Unreal Engine - World Composition and placing roads/objects (Tiled Landscape)

hey guys i'm back with another video so today i wanted to cover uh world composition for creating tiled maps uh it seems like there's not a whole lot of videos on it so i went ahead and added my lighting to my scene as you can see under my persistent level which it'll add to by default but if you need to get the levels you just go to window levels right under layers and go to world settings and enable world composition and for large maps you're probably going to want to enable world origin re-basing and what that does is it re-centers the world around the origin point or is recent or i should say re-centers the origin around the world uh the center of the world so the reason why that's important is if you're not real familiar uh with this issue then you'll see this is the the world origin right here if you try to spawn a player way over here and and you uh set it to possess that player and you play the game you'll notice that you automatically go into spectator mode because it's too far away now i'm not sure the exact reason behind that but enable world origin rebasing uh fixes it i'm not going to discuss all this stuff this is just uh nav mesh stuff right here but what we're going to do is we're going to go to levels and import tiled landsat escape actually before i uh go deeper into this i should mention that you don't that you want to put your world that you plan on using for world composition into its own folder because if you put it into a folder with other levels then world composition will automatically assume that it's one of the levels that need to be loaded and that will create issues so you don't want to do that lighting i'm going to have in this persistent level right here and then i'm going to go into levels import tiled landscape and uh if you use world crater you can when you go to export you can select unreal and you can select flip y and split and uh i use 1009 by 1009 uh if you want some more information on that there's uh this is these are basically uh the specified sizes 127 253 505 and 1009 i don't know uh how much higher it goes than that but i used 1009 on mine and so i'm going to use that 44.73 as my scale i'm going to not flip tile y coordinate because i've already done that i'm going to enable edit layers because we're going to need that i'm going to go ahead and select my landscape let's see it's down here somewhere i think i passed it yeah so i'm going to use pine landscape biome painter and if you have waited uh maps you can select them for these uh right here for each of the tiles if you used weighted maps out of world creator um other than that you're going to select height map tiles and mine is on my desktop and you're just going to shift select all of those and open and it should give you this information down here if it if yours doesn't look like this then your export might be messed up i actually had an issue with uh world creator where i had an extra tile created and uh i had to go back into that folder and delete that extra tile because it was not needed i don't even know how it got in there maybe it was a left over from another one anyway let's import this if you don't uncheck uh flip uh y and you're using world creator 2 and you flipped it in world creator uh 2 then it will flip it again inside of here and everything will be out of alignment it'll be rotated incorrectly so as you can see all the levels that are under this folder and none of the subfolders are all going to show up here under gr as gray sub levels you're gonna you can uh highlight all of them and right click and load them that normally this isn't uh recommended another way uh to do this would be to actually summon world composition and you'll get this right here and you can actually select the ones that you that you specifically want and you can unload or load them right here also you can assign uh you can assign these to different layers with a different view distance if you have a large open space where they can see further away then you would want to create a custom layer where uh the streaming distance is farther out than the standard 50 000 and you can select the tiles that you want to assign to that layer and assign it to that layer so to get started uh first off for me my uh landscape uh well my landscape material comes in looking like this it's not really a big deal uh but i will have to fix it so i'm going to stop the video here and i will be right back when i fix it all right we're back so basically all i did to fix that for those who uh who might have the same issue is i just went into top down view right here and i just uh went into paint mode and i just painted over it now there were some artifacts so i i did it in a square pattern around the edges so as the black faded away i could see the artifacts that i so i could clean them up better and i just did it that way so if you get artifacts when painting do the top down view and do it and go from the outside in that's the way i did it so what i'm gonna what we're gonna do now is we're going to create roads so uh you might want to save this and i would suggest making a backup after you've rigged all this up because a lot can go wrong when you're using world composition it's a little janky and uh hard to get a handle on and that's one of the reasons why they are phasing it out with a better system that's more efficient and less buggy so uh until then we're kind of stuck with this one so if you go back to landscape and remember i had enable uh enable edit layers uh checked if you don't go ahead and check that and then go into uh landscape mode and you're going to see this splines right here so we're going to select the splines and i'm just going to come on down here and i'm going to hold ctrl down and left click i'm going to hold ctrl down and left click again sorry i'm i need to slow that down yeah okay there we go now i'm going to hold alt down and drag that out and again and it looks like we're having an issue with land mass so i might need to restart the engine or maybe reload it so [Music] i will be right back all right so you know what i did uh reload it and it asked me to save it and us and i saved all the levels and then reloaded them again by highlighting them and loading uh when i did that i realized that i never created a spline layer so we need to create a spline layer so under edit layers right here right click and create a new layer and we're going to call this uh rhodes and then we're gonna right click on it and reserve for splines it's gonna ask you uh if you're sure because it'll clear everything that's on it and it will be not it will not be editable and you just say yes and now this is reserved for splines so [Music] let me slow this down again so it should work now so i'm gonna hold down uh control and click and ctrl and click again and i might just move that away from the edge a bit so it doesn't look so unnatural right there that that's probably fine and then i'm gonna hold down alt and drag this out and again and now you'll see it's reshaping uh the land for me also to get away from it being so destructive like that you can also hold down control and click and it'll uh it'll try to conform to the landscape as best as it can and that's actually a more appropriate way to do it and again you can just kind of adjust these a little bit to get that unnatural look out of it also you could go to details and select all control points and you can set how you want the falloff to be so if we set this to 2000 that fall off is going to be more spread out you see and it's going to blend better so that looks quite a bit better just setting that to 2000 they have these other ones too left side falloff factor right side of follow factor also uh since i have all these well i'm not going to do it now but actually let's just go ahead and do that so if you want to place a road on it i'll go ahead and show you how to do that so select segments and then and that'll select all your segments on that road and then down here under lens landscape spline meshes uh just add one to the spline mesh and then i'm assuming you have a road mesh so [Music] you can type in road and i'm going to use this wide one right here and you'll see it automatically bends the mesh and everything for you you just need a mesh and let me go ahead and show you how this one is made it's a 60 it's a 64 by 64. uh by 28. okay now it's approximate size is 720 732 i'm assuming this is 732 and this is 1098 and uh then it's 67 high and that's what it is and they made it so that the sides come up and actually that's preferable to do it that way and those are two different meshes i just kind of stuck that one inside of this one as you can see and so you'll see that there's a gap here that's because the bottom of it is touching the landscape so we're going to select all control points and we're going to offset this i might have to do like 120 so yeah and then you can check and make sure that of course the ends are going to be sticking out but that's that's fine so now what we can do is uh we can create another layer here and i'll call this uh road above edit and we can create another one i'm just gonna i'm just doing this to show you how layers work and i'll call this road below edit and so on the below on the one below i want to set smooth i'm going to turn my falloff back up and i'm going to turn my almost like that and then i can use the brackets to move move it down and then i'll show you that i can smooth the landscape on the layer below but you'll see it doesn't affect the spline now if i do this on this one you'll see it does affect the part of the road that the spline is on you see and if i go to erase i can erase all of that on this layer anything that any mistakes that i made i can edit those on this layer i can erase them i mean so if we wanted to just smooth that out underneath it without actually destroying the road then we can do it that way so for the above edit i'm going to set this to negative one which inverts everything so that i don't have to hold down shift to uh lower the ground see if i set this to one you'll see it inverts it so let's just erase that and i'm gonna set that back to negative one and i'm just gonna come along here um let's see oh i'm using the erase tool right okay so i'm just going to come along here and i'm just going to erase it i'm not going to worry too much about about the sides until after i come back and this makes it a bit easier and faster and then i can just go back and erase along the sides so now we can just go to erase and you see i can just erase that and notice how i'm keeping only the edge of the falloff part of the circle uh close to that to where i want it you see that way i don't erase too much i just want to reconcile the lips of that mesh and that's all i'm doing now obviously if you have a procedural foliage placement like i do then you're going to want to go back along the road and uh paint something underneath it that paint something underneath it that will not be uh spawning foliage and you can even like kind of like turn the strength down on this a little bit if you want something like that and you can go through there like that and just leave some areas there where maybe it looks like the grass has grown back through to make it look more natural and yeah that's pretty much it so [Music] if you oh yeah wait i haven't fully explained everything yet so this is uh where you start placing things let's say you want to place uh something right here on this uh in this area then uh but you don't want it to always be loaded because right now the you see how our persistent level is blue that means that level is anything we place will be placed on the persistent level which means it'll always be loaded like our skylight so what we want to do is we want to only place things on on this level so you can right click you can select this level and then right click it and go to level and go to find levels and level browser and now you see it highlighted it for us so i'm going to right click on this and i'm going to make current and it yeah because we have that origin rebasing it'll probably shift things when you do that because i think it's making this the center uh so if we come up here yeah we'll see that that the world is centered on that square we have selected and set as current so now now that this is blue and this is our current level anything that we place on this level will be streamed in when this level is streamed in and it'll be streamed out when this level is streamed out so you want to you want to be careful and make sure that you that you have have it on the tile that you have set as current again by going to level and find level in browser and you see the one that was blue uh is the one that we have set as current you see also when it's selected it'll be a dark black rather rather than a or a bold everything will be in bold uh if it's the current level so you want to make sure that you that you are placing it on the right tile that you have set as a current and not on another tile because you know there might come to a point come a point where uh things are being streamed in and out when they shouldn't be and uh it could cause performance issues now this is pretty much all i have on this uh be real careful how you uh do this again i want to stress this because i didn't get this at first you don't want to add any levels in here that you don't want streamed uh streamed in here and if you try to make a duplicate of this it's going to think that it's another level that needs to be loaded in and it's literally going to destroy your entire map it's going to throw errors things are going to be out of place things are going to look weird so don't do that uh i did that that's why i'm saying don't do that because uh yeah i've restarted this about three or four times there's not very good uh stuff information out there on this so i wanted to put a video up and i hope this helps somebody if found this helpful uh make sure to like down below and subscribe uh liking this video it does help quite a bit uh and i would appreciate it thank you

Channel: Unreal DevOP

Views: 2,965

Keywords:

Id: 2iZzO0_f2OU

Length: 22min 57sec (1377 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 17 2022