Creating landscapes

This documentation is written with TerreSculptor 2.0 in mind, but the same principles apply to other software.

You can get TerreSculptor 2.0 for free and it’s a fantastic tool for creating landscapes. There’s also a ton of support for Unreal Engine so a good fit if you’re using that. Get 2.0 here:

Support

Via the homepage you can get access to a bunch of freebies which include a RGBAK material setup for Unreal Engine, which colorizes parts of the landscape based on a splatmap.

TerreSculptor

Basics of terrain generation

Splatmap creation

Using a splatmap we can color specific parts of the terrain using data from our terrain generation software. This is nice because auto-materials generally have a much higher performance cost.

However, keep in mind that manual adjusting of the terrain is a bit of a hassle, requiring you to export your edited terrain from UE back to TerreSculptor, regenerate the splatmaps, and export again.

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TerreSculptor RGBAK Splatmap Creation

TerreSculptor UE4 Splatmap Landscape Workflow

Using real-world height data

  1. Find your data
    1. https://portal.opentopography.org/datasets
    2. https://tangrams.github.io/heightmapper/
    3. TerreSculptor has some
  2. Download raster image (GeoTIFF) data
  3. Import data into TerreSculptor
  4. Make adjustments
    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApD2tTWFajc
    2. Resample for UE
    3. Optional: cut into tiles
  5. Export as 16b png
  6. Import into UE as either single landscape, or landscape tiles

Importing landscapes in Unreal Engine