UE5 | Create a Photorealistic Mountain Landscape in Gaea

[Music] in this tutorial series I will go over how you can create stunning forest biome landscapes in a Gaia we will go over two different landscape texturing options we'll show you importing process and how to quickly set up a simple landscape material PCG part is split in two videos depending if you just want to set up simple PCG graph to spawn your biomes or you want to use new PCG biome core plugin that comes with onal engine 5.4 hi my name is Mar FR and let's jump into it so the cool thing about generating Landscapes using Gaia is you can set up different templates for different kind of biomes and then you can just change the seed numbers to get different kind of Landscapes so what we're going to do is we're going to start with Ridge um so here is the Ridge and we get this I can actually turn off this to the window for now and actually this this looks pretty good I actually like this is something I want for my lens Escape uh I want this part to be more flat and then I want some kind of like a mountain here so we can like put for example camera here and get this kind of look so just play here with the seed but we can just play with the seed and get different kind of looks so I just going to go back with whatever was this I think this one looks good and now just to get out a bit more the detail uh we're going to use something called wrench let's get wrench so we're just going to change this with called with base and now we can see we are getting now more this kind of like uh detail again let's play with the seed number I just going to deal something that I found this looks pretty good and now just to elevate a bit everything we're just going to use a shaper and I'm just going to use the shaper to 20% okay so now it lifted everything a bit up and now we just keep can um use combine so we can combine these two things and here we go so we're going to use the standard blend with ratio 50/50 so you have 50 for this 50 for this and I think this looks pretty good and again you can just go back and play with the seed number and change for example to something like this I took from already one of the templates that I have made uh so something like this so next thing we're gonna need to do is to break down a bit to start so it start to look like a mountain so we're going to use erosion erosion let's add erosion to it so we're going to set up duration to 45% so you going need to apply every time for erosion you need to click apply each time you want to make it some kind of changes so I'm going to set this random segments to 100% And sment removal to 45% okay this is good so now we can see we are starting to get some flat areas and more mountain areas uh now we going to area effect we're going to select to Pursuit amount uh by stop slope and apply changes so now we started to get some more details and this is this is actually going to be our base for everything looks very good and again if you want to change something you could just play with seeds for any of these parameters and you're going to give new look so this could also be something that you are basically done just four nodes and your Mountain thing is already done and you can just really go to the next thing but what I want to add is actually some water just to break out the landscape uh make it more interesting so now we going what we're going to do is we're going to add a river so we can see it's very easy so so now we have River um since we're GNA have some camera here and everything's going to be very far away and so the things don't get lost just in trees because if it's going to be very very small let's say River then Tre is going to cover and camera not going to see River at all so we just going to crank up all this to the maximum I going to set this to the 40% and I just going to again take one of the seed numbers that I have so something like this so it could be actually very cool for some closeup shots or in case if you want to create uh environment for just exploring let's let's say your character walks around I think this River would work pretty well but for cinematics I kind of feel like uh we want this revers to be wider because I know that if you have seen a lot of times people choose in this kind of Landscapes people usually choose a very wide reverse so they really stand out between the all the trees and the mountains stuff like that cuz right now here again if you're going to look let's say like this if we going to have threes all over here we're not going to see Rivers much so what we can do is we actually can create something called Lakes from the rivers so if we normally would have just leges uh so from the rivers they're just going to make it more wider now we can see it covers whole landscape so what we're going to do we're just going to change this number to something like one and apply changes and now we can see in the places where we use we had the rivers before now they're formating like small lakes so now we have more water area and if you can to have a camera here then we can see is just we're going to have this for example like if you're going to put that camera here we can have this nice big water area and it's really going to show up in the camera after that we're going to add something called AR Boral this is what actually going to give us information about where the tree is going to go and so we're going to get to we can to leave the cluts are healthy we can change the tie from the small it's again I I just like when it's large so we're going to have a really a bit bigger PCG area cuz we are actually not focusing in this that much in the trees CU we're not going to use these trees in our under engine rer is just I'm more trying to expand uh the high map areas so we have more information for our our PCG grabs um so we're going to just change this to the wild so again we can have more area covered uh so we're going to change the altitude to 42% because we don't want these trees to cover the peaks of the mountains we want them to be empty uh altitude fell off I think I can leave that so we're going to set the slope Max to like 50% so the so the basically the maximum slope the Tre is going to grow is a 50% uh slope fell we're going to change this to like 45% and that's about it and then we can just set up some again like can play with the seed and I think this looks pretty good again you could stop here but there's actually two more things we could could add so usually in this kind of Mage we would have snow and what are we going to do is so we're going to add a snowfall we let's add a a snowfall node we're going to put it here and I going to change this to 100 uh melt at 50% and this at the 10% Snow Line we can see that there's no really much of information of snow I think like actually all the snow currently is gone but what we want to do is to make it look more natural let's add a sunlight so I can to add something sunlight you're going to see what it does in second uh I'm going to put from the leg and then this one I'm going to put in this bin so the third one from the top see we can see the snow sow snow is coming back again um and what we're going to do I'm going to change this to 170 this is just basically degree so we can see the sun is coming from this side and there's a shadow and now we can see that we have this more interesting thing where the snow goes and on the top and here is more melted here's again we're in the shadows uh it's more more more snow than where the sun is coming from it's more melted and again you can just really play with this direction however if you know that for example like you're planning the camera here you can really adjust it depending like however you want so the last cool thing we going to add is we can see that here where we have the waters and especially this is going to be important if if you want to create some kind of walking environment probably if it's just cinematic shots you're not going to see that much uh is we can see that the trees currently are growing basically right here where the shore is and looks natural so we need to kind of like blend it between the area where the trees are and the water and how we can do this is we're going to add something like FX FX and we're going to pull this effects from the second node and I'm going to put it as a level and log so we can get out the information from the we can basically get the level the height uh information from the legs so you can see basically it's like a map and then we going to add something called multic combine and so I'm just going to put this in the first pin then this leg pin we're going to put this the third one and in the second pin we're going to add another effect node right here and I just going to put it here and for this effects node I going to set to shaper we're going to put shaper at 100% And to get that like so the edges are not that hard because again we want to make some nice transition we're going to add the blur and I'm going to set the blur to maybe like 3% and now here basically going to spawn the trees in this black area and then there's going to be nice transition to the B area so we going to be able to use this map to uh make a separation so adding like let's say different material between the shore and the water and the the tree area and then we just going to take this pen 're just going to moile this and we're going to put it here no nothing happened because we need to change the blend mode uh we just going to change to the Max and we're going to put it this to 100% And now here we go now we can see now we have the shore areas all of brown here so here we are actually done with our landscape and we can just export it or in case if you so it's really depends how you want to texture your landscape for example like if you want to make some kind of walking environment where you're going to be walking around uh with your character then probably you want to use some kind of honoral engine materials and textures to texture your landscape and like in case if you want to change things around but if you know this is going to be static and you're not going to really M make a changes then you can also actually texture your landscape in a GAA and we can use this texture in case if you are choosing to use a new Unreal Engine PCG plugin this texture not going to really work well uh if you're use we're going to use the PCG filter option using just a regular gra graph but with the plugin it's going to work actually very good so if you want to use if you want texture in a GAA then you can follow along or you can just use the time stamp and already go to the export settings so for for this we need to create something we're going to try quickly create something called portals so take this pin from the erosion and let's click it make a portal and another portal we're going to make is from this bottom node of the snowfall let's again click make a portal you can actually make another graph we can actually uh rename this to um landscape and we can make make another one we're going to call this texture text texture so yeah let's do that for just to keep keep it clean so in texture we're just going to create a new graph uh we can call it texture we're going to pull it out uh check portals and select erosion and now what we going to do is we're going to use something called set map it's called saturation map I believe probably and this is where we going to start to give the look for our map so the first thing um we're actually going to combine we're going to do do two of them let's set up this way so we can see what colors are changing and we can actually select combine let's use combine one combine two we can set up actually first combine so we can see actually what colors are we changing uh for combine we can to set up the blend uh we're can to set up to 100% Bland ratio okay so we have these two saturation map and I'm really just using it so it doesn't look all uniform and the same color and for the first one I going to set up uh color something like 0176 so this is going to be the first color I going to be using and I just going to change this to to make it more blue we can to just change it to minus 126 and and that's it so now we can see that most of the landscape is colored in this dark gray blueish which color and then these higher areas are where we getting this color from and we going to say this one to the same one 1076 and I'm just going to change this to something like 19 so it moves the bias moves a bit more and if you got to combine then here we go it combines very nice and we are getting nice different kind of textures on the sides and on the flat area so again you can play with different kind of numbers we going to need to add the snow because right now we can see we're missing the snow so what we going to do is I can to uh add F node and for this again we're going to go portals and we're going to use that our snowfall uh we're going to add level log equalizer uh we're going to add displays we're going to change this to 47 13 really these numbers you can just put in from um whatever I put because I have like just a template and then what we're going to do is we're going to need to start a mask out so we're going to put in this combine currently we can see nothing much is happening we're going to need to add saturation map for this because this is like just the mask so we can mask it out we're going to add saturation mask uh we're going to go to Legacy I'm going to go to zeros so you can get white color you can again play with different kind of colors and experiment but just I going to leave this and then we just going to do combine we can do combine uh we going to add this here then we can to add this saturation map as the second one and then this again we can to add as a mask and then for the combine we just going to do blend 100% and Bam now we have go get back also the snow so and the last thing is we're going to add another we're going to add something called we're at vegetation put it this here uh as the second output we're going to use our erosion and then for this one we're going to use something 005 uh we're going to use density 19 uh we're going to use influence so this is the influence level how much we can see let's crank it up to something very big like 90 and I can change this to let's say something like 28 and and here we could technically also add the water and mask that and and add some water information but I'm not going to do it because I I'm probably going to use just a water plane anyways so we're not going to see really this through anyways but but in the same way you could add also the same as we did with first snow uh we could start a mask out also the water area in case if you want to mask out but I think this is going to be good enough uh for this so the last thing basically what we need to do is uh we really need to set up our export settings so what we're going to do is so there is this erosion uh we're going to set this to make a right click on the erosion and choose Mark for export uh legs we also going to set up Mark for export arel click again um going to click this one mark for export snowfall also going to be marked for export um this multic combine in case if you want to mask out the Shore area and give it a different color we're going to mark for export 2 and in the textures we're going to use this and we're just going to mark Mark for export and now here uh we're just going to change this to PNG for all of them so it's here in the build we're just going to set up to PNG for everything PNG and PNG here we're going to leave to the normal build since we are using free version uh only big limitation for us is a texture so we just going to set to 1K so that's the maximum we can export in a free version so in case if you CH have a paid one you can export is a 4K 8K uh then we're just going to change this to the normalized so before we hit export actually one more thing that I forgot is we also need a normal map for our texture in case if you're using this so it's very easy to do we're just going to select the normal map and here for the input we're just going to use portal erosion and we just going to mark for export and we can start build so once we exported our Textures in high Maps it's time to set up the Landscaping under engine I'm going to be using under engine 5.4 for this so we're going to go the file new level and we're just going to set up the completely new empty level I get to save it uh we're going to create new map maps on um and we're going to set up I'm just going to call my landscape uh then I'm going to go to Windows and I'm going to go environment light mixer and I'm just going to add all the lights here in the scene and file sa so now what we're going to do we're going to go to uh landscape we're going to do import from file so and here what are we going to import is uh where's erosion so we can to import this erosion map so that's going to be our Bas for our high map so this erosion map we're going to open it up and now if we go back so we can see this scale looks off for our 1K so we can see that our resolution is 1K so here we don't need to change M much except this one and the formula for this is uh so we're going to go with there's two important numbers that we're going to need to adjust our scale so if you bring back back our Gaia project and open this up so we're going to need to get our resolution number so in our case is going to be 1009 but if you have 2K 4K 8K doesn't matter so you're going to take that number so in our case we have 1K texture and we need to get this number usually by default it's 5,000 so leave it as it is in case if for some reason you have changed this um then take that number but default is 5,000 and we're going to use that so so the formula going to be we're going to need to convert this 5,000 that we had in Gaia to kilometers so time 100 and divide by resolution so whatever resolution you have 8K 4K 10K 100K doesn't matter so that's what you're going to divide it and Bam now we have successfully converted the Gaia uh landscape to engine landscape with correct uh sizes and now we can just press import and Bam so if I just going to go back uh I'm just going to disable the fog for now so we can see look at that we can seriously put the camera here and actually landscape looks very very nice so our landscape is ready and now I just going to show you two different ways actually how you can uh color your landscape so in the case if you want to use the Gaia texture that we created uh what we can do is we can select normal map and vegetation map and we can import them both in an real engine uh we going to make new material I'm going to call it mine this one uh landscape texture since we are using a texture open it up and import both Textures in and we can actually sect the landscape and we can assign this landscape material so we can see what's happening so uh let's move here and then we can just select this as our base color and this is our normal and if we save we can see the tiling is off we get these small ugly tiles and how we can fix it is actually very easy we're going to create a land Escape layer coordinates we just going to connect this to the UV and and here I going to move it a bit more so we can see better here is a mapping scale and I'll you have to do is just enter your landscape scale so in our case it was one z9 so again if you have 4K 8K 10K whatever you're just going to enter that amount like number here we're just going to save it and Bam since it's a 1K texture obviously it's going to be very very low resolation and if we come very close it doesn't look nice at all but if you're planning to add something here uh as a base and just looking like this actually at the far distance that 1K texture doesn't change a lot it's not going to work for your walking environments but for that you're going to need to get um uh some paid version so if you're can to export actually the same scene in 8k it's going to look way more better and it's actually going to be usable but for far shots work but for close shots if you want to walk then we can go to the second approach uh what we can do is you're going to need to either create a material so I going to quickly show you how you can make one or we can use one of the Alo materials now this is AO material that we can actually use cuz brushify uses landscape material layer system and it's free so it works pretty well so let's say if we want to create our own material uh so we can like put out different kind of biomes out what we're going to need to do is get some textures and one of the places where we can do it quicksell Bridge let's go quicksell bridge and find so I have already downloaded some of the textures but so basically what we're going to need is a snow uh we would need to get some base so let's say we can get some rock left then you're going to need to have some grass I can to have a wild grass uh I will get the gravel ground for the base of our uh rivers and then for the shore I just going to get some rocky sand So currently we need just one two three four five and five textures uh so we're going to need the snow Rock so it's basically going to be the base of everything then we going to have wild f grass uh this is where actually our tree is going to grow and all that then we need a gravel and Rocky sand so I'm just going to add these uh they're medium quality I think it's like 2K for the tutorial it's just going to work fine and we're just going to create a new material so I'm going to call this landscape master so first thing we're going to do is uh select this one and we going to choose use material attributes so after that we're going to pull this out we're going to search for l landscape layer blend we're going to get this and then we're going to input and I usually kind of like to input the order based on how I going to layer uh and going to import my layers so first we're going to get add uh our rock or we can actually call it a base layer but I'm going to call it like rock so we can have our rock layer after that I probably going to import uh our grass then I think I can import uh snow then I going to import our shore and then I'm going to import our River and the reason is I just like to name it and the Shor is first because the river because these two materials overlap so the shore is just a bigger version of the river materials if you remember so I going to want to import Shore first and then River here currently doesn't really make a difference if even you make a mistake in order I just like to kind of keep consistency um everywhere so so we're going to just save this and now all we need to do is start to import these textures so let's start with our Rock Let's import here and now only need thing we need to do is pull this out and we're going to be make material attributes and we are getting back that um material attributes that we know and here so we just going to put this as a base color this is going to be uh MBA de clusion this is going to be roughness and this is normal so this is one and now we're just going to repeat quickly the same steps for others so I'm just GNA put this [Music] [Music] grass so now our material is ready we can just really comment it out so these first ones so let's recap this is a a rock so this is kind of going to be our base rock layer um then then we can set up this uh to be our grass um then I believe we have snow snow oh let's move this here then and I think this is the shore let's put it here and then the last one is obviously a river or lake or you can name it as whatever you use so we have these all five materials five textures so we can send select our landscape and we can apply it so currently we can see it's all black uh we can go to the landscape paint and what we're going to do is we're just going to create here in the paint we can to create the layers so create a layer create click this one and we going to set it way Blended layer normal and I'm just going to send save it in default locations uh for now and we can see that whole landscape is co covered now in um Rock because we haven't specified the layers we can see we we have tiling problem so what we can do is to fix it we can actually add coordinates uh texture coordinate and I just going and we can input this in UVS and we can experiment with number I know they usually tiling like one Z1 I think something like this usually looks good let's check yeah this kind of looks good you can tile it bigger or smaller if you want but I I think this looks pretty okay for the tiling again you can play with that number and then we can just grab this texture coordinate and we can just apply um everywhere how we can import the text now information so it colors H it should is so let's go to the Rock and we going to CL this import export the file let's click on this one and now an import don't do anything here there's layers so when once we open up this one up now we can start to import our layers so for the rock we don't need anything since that's already going to be our base layer we're going to start with the grass let's enable grass and then let's click this one and then in our export folder we going to find for we're going to use the color one we use Arial color color guide open it up and click import we can import it refreshes and now we can see the landscape has got the grass color it automatically has colored now after that we're going to go for the snow I'm going to use snowfall snow mask open it up now I can import the snow information then after that I can import a Shore um which is basically was our uh multic combine so we can import that one and lastly we can import our River so where is um Lakes Lakes we can import that one and import and now we can kind of see maybe probably we need to rescale this a bit uh we can open up again our landscape material and put it maybe like something 05 yeah let's put something like 00 five yeah this this looks this scale good again you can play it and here we go so we have our rocks we have our grass we have our snow here we have our shore information and we have also our basically Where the River was before so we have colored All Landscape and again the same approach you can use for let's say brush if F AO material the same way you can just import it's just the import order don't import them right away all the all the same time because um they they can overlap incorrectly probably most of the time like what I usually do is just import them one by one and uh like how I want them to stock the layer information how I they want them to import because for example like if if you can to import River before uh Shore the shore will going override override your River and you're not going to see you're not going to have River material so start with the biggest ones and go then go in the smaller detail in the in the chunks you can actually do the same thing with the snow and grass because I think the some of the snow covers some of the grass so you can always let's say go back if you feel like there's too much snow and not enough grass then what we can do is actually uh select grass import we could find um where's the grass Aral grass and let's import again and now we have actually we can see it covers more actually we getting in Shore so in this case apparently we needed to import the grass a last one cuz now we can see actually on the shore we are also getting some grass information it actually covers more snow so I hope that makes clear here the import is really kind of from the biggest chunks to the smallest details how you want and it's always you can just experiment and repport so now we're just going to go to the PCG and as I said there are two ways there's going to be two different tutorials we're going to use uh so you can use let's say just to set set up the simple PCG draft where we are filtering out the data that come from Landscapes that's that's one and we also can use the new PL in that comes with anal engine 5.4 uh that uses actually different approach and we have actually more flexibility with how we can texture as you can see now we can we have option to use G materials with that filter we can't do that because it really are based on the landscape layers but in the second approach uh we really can just use any uh landscape coloring but here you need to be really careful so difference between these two is in the first approach where we going to use a landscape data is every time if you're going to take let's say a landscape brush uh right so we go to paint we select this one right and if we like paint here we changing like hey I don't want to hear Snow part I want more grass then PCG going to immediately your PCG going to adjust it accordingly because again there's going to be changes in the landscape but in case if you're using the plugin then we're going to need to use the some kind of like uh volumes or splines to mask out and and changes information if we are repenting something so that's something you be aware and I going to go in this more into the PCG tutorial as itself I hope this tutorial helped with your project thanks for watching and see you in the next one bye [Music] [Music]

Channel: Maris Freimanis

Views: 10,037

Keywords: UE5, gaea, Photorealistic Mountain Landscape, import heightmaps in Unreal Engine, UE5 Multi biome landscape, PCG, Biome Core, Landscape Material

Id: A-v4euFzMAw

Length: 38min 18sec (2298 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 27 2024