TerreSculptor - How to Create a High Quality UE4 Landscape

[@demenzunmedia]

Note: This tutorial is for TerreSculptor 1.0. TerreSculptor 2.0 has a large number of improvements in the user interface and features. The Extractors are now on the Weightmap menu. With TerreSculptor 2.0 there is also no more Standard and Professional Edition, there is just the one free build that has everything.

[@michaelblackmer8183]

Could this material be made paintable if you created your material as a material function instead and used it as the "base layer"/Default in a paintable auto material?

[@demenzunmedia]

You should be able to mix Splatmap and Paintable layers in the same material by using Lerps to mix each paint layer with a splatmap layer. All that UE4 does with painted layers is pack all of the weightmaps into a splatmap, which is essentially the same thing. I will try to do a tutorial video on it.

[@lukeagex]

What kind of parameters about the current terrain does TerreSculptor use when adding effects such as erosion? For example, does it add erosion realistically by eroding down toward rivers and lakes?

[@demenzunmedia]

There are slight differences between the algorithms for each Erosion type available in TerreSculptor. They all do erode taking slope into consideration, so they all do move terrain material down slopes towards lower elevations, and create sedimentary deposits at the base of hill elevations. You usually get the best results by applying some Rain Erosion followed by some Hydraulic Erosion. Additional Erosion algorithms are under development.

[@bigsky7617]

Anyone have any luck with the blueprints? The patreon is dead and I can't figure it out from the video alone. Thanks for any help!

[@demenzunmedia]

I assume that you mean for the Material? The Splatmap Material information can be found on the business Free Assets Google Drive, you can find the link to the drive on the TerreSculptor page on the website. KZbin doesn't let me post outside links in comments. There is also a complete Splatmap Master Material available on the Epic Marketplace.

[@bigsky7617]

@@demenzunmedia yeah I meant how to connect which nodes. I studied the video close and I think I got it. Thank you for the reply and for all the insight!!

[@demenzunmedia]

@@bigsky7617 - You are welcome. There is a clipboard text file that you can just paste into the Material Editor sitting on the Free Asset Drive plus some actual UE Projects with Splatmap Materials on the drive too.

[@pawpotsRS]

is there an ability to make the landscapeCoor multiplied to uvTiling so I can manually adjust the tiling on each texture set?

[@demenzunmedia]

You can modify the TexCoord values for each texture in the material. You can change the splatmap style material to anything you want. The material in this tutorial is only one example.

[@Miditator]

i dont understand what i need download in alpha and splatmap node in unreal (

[@demenzunmedia]

The Splatmap Texture Node in the Unreal Engine Material uses the Splatmap that you created with the Splatmap Creator in TerreSculptor. That splatmap texture contains multiple bitplanes for the texture masks on the RGBA bitplanes. You create four weightmaps for each of the bitplanes in the splatmap, such as Flowmap, High Altitude, Steep Slopes, and Flat Slopes, and use the Splatmap Creator to pack all of those into the splatmap bitmap that you use for the Material. This is an old outdated video using an older version of the TerreSculptor software. There are newer videos that cover creating RGBAK splatmaps and using those with Unreal Engine.

[@mrwang420]

Thank god I'm using a 3950x. 16 cores and 32 threads. Made doing this way less time consuming

[@demenzunmedia]

My development workstation is an R9-5950X, ASUS X570 ROG Crosshair, 128GB, RTX-3080, and it is awesome for working with TerreSculptor and Unreal Engine 4 and 5.

[@mdz9430]

For the watermask file, when i export it, it gives me this jadged line on it. Not sure if this is normal or an error.

[@demenzunmedia]

It is normal for some of the Weightmaps to have aliased or jaggy edges to them, especially the Weightmaps that are saved out of the Erosion devices. I should probably include a Smooth option on all of the Weightmaps on the Erosion devices. You can use Photoshop or Gimp or any other image editor to smoothen those masks. The Weightmap extractors on the Weightmap menu do have Smooth options on them. I will be adding a Water Flow Weightmap Extractor soon that will also have Smooth on it. Plus I am working on a Mask Editor that will have a lot of image editing tools on it.

[@TomvGraf]

Clear tutorial! Thanks

[@JohnKMcCarthy]

AFAIK since this video was released, TerraSculptor has been made completely free so the comments on the Pro version no longer apply.

[@demenzunmedia]

That is correct. The Standard and Pro Editions were for TerreSculptor 1.0 only. Starting with TerreSculptor 2.0 the software has been completely free for any use including commercial.

[@tombennettfilms]

Hi, this an excellent tutorial, thanks! I've got the material setup and working, but have been trying to add additional maps (roughness, displacement) by repeating the node structure in the same way, but everytime I plug in the setup for the roughness maps, the texture goes blank/default material in editor... Any idea why? Thanks!

[@demenzunmedia]

When a UE4 material drops back to black or default, that means that you have used more than 10-12 textures which is the maximum supported (16 samplers) unless you enable Material Texture Wrap. Google should give you some results on where that option is located in the UE4.

[@mectoystv]

Where i download the image for this tutorial? , link repository plssss

[@demenzunmedia]

All KZbin video assets are available to the Patreon subscribers. If you are a Patreon subscriber, see the link in the Patreon Posts. www.patreon.com/demenzunmedia

[@irajmh]

@@demenzunmedia he is asking for height map

[@demenzunmedia]

@@irajmh - The heightmap was sourced from the USGS dataset website. A copy of it is also available for download to Patreon subscribers.

[@mdz9430]

@@demenzunmedia How do you import your specific terrain in USGS to terrersculpt?

[@demenzunmedia]

@@mdz9430 - I have videos on the channel here showing how to get digital elevation models from the USGS into TerreSculptor: Real World Terrains in Unreal Engine uses USGS EarthExplorer kzbin.info/www/bejne/nqXTmatniqqWqpo NED DEM to TerreSculptor uses USGS National Elevation Dataset kzbin.info/www/bejne/i6rLqa2grctrkMU I hope that helps. Basically, located the DEM file from the USGS in ESRI ASC, BIL, FLT, HGT, or GeoTIFF format, and import that directly into TerreSculptor.

[@richardroberts2457]

Amazing tool! A quick question...where do you find proper UDK (Epic UE 1 meter equivalent maps) height maps? I want to build real world locations, but am lost about where to find those geo files. Thank you so much for this program!! Cheers, RR

[@demenzunmedia]

That depends entirely on what area of the earth you are looking for. DEM sites like EarthExplorer and Terrain.party that cover the entire earth typically only have 30 meter or 90 meter data, since they are satellite sourced data. You might find some areas of 10 meter data mixed in there. This is fine for backdrops but not so good for play areas. The USGS has some 1 meter DEMs of portions of the continental USA, but they are stored as original files on a server with no void fills, so half of them are unusable, and you would have to use GDAL Translate to convert the files for use with TerreSculptor since they are in an odd file format. I have spent hours going through this data looking for usable tiles, and I have started making them available on Gumroad for cheap, see the Unreal page on the Demenzun website for the packs that I have completed so far, more packs are coming, I should end up with a few dozen terrain packs of all of the usable files from that set. www.demenzunmedia.com/home/unreal/ The UK Defra site has portions of the UK down to 25cm which is really high resolution. See my UK DEMs video for more information on that. Most other areas and countries you have to use Google to find sources of any DEM repositories, as they vary by country, and many countries don't have high resolution data available to the public. For example I have tried looking for DEM sites for Saudi Arabia and China, and they only have low resolution data (probably due to government secrecy control). There are also a few websites that maintain lists of what the current DEM sites are around the world, but they change so often that it's hard to keep track. For example: freegisdata.rtwilson.com/

[@richardroberts2457]

@@demenzunmedia Thank you so much for your reply! Terre Sculpter is an amazing chunk of incredible programming! I truly appreciate that you have put it out for the world! I was able to get an 'OK' portion of an area from Terrain.Party, Normalized, Set, and Re-sampled in your TS....then I used a rough workaround of measurements from Google Maps - satellite imagery as close as possible.....then scaled the Height Map in Unreal (4.26) to a cube, set to that measurement.....adjusting the Z visually (unless I had a building height reference), until the landscape matched. Once I did this, I was able to use a landscape layer (UE 4.26 is Non-Destructive NOW!!!) on top of the Height Map to finesse details of the landscape that did not contain meshes. Beautiful!! I really appreciate that work you have done! Ill be on Patron soon to support you! Cheers!!!!! -RR

[@demenzunmedia]

@@richardroberts2457 - You are welcome. Thank you for your support. There are many updates and new features planned for TerreSculptor in 2021, plus more tutorial videos, and related projects.

[@richardroberts2457]

@@demenzunmedia Amazing! Ill be watching out!!!

[@an.unarmed.civilian]

any luck on a paste of that material network?

[@demenzunmedia]

The videos on RGBAK show the Splatmap Material network, or you can purchase a project for cheap from here: www.demenzunmedia.com/home/unreal/

[@Monkok3D]

I just found this program yesterday and it's fantastic! Keep it up! UI is nice, though feels a bit old and lacks usability a little. I saw your comment recently, that another update is in the works, so I'm really excited for the news. At first, judging by the name of the program, I thought it has sculpting mode with brushes... so are those in your plans perhaps?

[@demenzunmedia]

The application Skin Theme can be adjusted in the Tools Settings Interface tab. The default is Microsoft Office but you can change it to any of more than 50 skins to suite your taste. The User Interface design has basically a slight feel of Autodesk Max and Photoshop. TerreSculptor build releases are typically every four to eight weeks. Sometimes they are new features, other times they are maintenance releases with many bug fixes and internal code changes and small updates to improve usability. The software is only about half done, so there is a massive number of features still to be completed and released. If you are a Patreon subscriber or you visit the Facebook Group, those places are where I normally release previews of what features are being released next and what is being worked on. This year should see some more updates to the 3D Engine including terrain mesh sculpting tools and brushes. Sculpting was planned from the beginning, hence the software name. TerreSculptor is a solo project that I work on after my paying job, it makes basically no income, and as a solo developer it takes me a while to get some of the major features completed. The software is 800,000 lines of code so far, and even though it is only half finished, it still contains a good number of features. I put between 60 and 80 hours a week into it's development

[@Rustyranger6]

Awesome video and awesome program. How do I get the "pro" version though?

[@demenzunmedia]

There is no longer the Standard and Professional Editions, that was for TerreSculptor version 1. With TerreSculptor version 2 the entire full application is free "open use" and supported through Patreon.

[@steven3314]

@@demenzunmedia Thanks for the nice work! My next book will use this software.

[@demenzunmedia]

@@steven3314 - Thank you for your support.

[@lifeartstudios6207]

thank you, are you from Canada?

[@demenzunmedia]

I am in BC Canada.

[@sk0v0r0dkin]

8,192*8,192 not 8129))))

[@demenzunmedia]

That is not correct. 8192 is NOT a recommended and optimized UE4 Landscape size. 8129 IS a recommended Landscape size. See the UE4 Landscape Technical Guide for a list of the recommended sizes: docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/Landscape/TechnicalGuide/index.html I recommend that you study that document web page to understand why you are NOT supposed to use non-optimized sizes. Recommended sizes result in proper component layout and optimal occlusion culling. The UDK Landscape Sizes dialog in TerreSculptor also has all of the Recommended Landscape Sizes so that you do not use an non-optimized Landscape dimension in terrain development.

[@azamabdullah1816]

I does not undetand a single world.. Is there any source for dummies explaining every single word on what his saying..