay so this is a clean slate right now we have only our Auto material applied so let's take a closer look what we've got here so so as you can see the cliff line is way higher than the ocean level which might be not a bad thing actually but I'm going to lower the whole landscape to match the Shor line so let's lower it and as you can see the auto material will place the beach Shoreline automatically so those two sand layers are being mapped onto the landscape based on the hide information so we don't have to you know manually paint all of that although if you prefer more manual approach then you are free to do it in that case you would have to open up the lscape material so we can access the material by selecting the landscape and scrolling back till you see the landscape material so let's expand this window a little bit and you'll see that if we scroll down to the auto material section we have this option of adding additional height blend so with this setting and excluding material to from height blend mask if we unchecked both of them you'll see we have a just simple upto material without this tight Blended sand Shoreline and afterwards you can go to the pain mode of the landscape and choose material four and five for descend and simply play with that but let's go back to our automatic setup and let's take a look you know honestly I really like the results I didn't expect it to look that good but we have some problems with this area where the sand doesn't quite make sense being here so either we go back to Gaia and adjust the height of this Terrain in this area in particular or just simply fill this area with another layer but we have this little problem over here the ocean is breeding through so maybe going back to Gaia and making few adjustments would be a better approach all right guys I reimported the twied landscape so I think the landscape is looking quite spicy at this moment um if you take a look at our Cliffs you will see those glitchy places and this is just the normal stuff when using the generated hide Maps so we can either go to the landscape mode and sculpt smooth those areas so either we can do that or we can edit our height map in Photoshop or you know or something and we could smooth it out but this is usually not an ideal approach because the terrain will lose also some detail and usually this is not what we are looking for but you know this is not that painful to you know go around the island and just tweak it and polish it and maybe you know manually add some interest to the landscape to complement this generative approach so we have our Island and the next step would be to add some foliage but before we spawn our forest we would probably like to apply a different landscape layers besides just this grass which is fine but if you want to have this um tropical jungle we would have to import our Splat Maps if you remember remember what we did before so next to the height map we exported those two Splat maps for the jungle and jungle puddles but before we import them we would have to edit them first I use Photoshop for that to basically adjust the levels so that we have almost only values between zero and one so by default the exported map will be a little bit grayish and this is not ideal because the gray means it's the blend of the black and white so that our layers would be just Blended together and we want to make them look more distinguished so I'm going to crank up maybe not too much but quite substantially up so I'm going to do that with all of them and now we are ready to import the Splat Maps so in landcape mode we go to the paint Tab and what we are looking for is first layer 06 which stands for our jungle Forest so we're going to right click on this layer and choose import from the file and expand that and select our layer 06 and choose our jungle split map for that and for the jungle puddles if we like to to use this that would be our layer 8 so that's puddles and hit import all right cool all right so as you can see we have our jungle layer applied and the auto material handles the procedural generation of the ground underbrush as well as the grass which is really handy and save as a lot of precious time so now we are ready to grow our forest but before I'm going to do this and show you how to do that I'm going to clear some clutter over here so let's get rid of all of those placed meshes which we don't need right now as well as for cards let's actually hide them for now all right cool so this is our Clean Slate so to use the procedural foliage volumes to generate the forest we would have to first go to the edit and editor preferences and in the search bar we going to be looking for you guess it procedural foliage so tick it close it and if we hit G the previously placed procedural foliage volume should be over here and the second one for the beach rocks cool but if you are starting from scratch and you have not duplicated the pre-existing level you would have to go to Simply window and then Place actors and search for procedural foliage volume and drag and drop it onto the scene and afterwards adjust the the scale of it so that would be roughly probably around 500 by 500 unreal units depending of the size of your landscape and then we need to choose the foliage spaer which in this case would be tropical forest and all of the procedural forage spawners are located in the procedural forage folder so one is for tropical forest and the other one for the beach rocks so make sure you have tropical forest selected over here and the final step would be to just hit res simulate and this process may take quite a while actually maybe even more than 10 minutes and this is because the jungle Forest has I think more than 60 you know trees and plants so this is a lot of complexity to be handled so just be patient okay guys guys welcome back after the short break so this is our lovely forest and as you can see the foliage is being spawned according to the landscape levels so this is a grass and if we go further to the Jungle layer we'll see this thick jungle Forest so this is really really cool and just like that in a you know few minutes we basically have this really dense environment which feels quite alive without you know needing to manually do all of that but uh if we take a look at our Mountain we'll see that the trees are spawning also at the top which probably isn't the ideal situation so we can go to the foliage mode and select you know the tree for example and sometimes we cannot just select it um this is I think a bug on ui5 because on ui4 um the Fage mode works flawlessly almost so I didn't find any other better solution for that than just restart the editor so I'm going to do this okay so let's try again to select no let's select all of the foliage and go back here okay and we can just start to delete those bigger trees which doesn't quite make sense being there yeah this is a little bit problematic situation because after selecting just a few of them I'm not able to do it again let's select all of the foliages go to the foliage mode no it doesn't work like that so usually what I would do is unfortunately just you know delete a few trees in key areas and just keep resetting the project so this is one you know quote unquote solution and the other one that could be maybe better is to either um you know position the procedural foliage volume um slightly down so that if we go to Left view if we position it in a way that will leave the mountain top not covered then the foliage would not spawn there but this is also not an ideal situation because in that case all of those smaller bushes and rocks and plants would not be spawned here so you know this is little bit of a tradeoff with the procedural approach maybe in later versions of unreal this thing will be fixed but for now this is what it is we could also go to the window and place actors and search for procedural uh folage blocking volume and then drag and drop it onto the scene and you know adjust the scale so maybe 50 by 50 by 20 by 2020 and we can place those blocking volumes so that if we recompile the procedual volume for the jungle Forest the forest would not be spawned inside those volumes but overall um I think it's not that bad anyway so I'm quite satisfied with the result and maybe just for a little fun we can spawn inside the forest and just walk around so let's choose spawn in the current camera location and hit play awesome really cool when I am creating those words I really appreciate this you know immersive mode of just walking around around and get the feel of the environment so we have our forest and next thing we can do is to go back to the procedural Foliage for the beach rocks so that's this square and scroll down and re simulate the procedural rocks and this should take you know half a minute it would be much much faster than spawn in a forest okay so this is our nice Coastal area really nice and uh again I use this procedural volume that encompasses the whole island in all places but if you want to have a you know areas where the beach would not be covered with those rocks then just simply you know again place the procedural foliage blocking volumes or you could also um split those volumes onto a smaller you know chunks so you would go back to the scale and let's say type 200 100 by 200 so that would be a smaller volume and you know place it over here then place it you know maybe over here and just like that that you know the drill I'm going to undo it so we are basically done um this is the part where we could art direct also the whole scene so for example if we select the directional light we could change the position of our sun so you would be looking for the side of the mountain that you would like to you know expose to the light and if you're going to move the sun you would probably also want to move move the sky sphere accordingly so that it matches the position of the sun so let's rotate it into the direction of our [Music] sun maybe here and also um the very cool way to enhance the atmosphere of the scene is placing those fog cards so I'm going to make them visible and maybe delete the rest and just keep one and then position it scale it rotate it it's really um a nice touch which adds some realism um to the landscape it's very subtle it's hard to notice almost but it's there sometimes we may not see something you know consciously but our unconscious mind is picking up on those little details so those little things that are not so obvious are playing quite a big role so I'm going to place those fog cards in different areas and if you like to control the thickness of those little clouds you can go to the details panel and open up the material instance for the F card and you know there are a few settings but the one that you'll use the most is probably the F opacity so if we go to 3 or 4 um the effect is much more pronounced now it's probably too overboard so I'm going to stick with 01 and after all this is a sunny day so we would not expect to have a Fick clouds anyway and the nice thing about this F cards is that if we come close to them they will start to disappear so according to the camera position their visibility is dimin finishing and I think this is a really nice example looking at this site what difference it could make if we enable or disable those F cards again it's not much at the first glance but it definitely adds some depth and interest and I think the last thing that I would like to share with you and show you is a little gam playay level design um element so if we go back to landscape and then paint mode and then scroll down to the material 07 this is the landscape level that will paint the um Forest path so let's shrink down the brush size tool strand is fine so maybe I'm going to first um hide the fol so I'm going to select it and hit H to hide it and let's say we would like to guide the player to some areas so let's go back to the pain mode and maybe first decrease the strength so that the path would be less visible over here and as it climbs up and go to the Jungle it's going to be more prominent and visible Maybe let's adjust the brush size I don't want this puff to be too wide so maybe 200 which stands for 2 m would be more appropriate and while holding shift and painting I can paint back or erase this layer okay and the auto material is handling those small ground foliage so that wherever I place the path the grass would not appear there we would have just you know some Roots small plants and you know debr okay I think this is enough for the demonstration so for the forest to respect our new layer um let's unhide the by hitting control and H we would have to spawn again the jungle Forest so I design this procedural volume in a way that would not make the tree spawn at our path so hold on a second I'm going to re simulate the thing all right so our forest is ready and uh as you can see the trees are not being spawned on the forest path really cool I really like this very consciously lighting really nice so the procedural foliage spawners are designed in a way that respects the different landscape layers so you would not have a trees on the forest path as well as you know on the sand and the procedur Fage spawner for the beach rocks also respects that so it would not spawn rocks in a forest or on the grass so you can really design your landscape almost in full procedural mode without having to spend so much time in manual work and instead just complete you know building your level in basically no time and before we wrap this up I actually would like to show you just two little more things I think they're important enough to highlight them so I'm going to show you another landscape layer so go to the pain mode and uh I design a third bit sand layer which going to place automatically if you're going to paint this you know those little foliages as well as those dead Palm leaves so it's really cool addition to paint this layer around those coconut palms that's a you know another Touch of realism so that's that and if we open up the content drawer and go to the meses tab and type Cliff you'll see we have a different type of cliffs so we have those jungle Cliffs as well as those Coastal Cliffs so I'm going to place them and maybe scale them up position a little bit bit and let's try another one and this one so if I go closer you will see how they look up close so this is a nice way to enhance the coastal area and if you want to go for the realism you could also go to the landscape mode and then sculp tab and sculp maybe increase the brush size first and scalp little bit you know the seab beled around them like that I'm not going to do this perfectly it's just a little demonstration for you and I'm going to show you just very very quickly the other Cliffs so these are the jungle Cliffs and maybe the good place to place them is next to this big Cliff so just drop them and as as you can see they are already covered with plants and foliage so you don't have to decorate them manually each time you place them so this is you know another handy stuff in your creative Arsenal so you have quite a lot of you know options to design your level all right guys that's it for this tutorial thank you for sticking by to the end of this video and if you are interested in purchasing the pack you you will find all the links in the description and I encourage you to comment you know share something ask any question you like and please also like And subscribe to this video to help me create more content like this in the future for you and until next time have a great day cheers guys see you

Channel: Michał Sornat CG

Views: 11,022

Keywords: Unreal Engine, Tutorial, Gaea, Tropical, Island, Asset Pack, Unreal Marketplace, Heightmap, Procedural foliage, UE5, Vegetation, Landscape, Terrain, Ucreate, GameDev, Unreal Engine Assets, Game Development Resources, 3D Design, Game Environment Assets, Game developer, Landscape Assets, 3D Modeling Tools, Game Asset Pack, Level Design Resources, Game Design, Procedural, 3D Props, Forest, VFX

Id: aa-gQ0GOcyw

Length: 50min 54sec (3054 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 28 2024