USurfaceMesh - Creating a muddy river bank with Quixel materials

Many games feature mud mounds and various meshes on the sides of steep slopes and rivers. In this video I show how to use USurfaceMesh to quickly build procedural meshes just like you see in games.

[@amerboss99]

this is definetly a very powerful tool but its also very complicated

[@xjuliussx]

How is the performance if you use this on a large scale maps? I understand it can be use for a scene, but for a game ? I wonder if this can be used for large scale rivers , and sunken roads, to build this beautiful edges and marks at edge of roads and rivers. I hope you still around, thank you.

[@bunksoup8137]

The power of this, and the fact that it just works, kind of makes me feel like a jackass for spending so much time building HDAs that are painfully slow to process, and always seem to break in some way or another. As a Houdini evangelist, it very much pains me to say that Houdini Engine is trash compared to this. How did SideFX spend over a decade co-developing an engine plugin only for that engine to steal their lunch in a single update? If Unreal keeps building tools like this, Houdini Engine will very quickly become obsolete for these workflows, and with how painful it is to work with HDAs in Unreal, I’m kind of looking forward to it.

[@3DevSoftware]

Hi. Thank you for your kind words. They really mean a lot to me as I am a solo indie game dev that just happens to make plugins along the way. I created USurfaceMesh initially for myself as I needed a way to build mud mounds and rock meshes quickly in Unreal Engine. Since release I have steadily added features that I needed or were requested and would perhaps benefit the larger Unreal dev community. Over the years I have gotten pretty tired of the back and forth process of Unreal -> Export -> DCC App (Process a lot) -> Import -> Unreal and cycle until it's right. This is not an Unreal or DCC app problem, it's a game dev problem that is part of the old dev cycle. USurfaceMesh is capable of many things inside the Unreal Editor that previously were somewhat impossible to achieve (that I know of). For example: Capturing parts of the landscape, Painting the landscape using surface data, painting vertex colors using surface data, transferring vertex colors from one mesh to another using proximity to vertices rather than UVs, world aligned texture displacement on a mesh... to name just a few. I find new uses for the plugin all the time and a lot of new features could be added yet. Thanks again for your support. 3Dev :)

[@bunksoup8137]

@@3DevSoftware Holy cow you created this tool as a solo dev!? This looks like something an entire team at epic spent a lot of time polishing. I hope you get way more attention for this and continue building tools for Unreal. I’m somewhat new to the industry but this is extremely impressive and inspiring.

[@Doosakidd]

Wow, just wow.... I'm going to have to get my hands on this! This will help immensely with covering cliffs in my height maps, thank you!

[@3DevSoftware]

Thank you for your support :)

[@andrenft]

Dude, thi is one of the best tutorial content i found around here. Its amazing and i learned alot! Thank you very much!