Areas of Higher Detail in Landscape

Subtle 1rony

Hello, I had a technical question regarding Landscape edit mode and creating detail on a small scale, for example I wanted to create a road and a ditch that runs along it. Is it more practical to make those detailed features external to UDK and bring them in as a static mesh and merge them to the landscape?

Right now, the brushes work well for large scale stuff, but when I get into smaller details the landscape polys are too broad.

I may have answered my own question, as I'm going to test this now, but I would be interested to hear techniques or workflows you guys use for creating areas of higher polygon detail in specific areas of your landscape.

ambershee

Generally speaking, I would build meshes for these kinds of things and import them. The ditch may be a nuisance, but you have a choice of either using a world space coordinate based texture mapping approach on both meshes (e.g. planar mapping), or blending between the two using the alpha on the mesh.

Subtle 1rony

Okay, that is making sense to me. I will try and post back with what works and what doesn't for me in this case. Thanks!

chrisradsby

you can always copy the landscape mesh and scale it down to a smaller version, it'll retain all the texture layers and stuff you need to be able to paint on it. :P