UE4: Easy 5-Step Process for Hand-Sculpting Perfect Landscapes Entirely in UE4 - Tutorial

in this tutorial I'm gonna show you how to manually hand sculpt good-looking landscapes entirely inside Yui for no external software required and you can get very good results if you know the tools and you know the steps in which those tools should be used and this is what we're going to create at the end and this entirely was hand sculpted inside you before this took me about thirty minutes and you can do this yourself by following this tutorial and five simple steps so let's go ahead and get started here I have a default scene open that comes with you before and the only thing I changed is I updated skylight to be stationary and I inserted a porous process volume to disable auto exposure or i adaptation by setting minimum and maximum brightness values to one and I enabled this post process volume unbound that means the sports process volume is universal and you don't have to be inside it for it to take effect and I have a video equipped up that will be available in the blog post and in the description of the video all right let's go ahead and create a new landscape switch over to landscape mode shift three I'm going to move this landscape down so it's below this ground plane and I'm going to keep this ground plane for skill reference for the landscape size I'm not going to change anything here I'm going to keep the default settings and have this default size that Yuri 4 gives me and then I'm going to hit create we're gonna get these lines all over the landscape and it's easily fixable by either building your lighting or our quick effects is to change your directional light to movable and then you can change you back to stationary when you're done working with your landscape this way I don't have to wait for the build and that will remove those lines and now I don't have to look at them so the first step and the first tool we're going to use is the noise tool I don't wanna have to sculpt something out of a floodplain and I want to have something to start with and the noise tool is great for this because it will give me some randomized terrain patterns that I can shape after and have a starting point from I'm also going to use the circle brush and smooth fall-off which have the defaults for the tool settings I'm going to reset everything to default and the first thing we want to change is the tool strength 0.34 noise is extremely aggressive and I want to change this to a very low intensity of point zero one I want the effect to be very subtle for noise mode I'm going to use both meaning the noise filter will raise and lower the height map for noise scale this determines the size of the noise filter larger value will create less noise and then lower value will create more noise and for us we want to have less noise so I'm going to increase this to 256 and then increase the brush size so it's very large and in my case I increased it to 7,000 and then zoom out so you can see the entire landscape and love click hold and drag all over your entire landscape and sometimes you would just love clock in certain parts to apply the noise filter and this will randomly raise and lower your height map creating your initial terrain and you want to do this very slowly working your entire landscape and building it up gradually and make sure you come down to the players point of view and take a look at what the player will see don't get stuck working high up above and judging it from a perspective that won't be seen by the player so it's important that you get down low and maybe even spawn a few times and see what the play will see and this is very important and continue going over the entire landscape and modify your height map and if you want you can change the noise mode to add so this will begin to raise the height map to create some mountains so starting with the noise tool is a great way to get your initial landscape because you don't have to think about where the mountains are going to go where the hills are going to be where the valleys are you're letting the noise to determine all of that procedurally then we're going to go back in and refine those shapes and here I'm going to change it to subtract mode go over it again and back to ad making sure I get down to the players point of view changing back to subtract and just keep working it and checking it from the perspective of the player and we don't want to spend too much time here by all we want is remove the flat plane give us something to begin with that we can refine and reshape to something that's going to be more realistic and here I'm going to go ahead and spawn this of the map and run the round and I like what I have so far it doesn't look good but it's a great starting point I can use this and I can already visualize the mountains and the type of landscape this is so now we're done with step one and step two we're going to use the smooth tool and with a smooth tool we want to remove some of the noise effects that were created by the noise scale and they're going to be very noticeable and you'll see them right away I'm going to switch over to the smooth tool and we set everything to default and if I fly high up above you can see these no scale patterns that are very noticeable and that's what we're gonna remove and also I'm gonna remove some of the blobs that were created by the scale sculpt that don't look natural so for the settings I'm gonna set tool strength to point one and enable detail smooth because I do want to keep some of that noise scale detail and I don't want to completely remove that and smooth tool has a tendency of destroying a lot of your detail so you want to be very careful with that I'm gonna begin to go over the entire landscape left click hold and drag to smooth out those jagged noise scale patterns and I'm also going back into the settings and adjusting the tool strength I as well as enabling and disabling detailed smooth for certain parts of the landscape where I want to be a bit more aggressive and smooth out more of the landscape sometimes the newest tool creates very unnatural and that will look in heightmap blobs and you might want to smooth them out so they're not very noticeable and if you have a hard time seeing some of that detail you can press alt 6 which will put you in a lighting only mode and you can see the detail and the landscape a bit better and then alt 4 will get you back into lit mode and again make sure you get down to the players point of view and see what the player sees all right I think that looks pretty good I removed most of those jagged stepped patterns from the north scale tool and now I am complete with step two and step three we're going to use the scope tool and define more of the shapes of the mountains of the hills and the valleys we're actually going to begin sculpting a better shape I'm going to switch over to the sculpt tool we set everything to default and then adjust the tool strength and I'm going to set it to point one and the purpose here is to begin to refine and define more of a clear shape a better silhouette on the landscape and I'm changing the brush size making a larger making it smaller by using the bracket keys and I'm working this landscape each Hill each valley each Mountain defining a better looking shape and it might help if you have some reference of the type of landscape you are creating so you're more accurate because you are doing this by hand and even though it doesn't look like a real landscape it will help you to know what to do and how to sculpt more precisely and more accurately and more realistically if you are following something from the real world and here I'm not trying to decide where the mountains are going to go and change the height map I'm just simply using what the noise tool gave us and just tweaking and redefining those shapes better so it's more real so the noise tool was the starting point it gave us a height map of what to sculpt in this stage and that's what I'm doing I'm taking what we have and just making it better and throughout this process I'm also changing and going back to the smooth tool and smoothing out some areas as I sculpt so if I see a problem area that I need to get rid of something unnatural within the landscape I go ahead change the smooth tool enable or disable detail smoothing depending if I want to keep or remove the terrain detail and just quickly smooth out an area then switch back to the scope tool and continue sculpting and I do this throughout this entire step i sculpt and then I go back and I smooth some parts out here I'm really quickly spawn take a look running around from players point of view see what else needs work and then jump back into and continue sculpting and I'm using both left click to raise the landscape and shift left click to lower the landscape so to successfully sculpt and define the shape better you have to use both you have to add to the elevation by left clicking and you have to take it away by shift left clicking and this step took me the longest and you can spend a lot of time here sculpting each part of the landscape but what you sculpt will depend where the player is going to be so you want to focus on the areas on sections where the player is going to be playing in and don't spend a lot of time for parts of the landscape that are going to be far away and the player will never get him and you may notice that throughout this entire step I am sculpting from the players point of view so I'm getting down low looking to add the silhouette of the mountains and I am sculpting and raising and redefining the shape from there because for me in this example my point of view is just from the small section in the center and mountains in the distance is the silhouette and that's what needs to look good for me but for you it will depend on how detailed you want to make this so you could spend a lot of time here hand sculpted the entire landscape alright I think at this point I'm gonna call it done and I'm gonna spawn inside the map again and run around I think this looks pretty good I'm happy with this this entire step took about 15 minutes out of the entire 30 minutes so this is definitely the longest step out of all five and for the sake of keeping this video shorter I'm done with step 3 and step 4 is the erosion tool and we'll begin to define the detail well let's switch over to the erosion and we have to erosion types thermal erosion and hydro erosion and we're only going to use the regular erosion tool so I'm gonna select the erosion tool we set the tools to default and the erosion is a filter that simulates real-world natural erosion that happens to your landscape erosion tool will simulate thermal erosion from the Sun and from the wind and the hydro erosion will simulate erosion from the water and there's a lot of options here that need to be set and I cover a lot of them in detail in ue4 fundamentals volume 2 course but as I said these I'm gonna give you a quick description of what each of them do so first is the tool strength which is the intensity of the brush and I'm gonna set this to point one I want this to be more of a gradual erosion and the higher the brush the higher the intensity the more the effect and erosion it causes and I don't want that I want more gradual and subtle erosion I don't want to destroy the shape of the landscape threshold is the minimum height difference for erosion effect to be applied smaller value is more erosion and the larger value is less erosion so when I initially said this to 110 surface thickness I don't use and I will leave it at default iterations is the number of steps performed lower value is less erosion and the larger value is more levels of erosion so I'm gonna lower this to 20 and never have noise mode this is very similar to the noise tool where you can set both which will raise and lower the height map as you use erosion or you can raise or lower in this case I'm going to use lower and then we have noise scale this is the size of the noise filter this helps to add additional detail to the erosion effect and I'm gonna leave it at default at 60 and then go to various sections of your landscape lock click hold and drag to apply the erosion filter the erosion effect and if it's hard to see press alt 6 for lighting only and you'll be able to see more clearly on a flat shaded landscape rather than seeing the grid texture pattern and you will see the erosion to begin to take effect and this adds a nice realistic layer of detail and throughout the step you should go back into the tool of settings and change some effects so here I increase the iterations and the larger value of iterations will give me more levels of erosion I also adjust the tool strength and lower the number of iterations and go back and continue applying the erosion effect to the mountains to the hills and I'm pretty much letting the erosion define the detail for me I'm just left clicking and dragging and then it takes care of all that detail and you can already see that it's creating a more natural more realistic landscape so continue going over your entire terrain and add in that erosion effect vary in the brush size making a larger making it smaller using the bracket keys also go over the flat plains not just the mountain peaks this will add the erosion effect to the flat surfaces as well and work all the sections on the terrain applying the erosion effect well let's go ahead and spawn and run around see it from the players point of view in-game and it's gonna judge everything and how it looks and I'm pretty happy with this just like the sculpt step step three in this step in erosion detail step you could take your time and really spend your time detailing each section to its absolute best I'm gonna go ahead and call it done so we can move on to our final step five which is final tweaks this is where you go back and use the smooth tool the sculpt tool or the erosion tool and fix anything that stands out so this is the polished step you're adjusting and fixing anything in the height map that looks unnatural or something you may have missed and just go over smooth some parts out use the detail smooth so you preserve most of that detail that the erosion created and you can even go back and sculpt a few things we define some shapes better or maybe go back to the erosion tool if you miss some parts of the terrain and here we are we are done so this is a great five-step process that you can follow to hand sculpt great-looking landscapes entirely inside you before thanks for watching and good luck if you enjoyed this video please give it a like subscribe and for more deeper knowledge to creating and texture and landscapes entirely inside you before download the UFO fundamentals vol 2 course this is the central beginners guide to creating landscapes entirely in an origin for the course contains over 30 videos and over 5 hours of tutorials you can download this course at world of level design 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Channel: WorldofLevelDesign

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Length: 17min 55sec (1075 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 28 2020