On Unreal's marketplace, I managed to come across Soul: Cave pack for free by Epic Games. I noticed a selection of dead trees and various rocks which is specifically what I wanted for my terrain.
I downloaded the pack and added the realistic looking rock texture for my mountains. Then I started using the foliage tool to create a more realistic terrain by adding in a range of trees.
I chose to put them on various settings so certain pieces would occur more than others and had all of them selected at once so I could paint all of them at once. At first, I found that the density was far too much, and it would be costing vast amounts computationally. After playing around with the settings for a while, I have managed to find a good balance between being realistic and over-the-top, whilst keeping the costs on the lower side.
Using the Culling Distance setting means you can keep foliage inactive until the player is within a certain radius of it, keeping the computation cost down a huge amount. I have a small map size and the player will not be exploring the terrain, so it is not a concern. However, in a different game, this may be crucial.
It is also possible to drag and drop the Static Mesh files straight into the Viewport. This creates one individual instance of it, meaning it is not an efficient method of creating a large terrain containing a huge range of objects. In this situation, I only intend to use one instance of the water.
When using this approach, the object comes in at the standard size. The water piece was extremely large and where it was naturally positioned made it invisible on my terrain. Soon I realized that I could use the rescaling tools to adjust the size and it's positioning.
By simply creating it large enough to put over my map area, then using the translate tool I could reposition the Z axis to make the water appear shallow or deep. The water is filling in the grooves I created in the landscape using the sculpting tool previously.
After adding these extra features from the Soul: Cave package, my terrain has started to come to life and I am very pleased with it. The only issue is the texture on the mountains have the same lines running down them. On the small map that I have, with few mountains, I think I can get away with this. However, if I had a larger size and the player was free to explore the terrain oppose to restricted to what is visible from the windows, this would be more of an issue as it would take away from the realism and be clear there is a repeated texture.
No comments:
Post a Comment